While many artificial intelligence (AI) applications address automation, numerous others aim to team with people to improve joint performance or accomplish tasks that neither the AI nor people can solve alone.
In fact, many real-world, high-stakes applications deploy AI inferences to help human experts make better decisions with respect to, for example, medical diagnoses, recidivism prediction, and credit assessment.
It has been demonstrated in a range of settings that recommendations from AI systems — even if imperfect — can result in human-AI teams that perform better than either the human or the AI system alone.
So how can AI add value to your projects and teams?
Project Estimation
Estimating the time needed to implement a project can be tricky. It is also difficult to accurately determine the resources required for each stage. Using AI allows project managers to better estimate and plan their projects.
Systems using this technology can scan large volumes of historic data and perform simulations to help you identify the actual time needed to perform standard project tasks. They can also assess the resources needed, allowing you to develop ways to reduce costs.
Duplicate and ambiguously defined requirements can also be flagged for improved workflow.
Risk Management
Delivering projects without comprehensive risk management strategies increases the risk of failure. Even at best, it may lead to the loss of time and resources, causing stakeholder and financial problems.
Using AI tools, you can assess the risk associated with ventures in various ways. You can automate risk assessments based on monitored risk indicators and model your risk universe using best practices by mapping strategic objectives to common key risks.
With the information provided by AI tools, you can further develop policies to manage threats with risk indicators and automated reporting. Risk versioning also allows organizations to take automated, periodic snapshots of active risks to track the evolution of risks.
Project Dashboards
AI can provide real time data and project status updates through data visualization.
This can help the team and management to discuss in a more informed way the status of a project, and allows informed decision-making on the project duration, cost, and strategy.
After all, it is not easy to prioritize tasks especially when working in teams.
AI can help the team to better understand the critical activities, their actual priorities, or focus on a particular task.
Team Performance
The growing momentum of AI calls for a diverse, reconfigured workforce to support and scale it.
Despite early fears that artificial intelligence and automation would lead to job loss, the future of AI hinges on human-machine collaboration and the imperative to reshape talent and ways of working.
Typically, AI is used in projects to tackle mundane activities, such as project documentation, data-processing and record-keeping, while employees spend time on more fulfilling high-value tasks. By fundamentally changing the way work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth, AI is projected to boost labor productivity.
Using AI can also unlock the incredible potential of talent with disabilities, while helping all workers thrive.
Learn more with the Institute of Project Management
Importantly, you cannot realise the full potential of artificial intelligence in project management until you understand the possibilities of the discipline.
The underlying and universal principles of project management can be accessed for free at any time in OPEN, our Online Education Portal: https://open.institute.pm
It is free to create an account and start learning today!
About the Author
Camillia N. Shanks is a marketing professional who specializes in taking difficult to understand subject matter and turning it into easily digestible content.
For the last five years of her career, she has lent her services to companies in the IT, software, food retail and lifestyle spaces.
In her spare time she enjoys cooking complex meals in her tiny kitchen, working out and binge watching The Office.
