One thing missing for AI to transform the project leader role

I’m blown away by Chat GPT capabilities to generate text for use in articles, help me understand new topics better, summarizing text, etc. Sometimes it feels like it can make sense of everything thrown on it.

However, there is one thing preventing Chat GPT from being useful in my role as project leader.

It is not how the generated text sometimes feels lifeless and flat, that’s most often fine or even appreciated when writing internal company documents.

The information I need is not there, it is not in the model.

Since the model is trained on generic data found on the internet and 80% of the information I need in is internal. It can be found in e-mails, direct messages, documentation, and other internal sources that the Chat GPT model was never trained on.

💡If it was possible to

1. Train a small model on the sources above and append to to the large language model used in ChatGPT, and
2. The small model was retrained frequently (say daily at start),

It will be a complete game changer for me, and I think it will have profound implications on how we work together.

Imagine that we had such a model, then I could…

📌Ask it to write a project plan and include relevant lessons learned from similar projects — it will give me a project plan that follows the company guidelines.

📌Ask it to give me an update on the key deliverables in my project. Most likely this information is available in e-mails, chat-logs and other project management tools, since all of these are included in the model and it knows the basics about the projects, it will spit out exactly the right information.

📌In addition to summarizing the meetings, it will be able to inform us during a meeting, that the last time we spoke about this topic we said… and even loop in information from e-mails regarding certain topics.

The list goes on and on…and on…

I bet that both start-ups and major companies such as Microsoft and Google, are currently tinkering with it. I will hunt for evidence 😊

❓What happens when we see the roll-out of these models?

As project leaders we can either super-power our current methodologies such as Prince II, PMI, SCRUM,… or, more exciting, build new ways of working from the ground up.

❓Imagine that you could get the information you want regarding any project related topic by just typing in the question into a computer interface, how would that change the way you run meetings? Which meetings would be removed? Which meetings would be added?

If we take the leadership perspective, I spend a lot of time trying to create the optimal conditions for my team members to thrive and be successful. If I have a trained model that contains all information from meetings and e-mails, it will be able to help me with this as well. Since the model is also trained on general knowledge (internet), it can help me with suggestions for how to, using validated methods, improve the performance / working conditions for my team members.

❓What would that mean for you as leader? Team member?

Hopefully there will be more time to look my team members in the eyes and ask them how they feel and focus on being human.

There is a paradigm shift at the horizon and we are pretty close to the horizon, buckle up — let’s enjoy the ride.