Building organizational and project readiness for AI: A dialectical approach

Abstract

To date, most organizational and project management studies have focused on how to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve outcomes. However, this wrongly assumes the preexisting project and organizational context is already prepared to incorporate such AI tooling productively. To address this issue, this essay proposes a provocation that we call CIPHER, a first-of-a-kind framework to increase organizational readiness for deploying AI in project work. CIPHER identifies six key tensions that occur with the use of AI: Cognitive, Informational, Projection, Haptic, Exchange, and Resource. These tensions occur either when humans directly interface with algorithms or indirectly where humans interface with an algorithmically driven robotic, immersive reality, and/or multi-agent system. For each tension, we identify a key project lever to navigate these tensions: intergenerational teaming, problem scoping, delivery-validation scaffolding, task separability, multi-agent governance, and model parsimony & transfer learning. Our aim is that through CIPHER, project leaders can harness the promise of AI while also more carefully managing its perils.