Can AI help you manage your project team more effectively?

As you become more senior in your project management career, you’ll inevitably start to take on people management responsibilities. This means learning to juggle the needs of your new project team with getting your own work done.

The benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) for task automation, administration and data analysis are well documented, but how can you use the technology to help manage your team without scaring the 32% of people who already believe AI is coming for their jobs?

To help answer this question, I researched AI tools on the market and how they could help you manage your project team more effectively. Let’s dive in and take a look at four options.

1. Use Copilot to document decisions for future reference

Your task as a project manager is to keep everyone aligned so that the project moves forward. Collaborating as a team in meetings and workshops is a great way to do this, whether you meet to work through a problem, set actions or make decisions.

But all this discussion comes with time-consuming admin. To help, try using Microsoft’s Copilot to unlock additional productivity in your Teams meetings. Copilot acts as a virtual administrator, taking notes, summarising discussions, recording decisions and suggesting next steps.

This saves you the admin of sweeping up after your project team meetings and gives everyone the documented output they need, reducing the burden on you and the repetitive ‘what did we agree again?’ conversations.

2. Remove the reliance on you with ChatGPT

When team members are struggling to find answers to important questions, they often come to you, the project manager. While in many instances a quick Q&A isn’t a problem, if you have a large project team it can be difficult to give everyone time.

Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are becoming more sophisticated by the day, helping teams answer questions and suggest creative solutions to complex problems. In the first instance, project teams across the globe are increasingly turning to AI tools as a first line of support when uncertainty arises.

This article from Forbes is a fantastic resource to share with your team, as it provides ready-to-use GenAI prompts for milestone planning, stakeholder engagement, risk analysis and more. Here’s an example:

“Draft a project update email for stakeholders of [project name] including sections for me to include key achievements, current challenges and next steps.”

3. Nudge the right behaviours and learnings with Humu

Throughout the life of the project, you want your team to exhibit the correct behaviours in everything that they do. But you can’t be everywhere at once to support and guide them in those critical moments.

Tools like Humu use AI to incorporate ‘behavioural nudges’ into workplace apps such as Slack, Teams, Outlook and Gmail. These nudges detect when team members are completing certain tasks and provide friendly pointers to help drive the right action.

These nudges have two impressive use cases. First, you can align them to your company or project values, providing a steer on behaviours to exhibit in high-pressure situations. Second, they can be used to deliver quick refresher training, ensuring tasks are completed correctly every time.

4. Use Microsoft’s sentiment analysis to detect simmering conflicts

To keep harmony in your project team, you want to stay ahead of conflict. But sometimes the signs of conflict aren’t clear to see, and with your busy workload, you might not be able to pick up on those early warning signs.

While sentiment analysis – the ability to analyse language to determine attitudes and predict behaviours – isn’t a new concept, thanks to the advancement of AI, its application in our day-to-day working lives is rapidly expanding.

Microsoft’s PowerAutomate can look at emails in your inbox, analyse them and alert you to those with a strong negative sentiment. Given the technology is still evolving and isn’t 100% accurate, to avoid any unwanted concern, you’ll likely want to keep the audience of alerts relatively small (e.g. a Teams notification just for you or close team members advising that you have a potentially negative email in your inbox).

This allows you to prioritise which emails you address first, helping you react to potential conflicts faster, de-risk your project and keep your delivery progressing smoothly.