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Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I would like probably to wrap up the discussion on the PMBoK guide, eighth edition, and I want just to highlight the concept of artificial intelligence in projects. I received several requests and questions asking me, Ricardo, do you believe PMI will include artificial intelligence as a performance domain will include this as part of the core part of PMBoK guide. And I said to most of them that I don't believe it's required that we include artificial intelligence in everything, but it's important that we highlight that. And this, I'm very I was very lucky. This is exactly what PMI did. PMI created an appendix that only talks about artificial intelligence. It's Appendix X3, and it talks a little bit. So it's only a couple of pages, but it gives us a glimpse of how we can use artificial intelligence, uh, vis-à-vis the performance domains and the work we do in the PMBoK. First, PMI recognizes basically three strategies for AI adoption. The first one is automation. It's when you use AI to automate something you were doing manually, or you were doing, I would say, without technology, and you create this automation, and then you produce a much faster outcome. The second one is an assistant. It's when you have AI as your partner to do, for example, scheduling to help you to, for example, to allocate different resources. So you assign tasks to AI, but you review these tasks. So AI is like your system, I would say a junior assistant or a specific topic assistant. The third one is augmentation. Augmentation is when you use AI to expand your own capabilities, to help you to balance options, and to help you decide what the best approach for risk management in your project. To help you to do complex brainstorming of options, for example, when you are doing a procurement process. So this is, I would say, the, the holy grail of AI. So if we can really use AI to augment our capabilities, then we are using AI not just to make things faster or make things with less mistakes, but to really expand our capabilities, like to have an additional arm or an additional eye that will help us to see things that we are we were not able to do uh, before without AI. And a vast majority of this appendix is all about use cases. It has a lot of use cases, like examples based on the performance domain and the AI strategy, one of the three strategies I mentioned. So with that you can read these use cases and it will provide you some food for thought for you to apply these concepts for you to apply AI in different areas of your work, like governance, like risks, like resources, like scheduling. And it will help you to through some examples to give you the possibility of saying, okay, if I need to do, for example, uh, brainstorming or an idea generation, how I should do that, or if I need to use a multi-criteria decision analysis, or if I need to optimize my baseline, or even how I can use AI chatbots to automate to create an automation of the governance of my project. And you can do all of this, um, through the use of the tools and the current tools. And this drives me to my final comment about this chapter. Usually the PMBoK is updated every four years. Okay. So this is not this is not strict, but usually it's it's every four years. So what happens with this AI chapter. And my advice to you is that we need to read it with a lot of care. Why? Because if we do not read it with this care, we may see outdated information very fast because AI is moving at a lightning speed. And if we are not able to understand that these concepts that were just release. It may not be the most updated ones in a year from now. Ai is moving extremely fast, and we need just to understand that examples on how we augment or expand our capabilities today, maybe in a year, will be part of our routine because we are already implementing and using it. For example, I'm using some tools on on AI today to craft the whole plan of my project using a prompt so I don't create a WBS chart anymore. I don't create a schedule anymore. I don't create a budget anymore. Everything is something like pre-populated using AI and using a simple prompt. So this is just an example for you, but it's extremely worth that you read this chapter and also that you take a look on the appendix X4. That is the appendix of procurement, because it's also very, very nice for you to see how these topics PMI is not saying that they are less important, but how these topics are framing also the concept of what we do inside the PMBoK. Today, for example, for AI, there is no way you can be a top level project manager without knowing AI. It's just imperative. We did research and we published the results recently and the results were very clear. In 2023, people were still trying to figure out is it good, is it AI something we should pursue? And today there is no doubt anymore. Now we are concerned, and we are looking to see, okay, how we can really maximize our return by using artificial intelligence. Our research. Just to give you an idea, we had companies that saved a quarter million US dollars just by using AI. And these were close to unbelievable two years, just two years ago. So this is why we need to be very mindful, very prepared to adapt ourselves, to understand and to read this chapter on the PMBoK, trying to extract the maximum we can, but at the same time, knowing that several of the tools, several of the techniques here may become obsolete in the medium term. And this is absolutely natural and normal if we think on the pace AI is changing. Think about that. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Next week I will go back to the normal topics in the life of a project manager. I hope you enjoy this series of the PMBoK and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast. See you!
