The Next Big Thing: What Artificial Intelligence Means to Project Management in the Development Sector

A major threshold was crossed in 2022, when Open AI, a San Fransisco-based tech company, released an Artificial Intelligence bot named Chat GPT to the public. The GPT in its name stands for Generative Pre-Training Transformer which is tech speak for “AI that is pre-trained to scour the internet for information that it can use to respond to your prompt in a chat exchange.

AI in and of itself has been with us for a very long time. It has been used by companies in a range of applications from robotic irrigation systems to news aggregators to social media companies determining ads to push on users consistent with how fast they scroll through content. What makes the advent of Chat GPT a point of liminality is that it is the first release of a wide-scale, complex application AI system to the public. Users will be able to decide how the AI will help them in generating solutions instead of supporting corporations. In other words, the application democratized artificial intelligence where a regular user can interact with the app through a simple chat bar and generate high-quality responses.

People took to the application and every day, the enormous capability of the application becomes more and more evident. It successfully responded to simple queries, coded websites, fixed bugs, wrote musical pieces, simplified complex literature, mimicked particular authors writing styles, provided relationship advice, and even drafted complete presidential state of the union advice.

This is not a trend that will fade away, Chat GPT is the arrival of wide-use AI and it is here to stay and will only improve. The shortcoming of the technology is that it's only as good as the prompt provided by the user and is limited to the content it has access to for producing results. But this is expected to improve and expand exponentially, note that Microsoft is behind it and Google is ramping up to release a rival application. This is here to stay and it would be counterproductive to not consider how it impacts our work.

AI will impact different industries differently. The industrial revolution impacted blue-collar jobs, and AI will impact white-collar professions. The onus is on white-collar professionals to learn from the lessons of the industrial revolution as they poise themselves to deal with a post-ChatGPT reality.

Project managers, and project managers working in the development and humanitarian sector in particular, are in a unique position of being able to leverage this technology to their advantage while not being threatened by redundancy. I say this with caution and full awareness that this may change in the future, but at the moment there are more opportunities than threats in the development sector. Let's look at what AI can and cannot do for program implementation in the development and humanitarian sector:

AI can be leveraged for doing mundane tasks such as support in drafting generic, multiple-use correspondences and documents. The bulk of the drafts will be generated automatically but program officers will proofread, edit and publish these documents. This will free-up time for planning and communication.

AI can be used as an intelligent assistant, to help with scheduling activities, managing resources, and prompting project managers to critical decision points. It can also help with predictive analysis based on current performance and factoring in proactive risk assessment.

AI can assist, particularly in the development and humanitarian sector, with actively seeking synergies by continuously scanning the online space for actors operating in similar activities that can be approached or learned from.

What AI Can Do for Development Project Management:

What AI Can't Do for Development Project Management (yet):

AI cannot implement development programs. It cannot meet national partners, local stakeholders, or partner organizations. It cannot go on the ground and conduct a contextual analysis to collect information on what can and can't be prudently implemented given different valuables such as budget, donor directive, socio-political climate on the ground, and the implementing organizational culture.

AI will not foresee changing moods of the public and changing temperaments of partners and donors. A myriad of variables in the development sector are changes that happen on the ground and do not neatly get updated online for AI to draw real-time conclusions from. Only engaged project personnel can do that.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, this technological development will benefit the development sector by supporting in production of higher-quality literature and project documents. It will assist in technical aspects of monitoring implementation and it will free up time for officers to contemplate, discuss and interface with stakeholders. The challenge will be to embrace the changes we need to factor into our work to properly harness AI and be vigilant of further adaptations as the capabilities of the tech improve.