As generative AI becomes embedded in creative production, there is an understandable assumption that many of the functions traditionally associated with project management, like scheduling, consolidating information, tracking deliverables, summarising meetings, coordinating workflows, and reporting on progress, can increasingly be automated.
That assumption is partly correct because AI can do many of those things, and increasingly it will. The mistaken conclusion, however, is that this makes the project manager less valuable.
In an AI-first creative business, I would argue the opposite is happening. We need excellent project managers more than ever; in fact, we’re actively trying to hire hundreds of them across the globe. What we need less of is project management built primarily around administration.
This offers a useful glimpse into the broader future of work.
For years, much of the AI employment debate has been framed around occupations: which jobs will disappear, which will survive, and which new ones will emerge, but occupations are bundles of tasks. AI does not necessarily remove an entire profession when it becomes capable of performing some of those tasks. It just changes where the economic value within that profession sits, and project management is a good example.
If a project manager spends hours manually consolidating information from multiple teams, producing status reports, rewriting briefs, or chasing information that technology can surface in minutes, automating that work should not be regarded as a threat; rather, it should be regarded as reclaimed capacity.
The question is really about administration versus orchestration and what the person does with it. Let’s be honest, creative businesses have always had a coordination problem.
A major global campaign can involve strategists, designers, copywriters, producers, technologists, clients, markets, platforms, and increasingly several AI systems working across multiple time zones, and generative AI can dramatically increase the speed at which individual parts of that system operate.
Generative AI is enabling strategists to interrogate information faster, creative teams to explore more territories, content to be adapted across more formats, and teams to consolidate vast amounts of information in a fraction of the time. However, as the speed and volume of creative production increase, so does the complexity of keeping everything aligned, making effective coordination more important than ever.
Someone still needs to understand what the client is trying to achieve, determine what needs to happen next, identify dependencies, make judgement calls, interrogate whether an output is useful and ensure that ten faster processes are moving towards the same objective.
