A Conceptual Framework for Applying Artificial Intelligence to Project Management

Title data

Auth, Gunnar ; Jöhnk, Jan ; Wiecha, Dennis Arnold:
A Conceptual Framework for Applying Artificial Intelligence to Project Management.
In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Business Informatics (CBI). - virtual , 2021

Project information

Abstract in another language

Although in recent time the development of AI-based solutions has made some notable progress for many application domains, project management (PM) does not naturally seem to offer rewarding uses cases for AI. Due to the characteristic novelty and uniqueness of projects, this application domain seems, at first glance, to be rather unsuitable for achieving strong improvements through the use of AI which typically requires large data sets to train and test learning algorithms. Nevertheless, PM researchers and professionals also have a rising interest in unlocking the promising business potentials of AI. Until today, this interest has motivated considerable research activities as well as commercial AI-based solutions promoted explicitly for PM. In this article, we present a framework which defines the fundamental concepts for applying AI to PM comprising both the requirements of AI for the application domain PM as well as the requirements of PM for the solution domain AI. Considering the two domains’ mutual requirements, the developed framework structures the potential for the application of AI in PM and thus supports the targeted solution design for business. Further, we call for future research to explore AI’s potential business value in unintuitive application domains beyond the prevailing use cases. Our research process for designing the framework consisted of two main steps: first, we conducted a state-of-the-art review of current research findings as well as commercial solutions available in the market, followed by an explorative interview study with eight experts from both the fields of AI and PM.