AI stole your valentine—but not your project manager!

Shocked by how many people on the internet trade-in their real-life, human connections for an AI bot? It’s no secret that AI is a growing trend. As we keep tabs on which fields are impacted by AI, it’s easy to notice AI invading project management, too. Does that mean your project manager is about to be replaced by clever AI? Probably not. Here’s why.   

Human touch is necessary 

No matter how far AI progresses, it can never mimic human intuition or connection. This rings true in both relationships and project management. Sure, AI can crunch numbers, but only a human project manager has the proper qualities to keep your projects running smoothly.  

Helping a team stay on task, work through conflicts, and find motivation is an active role that requires advanced social intelligence combined with expert planning skills. A good project manager uses high-level social intelligence to identify conflicts amid a team, to recognize when team members are approaching burnout or are stuck, and to carefully intervene.  

A team that has terrific social skills is certainly easier to manage – and an AI that can improve those skills might be helpful – but there is no AI that can step into the role of project manager and do more than offer canned responses to questions and a bit of social coaching. Replacing a PM with an AI is not likely to go well. 

Someone has to lead the team 

When you are looking for a Valentine, that best friend who is a low-key matchmaker is an invaluable resource. According to Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, though, this friend can be easily replaced with AI.  

You can rely on this virtual friend at surface level, but when it comes to complex project management, this advance-team ice-breaker AI won’t help. A PM has to do much more than match people with similar interests and goals. 

A PM has to get into the weeds of the relationship, help team members through rough patches, motivate and guide teams toward a goal, and bolster morale to overcome setbacks. Team building is a big part of project management and, so far, there isn’t help available from AI for that. (There are tools that will generate team building exercises and challenges, however, which might make a PMs job a bit easier.)  

Helping a team grow, thrive, and stay on task requires personalized communication, a high social IQ, and the ability to see and adapt to a constantly changing social landscape. It is a subtle art that requires a person to take a collection of disparate individuals with a variety of interests and skills and, through work and other team building activities, create a cohesive group that trusts and relies on each other. This is hard for humans to pull off, let alone an LLM that exists only in the ether. 

Chaos calls for boots on the ground 

AI might be able to narrow your options and make preliminary small talk. Unless a human takes over; things will never go anywhere. Both with your projects and your personal life. 

This kind of administrative interviewer might be helpful in an HR department, but it isn’t likely to lift the load for a Project Manager. Even Moovila’s AI-enhanced, intelligent project management tool that uses advanced mathematical algorithms designed specifically to automate the constant vigilance, data input, and schedule calculations it takes to keep a project on schedule can’t replace a human project manager.  

Once the AI in Moovila Perfect Project locates a project risk, the PM has to decide – based on real-life circumstances the AI can’t comprehend – what to do about it. The PM needs to understand how best to remediate the problem, who to allocate work to, how to put out fires with the client, and when to let people know what’s going on.  

When the AI gets weird 

We’ve all experienced that awkward moment where we’ve prompted an AI and raised an eyebrow at its response. With that being said, it’s worth mentioning the circumstances where AI can create weird, unreliable responses.  

If you press an AI for answers beyond its knowledge, it will make up facts, sources, and even physics. Like that guy who needs to lecture people on everything – even topics he knows nothing about – the AI will hallucinate an answer. In the context of project management, an AI that makes up a useless project plan or writes weird copy to send to a client is singularly unhelpful. Your team would ultimately spend more time checking an AI’s work. Who has time for that? 

You might survive Valentine’s Day because of AI, but your projects will not survive without a project manager.  

Curious about how PMs use Moovila to make informed project decisions? Check out our product tour page.