A Gartner study predicts that 80% of Project Management tasks will be performed by Artificial Intelligence by 2030. Will you lose your job to a machine?
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Show Notes
Last year, CIO magazine ran an article with the title How AI Could Revolutionize Project Management. In the article, they describe how automation can make projects more successful by reducing cost, analyzing risks, making project work more efficient, and keeping project on time and on budget.
In addition, Gartner published a study earlier this year indicating that 80% of Project Management tasks may be eliminated by 2030. Instead of those tasks being done by Project Managers, Gartner suggests that Artificial Intelligence will perform that work.
This means that Project Management functions such as data collection, tracking, reporting, forecasting, risk identification, and resource management may be performed by machines.
Even process improvement initiatives may be better served through machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.
The problem with machines managing the work is that it misses the people side; human interaction. Machines can assign the right resources, but when we see people as resources or cogs in a machine, we don’t get the benefit of their brains . . . their creativity . . . their whole self. Instead, we get a pair of hands that are told what to do.
Can Machines Elicit Requirements?
For repeatable, “keep the lights on” projects, I could foresee machines with the ability to product requirements and even future state diagrams and tech specs.
What about in a future where stakeholders can input what they want, their “requirements”, and the system spits out working, high quality code? This isn’t fantasy. There are systems today that can do this to a small degree, so it’s certainly something we could see in the next 10-20 years.
That process could work for simple or complicated initiatives, where cause and effect are well understood. But what about complex initiatives where the cause and effect relationship is only visible in hindsight? Where we need to probe, sense and respond? This is the realm of new product development and disruptive technology.
Remember that AI needs data from which to learn. But there is little or no past data for most new product discovery work. I doubt AI could have come up with the iPad or Netflix streaming video.
If keep the lights on and simple initiatives are eventually automated, I say that’s good. Then we can focus on areas that will bring the most value to our customers and to our organizations. Let’s use our creativity to shape the future and make our customers awesome.
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