Pierre Le Manh has a front-row seat to the massive disruption wrought by generative AI.
Le Manh is president and CEO of the Project Management Institute (PMI), which has about 750,000 members and 1.7 million active certification holders worldwide. Essentially, the nonprofit is a community organization whose goal is to improve project success. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 caused great anxiety in the project management profession, Le Manh recalls.
A few years earlier, Gartner had primed the pump by predicting that AI would eliminate 80% of project management tasks by 2030, he notes. Yikes.
“Everybody had this in mind already, and then GenAI came,” Le Manh tells me. “So it was a big shock, and we saw that as a need for us as an organization to help this community of project professionals reduce their anxiety by getting trained on how to use AI.”
PMI, best known for its Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, also saw a huge opportunity. With almost every organization focused on AI transformation, those projects need managers. “But you can’t do that if you have no clue yourself on how to use AI in your own day-to-day life,” says Le Manh, who leads a team of 800.
In the project management world, AI adoption has been sluggish. Although roughly 90% of project managers surveyed by PMI in mid-2023 said AI will have at least a moderate impact on their profession, only about 20% were using it.
So PMI didn’t waste any time. About a year ago, it launched PMI x AI.
In keeping with PMI’s emphasis on learning and development, this effort now includes three courses that are free for members: the original Generative AI Overview for Project Professionals, plus newer offerings on data and GenAI, as well as prompt engineering.
It also delivers on another PMI priority—producing knowledge that professionals can easily share. To that end, the nonprofit created its own AI-powered personal assistant, PMI Infinity.
This tool, which uses OpenAI’s technology, already contains 14,000 pieces of PMI content vetted by the project management community. PMI is adding more, including material from partner organizations, Le Manh says.
The plan is to create a big knowledge base—“and then, based on that, develop tools and applications around it that will help project professionals do their job.”
For example, AI can enable better communication with project stakeholders, Le Manh explains. Let’s say you have 20 stakeholders with different needs, objectives, and levels of involvement. You can ask the AI tool to analyze all past communication with them, then create a custom project update for each one. “If you can leverage that, then it will help you manage your relationship with stakeholders better, and that will increase trust,” Le Manh says.
This fall, PMI is releasing a new version of Infinity that allows for customization or personalization. “You’ll be able to upload your own content, your own templates, in a safe environment, in our own platform, so it’s not going to be used by anyone else,” Le Manh says. “You have a guarantee that it’s not going to train the tool of your competitor.”
So far, so good. PMI Infinity has about 50,000 active users, with a goal of 1 million. Meanwhile, enrollment in the three AI courses has topped 250,000.
As project professionals use AI more, Le Manh says, they can play a key role in building trust within their own organizations—by sharing insights on the technology’s limits as well as its benefits. “That will make the C-suite, the people making decisions in terms of investments in AI, more comfortable as well, and more confident.”
In these early days for AI, Le Manh sees it as a threat and an opportunity that will yield winners and losers. “I want our profession to be on the winning side,” he says. “So it’s on us to seize this opportunity and learn and really help the world make better use of AI.”
Sounds like quite a project.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
