Alan HalleyRemote Project ManagerIlhéus, Brazil, Brazil
There's a lot of talk right now about whether AI is going to commoditize project management, product management, whatever kind of management you do. Forums full of people theorizing about it. Almost none of them mention anything they've actually built with the tools they're arguing about.
Here's my test: what have you shipped using AI this year? Not planned, not strategized, not "explored use cases for." Shipped. A URL someone else can click on, built with AI in the loop.
I can answer that one. This year alone: a tourist guide site, a QR menu system live in 36 restaurants, a freelance marketplace, a decisions-tracking tool, a nuclear chart of the nuclides, a couple of side projects nobody asked for. All live. All built working with AI the way I'd work with a very fast, very literal junior partner — not by prompting my way to a finished product, but by knowing what to build, when to trust what it gave me, and when to throw it out and do it myself.
That's the actual skill in question. Prompt engineering itself is already getting commoditized — the tools got better, so did everyone else's prompts. What doesn't commoditize is judgment: knowing what's worth building, reading a situation the model has no context for, and finishing the thing instead of just discussing it with AI.
So before you weigh in on whether AI is going to replace project managers: what have you shipped using AI this year? Saving Changes...
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Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
A strong challenge, Alan. I agree that practical experimentation matters. Actually building with AI exposes capabilities, limitations and trade-offs that purely abstract discussions can easily miss.
I would perhaps add a second question to "What have you shipped?": What changed because you shipped it?
Shipping something built with AI provides concrete evidence of practical AI-enabled production. But adoption, improved decisions, better workflows or demonstrated value tell us more about what that capability actually changes. And that distinction matters when we move from discussing what individuals can build with AI to what AI may change about project management as a profession.
I also agree with your broader point about judgment. As AI makes generating code, analysis, documentation and alternatives easier, the differentiating capability may increasingly lie around the generation itself: deciding what is worth doing, evaluating what AI produces, understanding the context AI may not have or fully interpret, and knowing when to rely on, challenge or reject its output.
So perhaps the most revealing question is not only what we can produce with AI, but what better outcomes we can enable by knowing where, when and how to use it. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
The big problem, the first step to fail, is when people and organizations use generative AI as synonim of AI. We are using AI from more than 40 years ago. Saving Changes...
"Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crisis in the old theory, through an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulties created. We must examine old ideas, old theories, although they belong to the past, for this is the only way to understand the importance of the new ones and the extent of their validity."
