Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Project Management: Are We Still Far from Practical Implementation?

Abstract

The era of Digital transformation is proposing the usage of computer science in completely new ways and areas of application mainly the continuous interaction with human beings. This phenomenon is fostering the possibility to test those applications in a very wide range of the worldwide population giving the chance to speed up the process of new needs identification and implementation. Artificial Intelligence is following exactly this path emerging as one of the most promising hypotheses for improving many processes that still suffer from inefficiency and inaccuracy. Nevertheless, AI adoption is at the very infant stage. The paper aims at presenting a state of the art of AI application and its potentialities in the project management field through a wide literature review followed by a discussion and identification of new trends both in academic research and industrial applications. The result shows that in almost all knowledge areas, AI implementation can help to reduce the time spent on repetitive, low-value-added tasks, allowing the project manager to focus on managing the team and creating added value for the company. Nevertheless, many challenges still remain. On the one hand, the field must be ready for a change in project managers’ roles and professional and educational paths. On the other hand, the need for large amounts of data to achieve acceptable levels of accuracy in the predictive models makes the use of AI techniques still partially distant from practice.