In this segment of “Office Optional with Larry English,” Larry shares how AI is a powerful and essential tool for project management.
In 2019, Gartner predicted that by 2030, 80 percent of project management work would be carried out by artificial intelligence. Today, project managers are still steering projects, though AI has certainly become part of how they do it. With forces combined, project management is more efficient and effective, providing greater forward-looking insights and increasing managers’ power to steer projects to success.
In a 2025 survey from the Association for Project Management, 70 percent of project professionals said their organizations use AI, up from 36 percent just two years earlier. Still, a leap in maturity for project and program management is long overdue. Many project managers still rely on slides, spreadsheets, and manual recordkeeping. This is OK for hitting deadlines and deliverables, but it’s woefully insufficient for large projects with evolving targets.
AI Frees Up Project Managers for High-Value Work
Much of the anxiety surrounding AI stems from a general misunderstanding of project management.
Some folks think they’re decent at project management because they can hold a status meeting and create a list of tasks. This is a vastly oversimplified idea of project management. Far beyond basic taskmaster duties, project managers must be able to wield influence over teams, projects, deadlines, and budgets that are not their own.
Where does that influence come from? Solid data and insights. AI is simply the tool that arms project managers with the data they need to anticipate problems early on, develop appropriate budgets, and set deadlines and timelines.
For example, project managers regularly submit meeting agendas that list attendees, then create post-meeting notes. That’s a treasure trove of information an AI tool like Copilot in Microsoft Teams can help capture. Copilot can summarize what was discussed, note the decisions made, and list action items and owners. Reviewing those summaries makes it easier to spot more quickly if an important stakeholder has gone quiet or a decision keeps getting pushed. Flagging that risk early helps a project manager avoid all sorts of potential complications.
AI will also lighten the heavy administrative burden of project management, allowing project managers to spend more time on high-value tasks like meeting with stakeholders and coaching their teams. A tool like Copilot can transcribe and summarize status meetings, easily saving managers a few hours of low-value work.
“AI offers an opportunity to free up project managers’ time and allow them to do what they do best — lead teams and get the very best out of people. This will no doubt deliver far better results, fewer errors, more motivation, and greater success,” says Peter Taylor, former vice president of global project management at Dayforce and author of “AI and the Project Manager: How the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Will Change Your World.”
How Project Managers Can Leverage Value From AI Today
To start generating value from AI now, project managers should first look at documentation and reporting. This is where project managers tend to spend a lot of time for little value.
There are AI tools on the market now — again, like Microsoft Copilot — that can summarize meeting notes and help repurpose data, including user stories and sales reports, in minutes. No manual retyping and repurposing required.
GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help write personas, user stories, and acceptance criteria that are ready to live in an agile project management platform like Jira. They can also help pull together first drafts of industry standards summaries, regulatory documentation, and training and policy manuals — all things that don’t need to be started from scratch.
Project managers must still tweak what comes out of an AI tool, but having a baseline from which to start will save tons of time. To get started with AI now, project managers should educate themselves on AI’s current and potential capabilities, Taylor suggests: “Learn, read, explore, get engaged in debate, do anything you can to discover the realities and the potential of AI in your project world and beyond,” he notes. “It’s about being open-minded and proactively considering how and where AI can aid project management. And if your organization is not talking about AI yet, lobby to get the conversation started.”
From AI Assistants to AI Agents
The AI tools available to project managers have moved quickly since the first wave of chat assistants, evolving beyond summarizing meetings or drafting documents. AI agents can even act on your behalf, whether it’s by updating a task status, flagging a slipping milestone, or sending a routine follow-up to a teammate who owes a deliverable.
That shift puts more weight on the project manager’s role. An agent can only act on the plan, data, and permissions you give it. If your project plan is out-of-date or your status updates live in five different spreadsheets, an agent will just move faster in the wrong direction.
Before you hand any work to an AI agent, decide which tasks it can complete on its own and which still require review. Start with low-risk, repetitive work, check the output regularly, and expand from there. Decisions about scope, priorities, and people should stay with you.
New Technology, Old Story
Every time a new technology debuts, there are widespread fears about how it will affect jobs. When Agile arrived on the scene, for example, some people foretold the death of project management. Instead, project management became nimbler.
When figuring out how to use AI for project management, keep in mind that it’s not about the tool itself but about your processes. Tools just automate bad processes faster. How can AI bring visibility into what drives your business? How can it help you predict the future and better guide projects to success? Where are project managers spending too much low-value time? In other words, instead of getting too caught up in investing in the fanciest tool (which will keep evolving), focus on how your processes can improve.
There’s no need for project managers to fear AI. Because whatever insights AI delivers, project managers will still need to digest and understand the information, then sell the future based on the data. AI is a powerful — and essential — tool for project management success.
Is your PMO ready to put AI to work? Our Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management consulting team can help you build the processes, data, and governance that turn AI tools into better project outcomes.
A previous version of this article was featured on Forbes.com.
