Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has become an inseparable part of our lives, impacting businesses and daily routines. It has revolutionized the business world, shaping each industry uniquely. AI in project management not just appeared but also transformed it significantly.
Approximately $48 trillion is invested in projects every year worldwide. Just to put this into perspective, the US had a GDP of $25.46 trillion in 2022. These are colossal figures, highlighting how significant AI’s impact can be for project management.
As AI continues to advance, its influence on businesses, particularly in the context of project management, is becoming increasingly significant. The pressing question is how AI changes project management and how project leaders can proactively adapt to this transformation.
7 Key Applications of AI in Project Management
Let’s see the seven key areas of project management that AI will transform.
Improved resource management in project management
A project manager can utilize AI to allocate resources effectively. An effective resource allocation enables project leaders to use workforce, money, time, and assets at their full potential.
AI project management tools monitor team members’ real-time availability, workloads, deadlines, and scheduled holidays. While AI helps to streamline project management processes, it also can have other positive effects.
For instance, it helps to avoid situations where one team member is overloaded with projects while others have free capacity. In this way, an effective project management process can decrease the chance of burning out.
Besides monitoring availability, AI uses other factors for the ideal resource allocation during project management tasks. AI project management automation tools consider factors like skills and project requirements.
This approach ensures that the right people are assigned the right tasks, increasing efficiency and productivity.
Project tracking
Project tracking is one of the basic features of all AI project management tools. Automating tracking milestones, budgets, and time is essential for every project manager to succeed.
Project leaders can effectively monitor the whole project lifecycle, manage projects, identify potential risks, and track task progress with AI project management tools. By tracking project progress in real-time, these tools provide a dynamic view to monitor project progress to ensure projects stay on course.
Access to project data insights
We are living in a data-driven culture, and artificial intelligence already has a substantial impact on data analytics. Due to its ability of machine learning, artificial intelligence can analyze data and identify trends effectively.
Using AI in project management will grant you access to project status reports and performance details. A project leader can have a full view of performance metrics, KPIs, and project insight to easily identify areas needing improvement.
Risk prediction and mitigation during the project management process
An AI-powered project management tool can also play an essential role in risk management. Such solutions use big data and machine learning to identify risks based on historical project data and propose actions to mitigate the risks. Sounds cool, but how do these project management AI tools work?
An AI-driven project management tool applies several techniques to find the correlations between the risk factors and outcomes. Analyzing vast amounts of data from previous projects will uncover the pain points of the project plan so you can allocate resources accordingly. It can reveal budget overruns, resource planning issues, or unrealistic due dates based on past projects.
Such a project insight before even starting the project can be valuable and actionable when it comes to cost management. Having information regarding the last project’s budget overruns during project scheduling can be key. It helps project managers to optimize resource allocation properly.
A project leader applying AI solutions will be more likely to discover potential risks earlier, acquire data-driven risk evaluation instead of human estimates, and ultimately make risk management more reliable.
Advanced scheduling
An AI scheduling assistant is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to automate, manage, and schedule all your tasks. This includes automated meeting scheduling, task management, and planning.
In a nutshell, An AI scheduling assistant can prepare a personalized schedule based on your input and preferences.
And how could it impact your productivity and increase the number of successful projects?
Reclaim says their personalized schedule can save 40% of your time, while Motion claims that their AI scheduling assistant can help you do 25% more tasks. Although it can surely save time in project management, the amount of time saved may vary depending on several factors.
However, even achieving half of the time-saving potential these tools promise can be a massive productivity boost for project management.
Virtual project assistants
A virtual project assistant with AI-powered features designed to understand natural language voice and text commands and carry out tasks for the users. AI virtual assistants utilize natural language processing to understand human language.
Natural language processing is crucial to AI virtual assistants to understand text and spoken words as humans can. While understanding the human language is essential to interacting with a project manager, the ability of the machine learning model does the real trick in the background.
Artificial intelligence-powered virtual project assistants can learn from conversations and interactions. Essentially, it will continuously improve over time and will be able to perform various tasks during the project lifecycle.
Combining the virtual project assistant’s machine learning with natural language processing makes it an excellent tool for managing projects more efficiently.
Better team collaboration
On average, we lose around 31 hours each month to unproductive meetings. And if you are a manager, you are likely spending a significant chunk of your time, about 35-50%, in these meetings. Minimizing the time spent on online meetings can significantly boost the productivity of the project management team.
AI meeting assistants utilize artificial intelligence, natural language, and speech recognition to understand text and verbal conversations. These AI tools are seamlessly integrated with meeting and video conferencing platforms.
Typically, AI meeting assistants can help the project manager with the following tasks:
- Recording meeting,
- Taking notes,
- Prepares meeting summaries,
- Meeting analysis,
- Automated meeting scheduling,
- It allows you to find relevant information more easily in your meeting notes.
Nowadays, many meeting assistants use artificial intelligence, so finding the one that suits project managers best can be a tough challenge. To choose the right AI meeting assistant for project management, you should check four key aspects:
- Whether it is compatible with the meeting platform you use,
- Languages you use during online meetings,
- Functions you may require,
- Pricing of the AI platform.
In this article, I ranked and reviewed the eleven best AI meeting assistants to help you select the one that suits your needs.
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FAQ
How is AI used in project management processes?
Artificial intelligence in project management has many applications, for example:
- Resource Allocation: Artificial intelligence can assist project managers in optimizing resource allocation.
- Automated Project Tracking: It enables the automation of project tracking, covering milestones, budgets, and timelines.
- Performance Insights: Artificial intelligence provides valuable project and performance insights to enhance decision-making.
- Risk Management: Project managers can rely on Artificial intelligence for more reliable risk management processes.
- Task and Meeting Scheduling: Artificial intelligence helps schedule tasks and meetings to ensure project managers can focus on critical issues.
- Virtual Project Assistants: It offers virtual project assistants for smoother project execution.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Artificial intelligence enhances collaboration and communication among team members.
What is the future of AI in project management?
Artificial intelligence in project management is all about automating tasks. Adopting AI in day-to-day workflows can be a massive boost for project managers.
Generally, AI will probably take routine tasks from project managers. Nevertheless, complex tasks that require strategic thinking, project planning, coordination, and more human elements will probably stay with the project managers.
It is worth it to take one step back and think through the routine tasks you are doing daily and whether it is possible to delegate them to AI-powered tools.
Is AI going to replace project managers?
AI technology supports project managers and does not replace them. Similarly to other fields, AI is excellent at automating tasks and decreasing the project management office and managers’ time spent on administrative tasks.
Even though artificial intelligence constantly changes project management, it is a powerful ally that complements rather than replaces the human factor. AI will not replace project managers, but it will significantly transform their role.
