Connecting people and projects, APM North West Branch Conference, 9 May 2023 Speaker: Kun Wang and Ian Stewart

1. Can Artificial Intelligence learn
to be a project professional?
–An exploration based on your conception of ‘profession ’
Dr Kun Wang kun.wang@manchester.ac.uk
Dr Ian Stewart i.c.stewart@manchester.ac.uk

2. Outline
• AI and human occupations
• Overview of the research area
• What do we mean by ‘profession’?
• What do we mean by AI and professional status of project
practitioners?

3. Human occupations and new technologies
PwC reported that “Gartner forecasts
that 80% of project management
roles will be eliminated by 2030 as AI
takes on traditional project
management functions such as data
collection, tracking and reporting.”

4. AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined as machines or computer systems
that can imitate intelligent human behaviours (Kok et al., 2009)
Liu et al. (2019)

5. Why profession?
• Great status and power in society
• Control over of the development of the required knowledge by
respective professional bodies
• Gives an individual a certain degree of protection in the labour
market
• Highly-skilled expert practitioners
With the UK Association for Project Management being granted a Royal
Charter, the peak of recognition for a professional group in UK society,
project management can be regarded as a successful and
representative ‘corporate profession’ (Sabini and Muzio, 2017).

6. Overview of research area

7. Why Folk Concepts ?
• Solo-practice in project management
• AI? Is AI also used in airbags?
Jacovi et al., (2022)

8. Category Concourse Statement
Mastering project
management
knowledge and the
hard skills –
Codified
Knowledge
Hard skills of PM (risk, time or cost management) can be replaced by
AI
AI will make a static BoK pointless, it will have all the answers which
will evolve for specific industries
AI will make PM certification or chartership less important as
individuals merely have to know how to operate the AI
An AI will be able to contribute to the development of the professional
discourse/body of knowledge
AI will commoditise the expertise of project management, allowing
other professions to take it over and use it
AI will prevent teams from developing their own terminologies for
unique practices, enforcing a common standard
Use of soft skills -
Uncodified/uncodifi
able knowledge
AI will prevent accrual of experience sufficient for chartership or
qualification
An AI will be able to motivate and encourage other human beings in a
project team
Unified practice created by AI will reduce space for innovative project
management
An AI will be able to understand true meaning despite what is said.
Principles and
values
AI can take responsibility for misconduct and dishonesty
AI can provide a project managers' manner to stakeholders
AI will accept blame or responsibility for project failure
Sense of community and
awareness of the body of
peers
AI can earn respect as a 'peer'
AI will lead to reduced opportunities for recognition of a
PM by the community or other project managers
AI will impact on the network for learning, reducing
availability of experienced project managers
AI will reduce an individual’s sense of belonging to the
profession, there will be fewer practitioners in the network
AI will ‘give back’ to the professional community
Career boost AI will reduce employers’ training and investment in project
managers professional development
AI taking technical roles will remove stages of the project
management career path – preventing junior learning
AI will create new barriers to practice through complexity
in use and management, creating new need for learning and
new resources for status improvement of project managers
AI will affect (reduce) the fees chargeable for human
project managers from clients
Clients want to know that project managers understand their
business, an AI can also convince a client in this way
Social Status An AI will be recognised by the public as a professional
AI will be able to have sign-off power over designs,
documentation or contracts
AI will reduce the bargaining power of professional project
managers in front of employers and clients
AI will influence children and young people towards project
management as a first career
AI will make project management a more future-facing
profession.
Emotional status AI will reduce sense of achievement in obtaining
qualifications or obtaining successful project outcomes
Mastery of AI makes an individual project manager look
good

9. Method

10. Categories Average
Principles and value -0.88095
knowledge (Uncodified) -0.35715
Social Status -0.32857
Sense of community -0.14286
Career boost 0.385715
Emotional status 0.5
Knowledge (Codified) 0.583334
What will AI impact and who will AI be
in our profession
The Responsible
Machine
The Warm-Hearted
Workmate
– The Network
Loosener
The Standard
Maker/Breaker
Distinctive
Characteristics of
Possible Future
Roles
Can take limited
responsibility for
project works
Cannot fully replace
human value,
remains a tool for
those who require
the value of project
management
Can have positive
effects on career
status and the
community of
professionals
Can be recognised as
a peer and
teammate
Can lead to fewer
humans in the
professional
community
Cannot be
recognised as a peer,
remains a tool for
those who require
the value of project
management
Can replace the
rights and
responsibilities of
project professionals
Can shape the
terms, techniques
and expectations for
project management

11. Appendix and reference
• Jacovi, A., Bastings, J., Gehrmann, S., Goldberg, Y., & Filippova, K. (2022).
Diagnosing AI Explanation Methods with Folk Concepts of Behavior.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11239
• Kok, J. N., Boers, E. J., Kosters, W. A., Van der Putten, P., & Poel, M. (2009).
Artificial intelligence: definition, trends, techniques, and cases. Artificial
Intelligence, 1, 270–299.
• Liu, P., Yuan, W., Fu, J., Jiang, Z., Hayashi, H., & Neubig, G. (2023). Pre-train,
Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural
Language Processing. ACM Computing Surveys, 55(9).
https://doi.org/10.1145/3560815
• Wang, K., & Stewart, I. (2022). Can artificial intelligence learn to be a
project professional?