Around the turn of the century, most people were skeptical of the impact that artificial intelligence would have on the future workplace. Many people believed that AI technology would be a footnote in modern business practices. A 1987 article by Harvard Business Review suggested that most of the bold claims about AI would probably never happen. Advances in AI technology have since proved many of these naysayers wrong. Machine learning has led to some huge developments that are touching every aspect of our lives.

Being a Project Management Professional in good standing for almost a decade, I thought of exploring the role of Artificial Intelligence in my own area of Practice. But before delving into the nitty-gritty of the most exponentially growing technology of the current era and its role in project management, I thought to first enrich my readers with clarity on what does Project Management deal with and what does a Project encompass. Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria within the specified time frame. In other words, it is the application of processes, methods, skills, knowledge and experience to achieve specific project objectives according to the project acceptance criteria within agreed parameters. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all the goals that are constrained to a finite timescale and budget.

We used to talk a lot about the future of project management and a place of artificial intelligence in the field. However, the fact is that the future is already here, and AI is a significant aspect of today's project management process. Technologies are advancing by leaps, and their impact on this area can not go unnoticed. Skeptics will say that modern AI is not intelligent enough. Today, AI is often understood as any automation, that is not completely true.

Edward D. Hess, Professor of Business Administration & Batten Executive-in-Residence – Darden School of Business, and co-author of Humility Is the New Smart Technology will continue to advance much faster than the business world will adopt and much faster than the social and governmental sectors will adapt. The two big areas that will practically lead the way in 2018 are The Industrial Internet of Things and Global Politics. Global industrial Incumbents who are ahead now in technology adoption and who are building AI-Cloud based platforms to serve an ecosystem will continue to advance and ultimately that will lead to massive global industry consolidations leading to large reductions in the number of human employees. The power of large AI-based platform organizations will be the story of the future. The impact is still 3-5 years out but, when it hits, it will be big. The dominant Future of Work issues in 2018 will be political. How will China advance toward its goal of becoming the AI global leader and who will contest that? What happens in the mid-term elections in the United States? And will Germany's to be formed new government continue to exhibit the leadership needed in Europe and globally?

When we think of project management tools, many of us immediately think of Microsoft Project--arguably the market leader for specialized PPM software. However, in the Software as a Service (SaaS) era, there is more choice than ever regarding project management tools, with more specific solutions targeted at different industries and use cases. There are project tools out there dedicated to task management. There are solutions that are more focused on analyzing project data and presenting it in a visually appealing way. There are project management tools which are focused more on resource planning than task management.

If you've read any tech media recently, then you're probably hearing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI). Some people herald it as the promise of the future, while others are skeptical -- even fearful -- of its impacts on society, culture, and our workplaces. As it turns out, the buzz around AI has mostly resulted in a lot of conflicting emotions. A recent Atlassian user survey found that 87 percent of respondents said artificial intelligence (AI) will change their job in the next three years. Almost the same number said that some part of their job could be done by AI.