Introduced in 1956, primarily by John McCarthy, the world-famous computer pioneer, Artificial Intelligence or AI is ideated to mimic human intelligence i.e. speech recognition, decision making, visual perception, natural language processing, pattern recognition, machine learning et al. Over the past few years, AI has deeply penetrated into various industries. Just like any other domain, the field of business project management has immensely benefited from AI technologies.
Deemed as the harbinger of the world’s 4th Industrial revolution, AI can have manifold benefits in planning, initiating, controlling or executing certain responsibilities to meet a specific goal, thus managing a project. Let’s run a quick glance through the core benefits of Artificial Intelligence in project management –
Perks of AI in Project Management
Artificial Intelligence hints at the incorporation of advanced logic-based analysis and techniques that include ML, etc. to interpret certain events, thereby automating business decisions and taking the necessary actions. Upon being provided with the core information of a project, AI shall apply that logic to monitor and manage a multitude of data.
Unlike the human assistants, AI can interpret a multitude of data, all at once, without taking any break or falling prey to any kind of distraction. However, such capacity of AI is only restricted to carrying out repetitive or rule-based tasks.
Benefits of AI-Integrated Project Management
The perks of inculcating AI in managing a project are galore – right from accumulating task statuses to generating accurate status reports, from measuring the budget implications to maximizing scopes and conducting risk modeling. This isn’t it! There are plenty of other benefits of managing a project with the help of AI. These are as follows –
- The importance of AI is paramount when it comes to automating certain repetitive or monotonous tasks, thus helping a project manager spend more time and effort in problem-solving. As per a recent survey by Gartner, by the year 2021, a whopping $2.9 trillion is expected to be generated in the global business values owing to AI augmentation. It is highly anticipated that AI augmentation can save about 6.2 billion hours of employee productivity in the days to come.
- Artificial Intelligence can refer to the former results of a project to churn out accurate calculations and predictions. Using the historical data accumulated by AI, a project manager can calculate and predict with more accuracy, thus enhancing the overall results.
- The efficacy of AI is incomparable when it’s about performing risk analysis or modeling based on certain changes in scope, reduced budget, available resources, and the likes. No matter what, there will always be some or the other unforeseen changes in a project. With Artificial Intelligence, you can predict their impacts to some extent.
- With process-specific and rule-based workflows, AI can help maximize the overall speed of decision-making. With AI tracking and sending notifications on task updates and statuses, several bottlenecks or roadblocks could be kept at bay.
- Artificial Intelligence plays a huge role in optimizing resource allocation and scheduling. It can assess the kinds of resources a project requires based on the nature of tasks, time to create a customized workflow, etc. Referring a complete database of employees and their adroit, AI can pick the best staff to manage certain projects.
Can AI Pose a Threat to Project Managers?
The cursory stage of an AI-driven era is around us – in smartphones, it obeys voice commands, in computers, it predicts user preferences, in banking sectors it enables automated financial transactions, etc. On the horizon, some phenomenal breakthroughs await in healthcare, medicine and food production. Some world-famous prolific thinkers including, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, had already stated that the day is not far when AI will take over human intelligence.
Will human brains ever be replaced by AI in project management? Well, not exactly! Artificial Intelligence is just a work of augmented tech solution, not a substitute to human intelligence or adroit. Moreover, AI can never accomplish a project on its own without any kind of human assistance.
Finally
Artificial Intelligence is at a new high with more and more project managers increasingly banking on it for resource scheduling, suggesting informed and accurate project schedules and team et al. So, unless you want to be left behind, it is imperative that you make a switch to AI, too.
