54 INTERVIEW The future of project management Pierre Le Manh discusses how AI will influence project development and how employees can get started with help from PMI BY AMBER HICKMAN Project managers are a vital part of organisations across every industry. They are responsible for driving a project’s success from conception to completion, but how do they achieve this? According to Pierre Le Manh, president and CEO of Project Management Institute (PMI), it is becoming increasingly sophisticated because the concept of project management has evolved greatly over the past 30 years. “Originally, and to simplify, project management was mostly about creating the most detailed plan you could, predicting all the possible scenarios, and then executing it,” he explains. “However nowadays people are finding this may not be the most effective. Whether due to competitors or changing requirements and regulations, project managers must constantly adapt and adjust.” To overcome this issue, they have added agile methods to their best practices. And project managers are increasingly using artificial intelligence technology. “AI has been embedded in some of the software that project managers have used in the past,” says Le Manh. “But now, especially with the rise of generative AI, we’re seeing a completely new world emerge for the profession. “There is a lot of growing interest from our global community. AI is currently the number one topic at all our live conferences, and we have already surpassed our 2024 target for the number of views on our on-demand AI sessions. Furthermore, over 230,000 professionals have now taken our AI courses applied to project management, the first of which was launched in September 2023. This is by far the fastest adoption of any course we have launched to date.” There are many different potential use cases for AI and for project managers, there are three key areas of application: automation, assistance and augmentation. “First, automation allows users to remove the manual labour from tasks such as writing meeting notes or filling out spreadsheets with data,” says Le Manh. “Secondly, using AI for assistance can help users to fine-tune their work or generate ideas and drafts. “ AI is currently the number one topic at all our live conferences, and we have already surpassed our 2024 target for the number of views on our on-demand AI sessions”
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