Using AI as Your Project Co‑Pilot (Not Your Replacement)

AI is brilliant at chewing through the tedious admin work that clogs a project manager’s day.   Think of it as a sharp junior PM: fast, tireless, helpful, but not someone you let sign off on your deliverables. Reviewing the output of any AI is essential. Given you don’t give up your review and approval responsibility, here are ways the smart PM can deploy AI as a helpful co-pilot.

• Let AI handle the admin grunt work.Use AI tools for capturing meeting notes, deriving and tracking action items, creating basic document summaries, and building first‑cut slide decks. That way, you can stay focused on stakeholders, decisions, and detecting trends in project delivery.
• Use AI to generate options, not answers. Supply your AI tool with the project context, constraints, and goals, and ask for alternative features, risks, or solution ideas instead of a single “best” recommendation.  Keep what aligns with your experience and discard anything you can’t explain or defend in a room full of senior stakeholders.
• Treat AI like a super-efficient data analyst. Feed the AI tool with project histories and reports to surface patterns such as potential delays, dependencies, or hotspots that warrant closer review.  Then, your job is to determine whether those flags pose risks that need to be addressed or noise that can be ignored. (Note: don’t include confidential information in the feed unless you have appropriate privacy protection.)
• Use AI to generate “starter kits,” not a final control deliverable. Use AI output as a first draft for things like procurement plans, risk lists, or communication plans, using your own templates and parameters as a guide.  Then update the draft to reflect your organization’s local processes, culture, and your own war stories so it aligns with how your organization works.

Use AI as a proofreader and editor, but don’t lose your voice. AI is great at tightening your wording, adjusting tone, or proposing more precise phrasing for emails and updates.  Use those suggestions as a starting point, then make adjustments so the message still sounds like you.