What are you trying to achieve from using AI for everything? What value are you bringing to your role if you end up delegating everything to a computer program?
I’m becoming more and more bemused at some of the choices people are making about what they want to have AI do for them, particularly LLMs. We all know that these tools can produce plausible sounding documents and text, distilled from vast amounts of data. But these documents can never fully reflect the position you are in – you have a unique set of conditions around what you do, and LLMs cannot know all of that context, even though you can help by providing some.
This isn’t me just shaking my fist at the clouds in the sky, it has come from somewhere. I’ve started to see some Project Management tools touting how they use AI to produce Project Briefs, Plans, Risk Logs, Highlight Reports, and so on. I get it – sometimes these documents are a pain to produce, and getting a tool to make them almost magically can seem a great time saver.
Except… the documents are the evidence of the work. The discipline of making sure the Project Brief accurately reflects the environment, and the desired outcome, is what gives the document its value. Skipping that graft, of investigation, clarification, and elucidation, dramatically reduces the value of having the document at all. Feeding staff allocations into a tool could produce a fantastic plan, which paid no attention to the wider context of the work, of the people involved, and misses the implied ordering that all organisations have.
And I get it, Highlight Report production can be a never-ending grind, and often it feels like no-one is really reading them anyway. In which case, you need to address that issue, not just keep producing a document you haven’t written, and no-one else is reading. Producing the report is vital to make sure stakeholders are informed, but also to make sure you genuinely understand the position the project is in, not just think you do.
Look, AI tools have their place. But you should look askance at anything that says it will produce key documents for you. The work is the point, it isn’t something to be avoided. Use AI to support you, but don’t use it as a crutch.
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.