Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcast, the podcast where we discuss project management principles for your everyday life. My name is Ann Campia, I'm a certified project manager. I've worked in the program management space and I'm currently in an operational role for a nonprofit marketing agency. So today I'm so excited to welcome Galen Lowe, who is the Co founder of the digital project manager. He has his own podcast. He does, he's doing his own
thing. And I'm so excited that he has reached out to me and we're looking forward to doing some sort of podcast swap at some time here. But Galen, welcome to the podcast. For those who have not met you yet, please take a brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience. Yeah, sure. No, thanks for having me on the show. It's a total honor. You kind of covered a lot of it in your intro. I think the things to know about me, I'm a huge digital nerd.
I came up managing digital projects like website builds, digital transformation and now I run this thing, the digital project manager. We are basically a knowledge sharing community and also a training provider and we're just hell bent on helping digital project professionals get skilled, get confident and get connected so that they can lead complex projects towards real impact. I've got my podcast as well, a digital project management podcast. We will have you on.
I think that's exciting. Yeah. And that's all about just like, I don't know, tough conversations into tough topics so that we can get like practical and actionable insights out of those conversations. I, I'm just excited to have you on here because there's so much synergy even in the naming of what we do right. Digital project manager everyday PM There's just connectivity and all the things that we're trying to do and accomplish for our community, our project manager,
project management community. And for those of that are not project managers that listen to this podcast as well, because today we are talking about artificial intelligence, which I think is just all the rave right now, such a relevant topic. I think Galen will probably get to a point where AI is just a part of our everyday thing, if not it already. And as project managers, I'm sure we're all scratching our heads asking the question of what does this mean for us?
You know, it in terms of everybody who is encountering AI is probably asking the same question. And I think we're going to kick off with let's just kind of rip the Band-Aid off here and I'm going to ask you about AI and AI as a project management solution. And really, what does that do for the role of project manager in terms of redundancy if anything? So your thoughts there? Ripping the Band-Aid off, yes,
juicy question. And yeah, absolutely at the forefront of every conversation that I'm having these days. I think our a lot of our immediate reaction is AI is here, is it going to take my job? And when you look at some of the tools that have been coming out, like especially in project management and productivity, like we are making leaps and bounds week over week, it's easy to see a path where, OK, yeah, it does all the things that I do
now what? But you know, I kind of have like there's two sides to to my answer here. Yes, I'm going to sit right on the fence. My biased answer is no, project managers are not going to be made redundant. And I'd say that because a lot of folks assume that project management is about planning and being organized and identifying risks. And it is, absolutely. But the bulk of project management, for me at least, is actually about the human skills. It's about like building rapport.
It's about casting a vision. It's about inspiring the team. It's about managing through influence. It's about like negotiating. So there's all of these things that AI is not yet there to replace. And I think that's still, you know, it kind of almost reveals the like collaboration layer that is not the administrative layer. Yes, those things have to happen. Yes, AI can help, but no, I don't think it's going to suddenly stand in for a project
manager. And I'll, I'll dive into it in a little bit, but I mean, you know, the reality is the role is going to change. It's not going to be the same, right? And The thing is project management is a skill that is very much in demand, but the number of roles with the title project manager like isn't necessarily going to keep expanding, right? It's not like project management is in demand. Now there's thousands of more PM jobs like the title of PM.
But I think what's going to happen, and I see it happening already, and I've worked in organizations like this where the bulk of projects being run within the organization are being led by folks who don't even consider themselves to be project managers. And I've worked in agencies where they've even, you know, said, OK, listen, for a small kind of less complex project, like let's save our PMS for the
big complex stuff. Let's just get that SME who is like the UX researcher or, you know, the lead engineer to lead that project. We don't need APM on it. Let's like, you know, let's see how that goes. Let's save our PMS bandwidth so that they can tackle something bigger. But even still, I would say that doesn't mean that PMS are going to become redundant. And I think that for two reasons. One, what I just touched on is that there are some pretty complex projects going on right now.
And you know, we talk about this notion of like, you know, running a project off the side of your desk. There are projects that are too big to run off the side of your desk, too complex to run off the side of your desk. And that will always need a dedicated role. And, you know, like project requirements are getting more and more complex. The team configurations are getting more and more complex. The the stakeholder ecosystem is
getting more and more complex. And that's where we will always need dedicated project managers to, you know, it's could be a full time job for some of the, you know, larger transformation projects and that is always going to be required. Yeah, I I agree. I agree. Go ahead. I was going to say, like the other part for me is like actually the mentorship side.
And I don't know if a lot of people are thinking about this, but you know, who's going to teach and like oversee and like bring consistency to the way projects are run within an organization. Like I've seen it when it's the Wild West and everyone delivers a different way and has different processes. It's confusing for people. Eventually it stops, you know, it puts a lid on productivity and you can't really kind of get to where you want to get to.
Project managers also become, you know, we, we, we will take on this responsibility to also be educated educators and coaches and mentors for our colleagues who are running projects. And that's OK. We are the people who are sort of, you know, the arbiters of project management, the like oracles of project management, helping other people deliver projects, not necessarily hogging all the projects and going, you know, get away from my projects. I still want my job.
I think the role is going to change. We're going to be dealing with more complex stuff and we're going to have a mentoring component. I definitely think that hoarding mentality is something that a lot of project managers when early on, of course, you're eager, your appetite is there. You want to take on as many different things that they classify as projects as you can and you'll hoard those for quite some time because you think by taking all this on, I'm showing my value back to the
organization. And maybe I'm speaking from a place that this was the mentality 5-10 years ago. I don't know, right? Because I've been in the space for quite some time. I know you have as well, Galen. Maybe that's not the mentality anymore, but I do think that there's something interesting about project managers who aren't at a point where you can kind of divide the complexity of things and really understand the application of AI.
And I love the point that you make around, you know, for those non project management roles, AI can really be something that will help enhance the workflow, will eliminate some of those repetitive tasks. But it's not necessarily replacing the soft skills, which are now known by PMI as power skills, which whatever semantics. I I still kind of have an issue with them changing soft skills
to power skills. I think it's kind of silly, but that's just me. But that emotional intelligence part of it, you're still working with other human beings. And to your point, I think until that is eliminated, I think AI and its application is not going to make the PM role redundant.
It's also not going to hurt if you are a non project manager to utilize AI. And it's not going to take anything away from project managers who then need to focus on the more complex projects that you had described, especially in the digital space, right? When it comes to the complexity and knowing who you need to work with, what types of stakeholders, I don't think AI
can do that just yet. And until we are in a space where the other roles have been overtaken by AIII think that piece, the whole is this PM redundant? I don't think that will ever be something where we can say the role itself has been completely eliminated. So all great points in terms of what you're saying. And I love, again, the aspect of PMS can play an active role. And let me know what you think about this.
I think PMS can play an active role in figuring out across their organization what are those tasks or things that you could utilize AI for in those roles where it's a not a project manager, but it feels like project manager work, if that makes sense. Do you have a take on that?
Absolutely. I mean, so I mean coming back to your point, I think, you know, there is this we are susceptible to feel like projects have the scarcity around them and then the project rolls have a scarcity around them. But you know, projects, bigot projects, you know, I think that we'll be doing, we'll be doing a lot to help projects in general.
If we're helping non PMS run projects in terms of like AI helping non PMS, you know, manage projects, is it going to suddenly make somebody, you know, who has never LED a project into a senior project manager overnight? No, I don't think so. There are a few key areas. And I think, you know, like, I wouldn't, I'm sure I'm not the first person to compare something like ChatGPT or Gemini to like Tony Stark's Jarvis from like the Marvel Universe.
Yeah, we're going to be doing this all of a sudden, Yeah. Yeah, we have a hologram. We're going to be asking for help. And like, you know, honestly, it's already impressive as a, as an assistant, right? It's a great assistant to help you achieve a goal as long as you know what you want. And it's actually really quite great as like a practical teacher in the moment when you haven't really got time or you just aren't motivated to like read a textbook or like take a course, right?
You know, like, well, let me pause and get my PMP right. I'll be back in like several months. It's there in front of you. But in terms of enhancing project management processes, I think just like I would say there's four big areas where I see AI being a big help for folks who don't consider themselves to be project managers. One is, I guess the 1st is just like gut checking your approach. And I think as project managers,
we kind of all know this. And part of it is that instinct to be like, is what I'm being asked to do or what the team telling me, is that feasible? Can I still deliver by this deadline? Are we going to hit this milestone? Or is this just a crazy plan? Like is this plan like absolutely unviable? And actually we've had a lot of great luck, like with things like even ChatGPT 4, just like straight up being like, hey, listen, like here's what I need to do and deliver.
And like, it always kind of has a little bit of an opinion. It's like the the timeline's pretty tight. You know, you might want to like, you know, check this. And it's much easier, I think, to kind of like, you know, not raise your hand and be that person who was like, I don't know, boss, I don't think this is feasible. Like you've never LED a project before.
Like how do you know you can kind of like lay it out and not like, oh, because chat GPG told me, but because you can be like, OK, well, you know, here are the activities and, and, and here are some of the durations. And here's who would need to be involved. And like this needs to plug into that. Like we've got dependencies here. Like there's risk, right?
There's risk in this timeline. And I think it's a really good thing to put in front of a non PM who doesn't have that instinct necessarily to be like 12 tasks easy. Yeah, we can do that by the end of the month. Yeah. Yeah. But what are they? How big are they? And then, I mean, I think the other one for us is, has been like identifying risks because, you know, risk management is a huge part of project management. It's also like the least sexy part of project management. I think.
I've yet to meet someone who is like really jived about identifying risks. It's like a blank canvas to think of like everything that might go, you know, opportunist, opportunistically right or like very, very wrong. And it's like it's a very difficult exercise actually. Have you seen have you seen the new movie Inside Out too? By the way, this is a little bit of a quick OK for those that are listening. Just the image of anxiety in the scene where she's running hundreds and thousands of
scenarios. That's what Galen is talking about right now, which is in, I think in the reason why you said it's not a very sexy part of our role, but we had somebody has to do it. Somebody has to be looking around those corners for sure and. Anxiety is the perfect emotion to be doing that right because that's what it makes people feel.
But you know, we've had actually great luck, you know, giving, you know, a large language model like the OR, you know, a ChatGPT, the context being like, I'm running this kind of project, like what could go wrong? What could go right? And just giving us, you know, we prompt it, it prompts us and we're like, yeah, no, that probably won't happen. I don't think we need to worry about that risk. Oh, that's a good one. We never would have thought of that on our own.
And there is this sort of, it is a knowledge base of some of the things that have gone wrong or have gone terribly right, wonderfully right on projects that you can, you know, bake into your plan and keep an eye on straight your plan. And I think that's a great thing because we've all had a good plan that just gets kibosh by some big thing that we didn't see coming. For sure we had seen it coming. Especially like someone who's new to project management.
Yeah, that is like an ace up your sleeve. So, yeah, I think got checking your approach, identifying risks, I would say knowing who you need, because a lot of the time you're like, OK, well, who's on my team? Do I have the right people on my team to get this thing done that I've been asked to do? And we've again, kind of been able to use something like a ChatGPT to kind of suggest A-Team and then go, wait a minute, we're missing this person. And then you can be like, what
does this person do? And we're like, no, actually, you know, Soren does that. Actually, it's not, it's not their title, but yeah, they can do it. And you can kind of make sure you don't have a skills gap on what you need to get done because that's the other big risk of like, can we get this done by this date? What's the risk? And do we have the right people?
Interesting. And then I, I think my 4th one is just like, you know, I said it, AI doesn't help with some of the like human skills, but it can. So we, we use it sometimes mostly just for fun, but like to prepare for a tough conversation or negotiation. You can kind of give it the context. You don't have to like give sensitive information and you just like, here's where things are at. Like, you know, what are some of my options to like approach this
really difficult conversation? Because that's the thing that a lot of the experience, project managers listening like we cut our teeth doing things like we learned the hard way. We probably went into that first negotiation and it probably bombed and it hurt and we didn't have the help. We built over time. We're like, OK, well, next time I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna do this, but there is a lot of sort of knowledge that can be aggregated and brought
right to you. But like, OK, well, think about this, you know, consider, you know, seeing things from the other person's perspective and not just like running in saying this is how it's got to be. Project manager says no, you know, like it doesn't have to be. You can get guidance on that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And do you think a lot of the information, so AI obviously it's learning everyday, taking in more and more information.
So the Chat GPTS that we knew when day one it became available versus today is vastly different, right? So I have a few questions in terms of your key considerations, because I think that do you feel that it has enough, Do you have enough confidence in what it is returning to you from your prompts in terms of has it kind of taken all of the various aspects it would need to at this point? Or are you still doing kind of a verification of the information it spits back at you?
I'm, I'm just thinking about the last example you shared where you said, you know, you're asking it, do I have the right people? Are these the right? Do I have the resources to support a project of this magnitude and scale and complexity? Are you seeing that the information is speaking directly to that, or do you still have any to do a little bit yourself as a person? I mean, I'm the kind of person that would never take anything at face value like just because
it's. Honest IRPM. All right, I mean, you know, like our even just our media literacy, right? Like, you know, you see an ad on YouTube, doesn't mean it's true. You know, someone writes something in Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's true. I think we should always be a little bit critical. And I think that is as natural as it will get because if a human came and told me, now you got to do this, let me, you know, let me sort of explain your job back to you.
And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK. But but I'm going to do it a little bit differently. I think is the right way to use AI, I think. Take it with a grain of salt and lends it through your experiences. Heck, bounce it off other humans too. Like it's more a starting point than it is the solution or the answer. And I don't ever think that there is sort of one answer to anything. And the way we build technology
is to try and achieve that. So, you know, you have your like Google search where it's like, listen, I think I know, you know, like the all the way from the I'm feeling lucky button right back from the way the way back, but just give me the 1st result. That's probably right. And a lot of our behaviors around the technology we're building around our knowledge is to give you the right answer. And I think fundamentally that's just not how humans have
progressed this far. But having one right answer to something, there's always multiple ways to look at it. So I would encourage anyone to kind of look at it critically. And and then of course there's the other stuff, right? The technology is, is, is advancing very, very rapidly, but it's just the technology side. And so the other things that I asked folks to consider is that like, you know, you kind of have to know like what is sensitive data or what should I not be putting in there?
What is my company policy on this? Sure. Because, you know, it's so easy to take this powerful tool and have it go terribly, terribly wrong for. You. Yeah, that's a really good point. You're jumping into, you know, a, a sports car, rocket ship, you know, read the manual kind of thing, right? It's like, know what it's capable of. But even beyond that, like, you know, we're all adopting AI so fast and it's easy to assume that everybody is open to it.
But I think the other consideration for me is like that might not be true. And we've had a couple of instances, you know, people have very differing opinions on those like note taking bots, right Fireflies or whatever shows up in the meeting and some people get their get their back up. Some people like it's as natural as just showing up to a Zoom meeting and everything in between. But I think, you know, that's going to impact your collaboration, your team culture.
If you've got a stakeholder that is really, you know, like not open to AI, Like that's a conversation to be had with them before you start, you know, plugging every AI tool into your project, you know, to make it go. And then I get, I think the last bit for me, it comes back to that grain of salt, right? The technology knows stuff. AI knows stuff, you know, it's been learning.
It continues to learn. It does not know everything that you know, and it's going to depend on the quality of what you're asking it. And the thing that you know, I, I notice all the time is that we've got this behavior like we are programmed to do web search, right? Give me to the, give me the answer to this thing, the end. We don't have this chance to refine and like chat with it, but that is what AI is. That's how it learns best.
If you get something and you're like, I don't know, I probably could give you a bit more information. Give it more information, like have a conversation. Give it the context, let it sort of like let yourself get there through refinement. It's not a one and done, you know, OK, yes, I've used ChatGPT to be like, hey, I have to write, you know, thank you cards from my kids teachers. Can you give me some suggestions? Yes, here you go the end of by. But also, you know, you can
refine that. You can be like, can you make that shorter or like, hey, can you speak in the voice of, you know, someone who has this experience? And you might need to like craft it together with AI. It's not supposed to just deliver the one right answer. It's supposed to help you achieve a goal. And the more information it has, the more information you can safely share with it, the better it's going to do. So I would say it's a conversation.
I think the people who are using AI wrong are the folks who are thinking it's just a one and done. Yeah, yeah, absolutely create a project. Plan. I love that, you know, something you said stuck this entire time that you're going through the key considerations, which is even in the responses, there could be bias in that right, depending on the type of information that the chat bot or whatever has taken in.
And so we have to really be cautious about what type of biases that the responses are carrying. And it could also be to your point in the way that we phrase our prompts. And there's another thing that I wanted to highlight of what you said, which was really relevant to, you know, I think a lot of spaces where when we were growing up as project managers, a lot of people would say, we need APM, we need APM, but they didn't really understand what
the role was. They just thought they needed it. And they had a very vague definition of this catch all person that could do all the things to help stabilize and bring structure to a company. And I kind of think in that same perspective, you could put AI in that space and say, I know you said there, there could be, you could have some leadership that's adverse to AI. But then on the flip side, you might have some leadership teams that think they know what AI can do for them.
And then their expectations are completely off base from what it can actually do when it's applied to your organization. I'm wondering if you've seen some examples of that, both the successes and the the failures around AI in terms of its application. No, I think that's a really good question. And you know, we've been seeing it a lot in the project world, even in the product world right now where it's kind of almost AI for AI sake.
But I'd add an inflection to that, which is like there's a sort of competitive nature to it. It's like everyone else is going to be using AI. We need to figure this out now, but as leaders of an organization or leaders of an operation, like coming in and like trying to do wholesale change. We're AI now, AI and everything, please. Or like coming with that ambiguity. It's funny because you know, we talk about like crafting a prompt for AI. Well, craft that prompt for your
teams, right? To be like, here's what we want to do with it. Not just like go do AI wholesale change, AI everything, figure it out. That's where I see it go wrong. Where everyone's like trying to like rewire their entire business to use AI everywhere without understanding what is what, what is it that they actually want from it. And I mean, the flip side of that is that, you know, I'm sure someone is doing successful wholesale AI change, but I haven't seen it.
What I have seen is people doing like safe to fail real world practical experiments to be like, OK, everyone hates risk identification like we and, but and yet all of our projects seem to run into these risks time and time again. We're not doing anything about it. OK, let's work on this one project and let's do risk management with the team with the support of a chat, you know, like you know, ChatGPT or AI tool of your choice.
You know, let's run an exercise in mirror using it's AI solution where it's generating some stuff that we can react to. And then let's see, let's see if a people enjoyed that better than trying to come up with things that might go wrong from scratch. Let's see if it helped us avoid, you know, a big pothole in the road that we keep running into.
And let's see if like our our our stakeholders or our clients or our sponsors or the people working on the project, let's see like what friction it creates or what, you know, it empowers them to do. And then let's scale it because, you know, it'd be easy to say even in the risk management example, right? OK, all risk management must use
ChatGPT now. Goodbye is not necessarily going to lead to, you know, meaningful progress, but if you can like run it kind of scientifically right, you're iterating through, you are incrementing your way towards being an AI enabled organization. That's where I've seen it be much more successful, not least because the change management aspect is much smaller. So yeah, you have an extra meeting. In your project now, right?
Yeah, it's not like suddenly your world is upside down, yes, and you don't know how to do your job anymore. And now AI does and then it's easy to be like, OK, I guess you know, need to find other work now. Isn't that true of any change? I mean, AI or not, it's like when you when when your leadership team decides everything we're going to do is going to be turned upside down. I definitely think there might be some risks involved in that. I'm just I'm just going to put some money on that.
But I think, you know, kind of going back to those non project manager tasks, because I think this is a really interesting space because in most of the conversations we are both of us are hearing within the project management community, it's so much focus on the project management role itself and those tasks that are related. But then, you know, you wanted to come on here and let's talk about the stuff that's not
project management, right? A non project manager who has tasks that we could utilize AI for. You know, what are some of those potential challenges when it comes to transitioning from that those tasks to something that AI could maybe effectively do for the organization? What are some of those challenges? How do we address them? Have you seen any use cases that you can share with the audience? Yeah, actually.
So I did really want to specifically talk about talk to non PMS and also PMS at the same time, because I think, you know that some of these transitions are relevant to that entire group. And whether we like it or not, whether the listeners like it or not, projects are being delivered by folks who are not trained as project managers.
And that's OK. But then there's these tasks that sort of come out to their plate and then the AI sort of variable like adding complexity, well, seemingly like looking like it's going to remove complexity or as it's actually adding complexity. Yeah. So I mean, here's here's where I've seen some issues. OK, Well, like a 5050 split. Sometimes when you are prompting something like ChatGPT, as someone who's not a project manager, you're like, teach me this thing.
Tell me about this thing that I don't know. It will know and it will respond to you as you're learning. So you're going to get a very non PM answer. It's like, OK, you're starting out and here's what you need to know, which might not be the answer you need now that you're actually kind of a project manager. So if you're getting the sort of basic ground level definition of a thing and then you're taking that to your team and you're being like, yeah, I know what I'm doing this thing.
You might need a PM answer from it. And you actually can, you can prompt it. You can say, act as a seasoned project manager working in the nonprofit space. Yeah. And then do this thing and please give me bullet points out of it. So you can kind of, I was talking to someone and they're like, I use both voices.
Sometimes I'll be like, I don't know a thing about this thing, Tell me about it. And then now tell me the same thing as though you are an expert and let me get that vocabulary and let me understand the bigger picture. Again, not a one and done. You can ask it the same question and sort of angle and tilt the response to what you need. So I, I, I've seen that happen where people are like, OK, you know, it's not really helping me. It's giving me, you know, dictionary definitions of a
thing. And that's not helping. But you can actually prompt it to act as something, you know, act as an experienced project manager and it'll give you a bit of a different answer. It'll go deeper. So I've seen that kind of be a, a, a hiccup. The other thing I've seen is like, it's like putting the puzzle pieces together is still difficult and it's kind of like you have got AI now, so you should be able to figure it all out. But a lot of the time it's strip
feed, right? You're like, OK, I need an answer to this now. I need an answer to this now I need an answer to this. And you kind of have this these conversations, but it's not always as easy to zoom out and understand the 50,000 foot view of like how all these things fit together and seeing the bigger picture. And then therefore being a better project leader because you kind of understand what's going on.
Not just, you know, walking through the fog, seeing an inch ahead of you every time is to be able to kind of like, OK, I still need to. It's still my responsibility as someone who has a project that I'm meant to deliver. It's still my responsibility to kind of zoom out, understand how everything fits together. And in a lot of cases, I mean,
AI, we can do that for you. But I think the way we use it to kind of prompt and then prompt and then prompt and like walk down this path, prompt by prompt won't give you that. It won't just deliver this. By the way, you've asked me these 17 things. I think you're here. You need to consider this phase, your next stage is going to be this. It might not have, it might not give all that. It might know it could. But the way we prompt doesn't always give us a, the sort of
context and that bigger picture. Sure, sure. And then what do you think about like I could easily see APM or sorry, even a non PM at some point who's managing some projects. You said like 17 prompts so it made me think about this. I found myself doing this as well. I don't think you can necessarily manipulate what the AI, you know, chat is going to
give you back. And do you think in that scenario where you're describing, you've vetted the prompt of multiple times it in some ways, do you think that that person is looking for something very specific and they're just waiting for the AI to tell them that? And then the other, the other piece that I I'm wondering about that you've seen is in non PM. So as they're using AI, what,
what is that limit? Like at what point have you said, OK, I put this prompt in 17 times, I'm not quite getting what I need. I need to just go ask somebody about how to do XY and Z because it's AI is not helping me. Like, have you seen any of that happening as well?
Yeah. And I mean, you know, coming back to that 17 prompt thing and like kind of not getting what you wanted and maybe not even knowing how to ask for it kind of thing is like, you know, I, I think when you get to that point where like every action you're taking on your project is preceded by, you know, going to ChatGPT or going to Gemini or going to cloud or whatever. And like, so in other words, you're like, do a thing, OK, ask AI, do a thing, ask AI do a thing. Like that maybe shouldn't
precede every action you take. It also shouldn't dictate every action you take, right? Again, like taking this with a grain of salt. And there will be these sort of moments of like, OK, I'm not getting, you know, what I need from it. But also maybe I just don't know what to ask. And maybe I shouldn't be like, if it's not saving you time anymore because you're like, I'm like 17 prompts in and the meeting's almost over. Yeah, right. They're like, OK, well, I
haven't figured this out yet. It's still. It's a powerful tool, but it's kind of like being told to, like, build a car from scratch every day, right? It's like, at a certain point, you're going to be like, I cannot build an engine from scratch just by asking questions. And when you get that feeling and it's, you know, the tool's no longer helping you keep things on track, and there's more ambiguity than there was
before. Yeah. I think that's a great time to sort of raise your hand, ask for help, but also, like, start setting expectations of, like, what you're capable of doing when you're doing it, like, your
main thing, right? You're not a dedicated project manager in this scenario that you know, what is actually feasible and realistic for your organization to expect from you and not just be like, OK, well, yeah, I, you know, I should be able to do this because I have AI, but be able to also manage expectations with your leaders to be like, I got this far. But like, if I, if I keep going this way, like I don't think this is actually helping the organization achieve it's goals.
I don't think my project is being helped by it. You know, now might be a great time to either get me trained or bring in some extra firepower to deliver this project. And I think that's the main thing for me is it's not. They're not mutually exclusive. You can get help from AI and you can get help from humans at the same time, right? It's like neither one of those should be dictating what actions
you're taking. They're all inputs into what you decide to do. And, you know, I think there's some, some huge pillars there that, you know, I'll do a shameless plug as well. But like, you know, AI is great at understanding what we've done already in the past and like, best practices from that. Yeah. But humans, I think are still better about, you know, understanding the context and using that to envision a future for sure. And I think that's really
important. You know, AI doesn't know all of those stories in your head or all of those experiences that, that, that you had, you know, throughout grade school that made you, you know, who you are or that, you know, that one project where that like that thing, that really unique thing happened. And you know, it's not anywhere on the Internet. It's just in here. There's a lot of that in people's brains.
And so, you know, that's why we're so huge on on on community and sharing information and supporting one another because it's really these conversations. I think it's the knowledge exchange. It's a storytelling, it's, you know, helping each other build skills based on those experiences that I think helps fill in that gap. AI can get you this far. That's fine. But you know, if we're relying on that for all of human knowledge now, it's just going to loop.
Like it'll learn very, you know, incrementally. The thing that's always made us great as humans is our creativity, our ability to communicate with one another, our ability to build on one another's ideas, try a thing, decide whether or not it worked and like keep going from there. So, you know, I think, you know, my big thing is the support you need as a non PM to, to, to do projects or even as a project manager running projects. Like your support comes from two
places now. It's comes from your AI tools and it comes from like leaning on real people to kind of, you know, develop an understanding of what the future might be and how you should proceed with the information that you have. Gosh, I love that. It's just a different perspective, a different way of learning and application.
I think, Galen, I'm going to throw one more curveball at you before we round out this conversation because I think you and I, before we started off mic, both said we could easily talk about this topic for hours. So my curveball is this. Are we having this same type of conversation in the context of PM and non PM and AI? If we were to do this podcast about, I don't know, three years from now, five years from now, what is that conversation look like?
That's a great question. I told you it was a curveball. It was, it was about a decade ago when we kind of started talking about the advancement of technology and how it's going to look specifically from a UX lens. And we kind of talking about the idea that like, you know, doing a wireframe isn't going to be the in demand skill because at some point AI is going to be able to do that.
And we started talking about not just UX as a user experience, but like like MX or like RX, like robot experience. It's like, what about this world where we're interfacing more readily with technology and a world where technology is interfacing with one another in itself, right? And, and what does that collaboration look like? And three years, I know it doesn't seem like a long time, but you've seen the speed at which these things are
advancing. And it's not hard to imagine a world where you've got an AI, you know, humanoid robot on your team or shows up on Zoom, or, you know, it's already kind of happening, right? But you're actually. Like interfacing and interacting. And you know, I, I just said support comes from two places now, right? Yeah, your tools and your people. Imagine you're on the Zoom call,
right? And you're like, like, OK, you know, like, hey, you know, like, you know, what do you think about this to your human colleague? And then turning and going, OK, you know, like ChatGPT Zoom attendee bot, like, what do you think? And they're like, well, I think this and you're like, OK, that's great. Let's put those two things together and here's how we're gonna move forward. I think that is like a feasible reality. It seems very, you know, sci-fi right now for sure.
But you know, it's gonna be sci non fi pretty quickly because that's just the way we're wired. You know, we take these cautionaries very tales from very bright creative people who have warned us about technology, and we just do it anyways. So that's my predictor. But at the same time, I think it can be productive and I think it will embody that whole cohesion
between the two things. And then it will create a whole bunch of other problems that don't get me too deep into the iRobot or. Hey, the sci-fi movies always said by the year 2000, we'd all have our own robots with artificial intelligence living in our houses. So I mean, who knows? But I, I love the insight. I love kind of the forward thinking, the future of what we can expect from from Galen Lowe and the digital project manager.
I think that your perspective highly relevant for the everyday PM as well, or what we were calling during this conversation, the non traditional or even the non PMS that are listening in on this conversation. So Galen, this has been fantastic. Honestly an honor to have you as a guest on the podcast. Your insights are are highly relevant to the space that we're living in right now as the project management community. So if people want to continue the conversation with you, where
can they follow you online? Oh yeah. I mean, come check out the digital project manager. We are at thedigitalprojectmanager.com. We run a community, we've got the podcast and honestly, we're just like, we just publish really like as much value and knowledge as we can for free on our site. So definitely check that out. We're always talking about this sort of thing. My podcast as well, the digital
project management podcast. And actually like we're quite active on like Instagram and we've got our YouTube channel. We are the digital PM on both of those channels. That's where we try and have a lot more fun with things because there's a lot of serious topics and there's a lot of complexity that we're dealing with. But at the end of the day, you know, it's it's not, it's not sort of as life or death as some other professions. So we don't mind having a bit of
fun just to bring that levity. So if that's kind of you and, you know, you're looking for that sort of mental break that doesn't necessarily take you out of your work. Yeah, we're good for that too. I absolutely do. So I will be hopping on to the Digital Project Manager YouTube channel after we end this conversation For folks that want to, you can follow the everyday PM. We're on Spotify, any of your podcasting platforms as well, and you can follow me. I'm on LinkedIn and Campia.
I'm also on all the other social media platforms too. So for Galen and I and this conversation around digital space, non PMS, PMS and AI look forward to catching up. Up with you maybe in three years to talk about this same topic and we'll see how different this conversation is, but that will do it for Galen and I and this installment of the Everyday PM podcast. Thank you all so much for joining us. And until next time, take care.