Digital transformation is hard. Even in the forward-looking profession of project management, we spend countless hours documenting and distributing meeting notes and action items for our teams. What if we could automate these processes to leverage AI and Machine Learning so that our focus could be applied to higher-value tasks, such as relationship building and strategy?
On March 25, 2021 I had the opportunity to present at the PMI Virtual Experience Series PMXPO event. This was a globally attended event with excellent speakers, virtual exhibits, and networking activities.
My presentation, “How Conversational Intelligence Software will Boost Meeting Productivity,” focused on the promise of automation and AI in helping our profession become more efficient in managing information and insights arising from meetings. I also shared a vision on how project leaders can influence the direction of solution development through our active engagement with industry vendors.
I’m pleased to say that help is on the horizon. There are emerging technologies with the potential to boost meeting productivity that project leaders should harness for our companies and for our own career growth. These early-stage companies are applying conversational intelligence (CI) plus machine learning algorithms to automate processes around meetings.
My PMXPO presentation provided an overview of available CI platforms, as well as key features and workflows in this space. While the emerging solutions show promise, they are still very early stage. I also shared lessons learned from piloting a CI solution at my organization. My team found that true automation is lacking and the vendors working in this space need to continue to train models for better results.
As project leaders, we need take control of our destiny to form a “Conversational Intelligence (CI) Working Group” for meeting productivity and task automation tools. We need to build a community of practice to stay at the forefront of innovation that can positively impact our profession.
A Working Group would have many benefits for our profession and would:
- Inform industry requirements and standards,
- Create community and enable sharing of information,
- Assist vendors with refining their solutions, and
- Ensure that our voices are heard in the product development process.
Contact Bruce Gay if you have interest in being included in the Conversational Intelligence (CI) Working Group.
Sign up for the Conversational Intelligence (CI) Working Group
