PMI Global Summit 2023

Once again, PMI excelled in executing this summit, with more than 3500 attendees, 80 speakers, including 3 keynote speakers, interactive sessions, and networking. It was my first time and I must say it was THE experience.

The summit concentrated mainly in 3 topics: AI for project management, PMI and Agile transformation.

About a year and a half ago, ChatGPT was released to the public, and it became the most loved and feared tool in the market. Excitement about what it is capable of, the full potential it has to help us in our tasks came together with the fear of uncertainty it will bring, privacy concerns, and job insecurity.

Like any past disruptive event in the progress and development of humankind, ChatGPT and other AI tools are bringing societies, companies, and organizations together to coordinate the right direction that such powerful tools should take. Ethics, privacy and copyright have been constantly debated to set limits without harming individual interests and holding back this technology development.

We also had 3 fantastic keynote speakers talking about the importance of Change of Behaviour, the relationship between AI and different generations and lastly, the creator of Shazam, that shared with us all the setbacks to stablish his company and his main driver: NEVER GIVE UP!

My key takeaways were:

• Use of ChatGPT to analyze projects and portfolios: from generating charts to complex data analysis, forecast, summarization of documents, explanation of large documents and portfolio selection
• New tools and plugins are evolving all the time, play with them, explore, fail, move on. BE CURIOUS
• Privacy is still in the beginning stage and one using it should always review what are the conditions being applied for that tools and how confidentiality is approached
• Task automation in projects and for PMOs: how to leverage genAI to work smarter.
• Implementing AI requires good planning, define a roadmap, understand the data and how to process it. Bad data will not help with good analysis results
• AI governance needs to be developed in companies adopting this technology. Ethical use, risk mitigation and stakeholder trust are directly correlated with AI output
• AI hallucination: one must triple check the generated information. Good approaches are to search for the source of the information and the reasoning behind the answer, if it looks suspicious.

In addition to the conference, PMI brought us 2 big news:

• PMI acquired PMO Global Alliance (https://www.pmoga.world)
• PMI is launching INFINITY: PMI's new AI Project Manager Assistant and PMI members with membership in good standing can try it here: https://aiassistant.pmi.org/legal-doc

 

AI tools have come to stay and boost our productivity. At the same time, they relieve us from boring and repetitive tasks. They will develop our curiosity. It is not a tool for people who plan to be lazy by working less, but instead, it will complement your daily life. It can be scary, and I learned there will be two options: be scared and not understanding them OR exploring these tools and becoming consciously scared. This technology, which for me is the 5th industrial revolution because of its capacity to linearize human thinking, has come to stay and is shaking our lives for the best.

I don't believe AI will completely replace human work. However, I do believe that those who know how to use these tools will replace those who miss or avoid adopting them.

 

This text was written by Sergio Barrak and grammatically revised by ChatGPT