Undoubtedly, AI is proving to be one of the most popular emerging trends of this century. However, among project managers in general, there’s a mixed response. While some herald it as a scintillating trend with enormous future potential, others fear it as a threat to their jobs. Although it’s not clear whether and most importantly, by when we would be seeing enough development in AI systems and models smart enough to imitate human decision making, supervised learning – one of the key branches of AI - has already proven to be one of the key techniques in managing complex projects.
What’s interesting to note here is that the use of AI and ML is not only limited to core product-based tech firms focused on EdTech or BFSI or Healthcare sectors, but AI has already found quite a strong user base among the blue-collar labor-intensive industries, such as Construction, Real Estate, and Manufacturing. This trend proves two things:
- The use of AI is not only limited to the companies focused solely on the Agile project management practices and are now finding usage in the predictive or the conventional waterfall methodologies as well.
- As most of the firms in these sectors are quite old (at least more than 20 years), they have a sufficiently large database on past project metrics (Earned Values, Contingency utilization, et al) that can be used for developing a better algorithm to support these AI based models.
Hence, it’s only a matter of time that we get to see a paradigm shift in the practice of project management, and surely AI will prove to be a great enabler in defining this course.