Dear AI, help me to be more strategic in 2025

A chess board with a person's hand picking up the white queen. Off to one side is a cute robot representing Artificial Intelligence.

As we look towards 2025, many of us are thinking about how to approach the new year more strategically. Last month, I co-presented a workshop “Evolving into Strategic Leaders: Strategies and Tactics for Women in Project Management” at the PMWest 2024 conference. My module covered how generative AI tools can assist us with cultivating strategic thinking. Here’s a quick recap - may you be more strategic in the coming year!

I’ll set the stage with a couple basics before diving into how we can apply the tools.

Prerequisite: Using generative AI tools responsibly as a Project Manager

Before we dive into applying generative AI tools, it’s important to cover responsible use of these tools in the context of a Project Manager’s day-to-day work.

Keep up with your company’s policy on the use of generative AI tools. e.g. What are the permitted inputs AND allowed uses of the outputs? Expect the policy to evolve, since this field is changing so rapidly. If your company doesn’t have a policy yet, who is the right leader to drive its creation, and could you suggest that they create a policy or publish guidelines to help employees navigate the risks?
Never put confidential information into a tool that is outside company bounds. You don’t want your meeting minutes to be the source of a leak [1]. Many larger companies offer options that are within a bounded network.
Respect requests to not transcribe / record / use an AI note-taker. Be aware of sensitive topics: Legal, HR, restricted access IP, etc.
Augment yourself, but verify data - AI hallucinations often sound plausible. You can ask the tool to provide links to its references and check them.
AI typically uses much more electricity than traditional automation - the World Economic Forum estimates “by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021”.[2] And, not all problems warrant the application of AI. So, I avoid using AI when it isn’t delivering much value above traditional methods.

Recommendation: Learning to prompt effectively

If you haven’t taken a course in prompt engineering, I highly recommend doing so. The Project Management Institute (PMI) has a course that is free to members.[3] Even if you’re not a PMI member, the PDF workbook from the course is free and shareable.[4]

Aside from helping to use generative AI tools more efficiently, I strongly believe that when we learn to prompt well, we are also learning how to communicate and delegate better to humans. Often, colleagues are reluctant to give feedback on our communication deficiencies, but we see garbage-in-garbage-out quickly when interacting with a generative AI tool!

Key aspects of being more strategic

In order to act more strategically, it’s essential to make time for deep thinking. To identify root causes, getting different perspectives on a problem is important. Then, we can reach better outcomes if we identify a wide array of potential solutions, shortlist, and compare the most promising ones.

I go into more detail about how Project Managers can apply generative AI tools to help with these key areas in the following sections.

Making time for deep thinking

In order to be more strategic, we need to give our brains the chance to zoom out and connect the big picture to the details. We have to hold different pieces of information in our brains together, and turn them over like puzzle pieces, to produce something valuable. We can create greater change if we tackle root causes instead of reacting with the first solution that comes to mind for an issue that arises.

As project managers, we’re often up to our ears in execution. Generative AI tools can help us to automate busy-work, freeing up time to think deeply.

I'm impressed with Microsoft Copilot features in Office 365 and their published roadmap.[5] Aside from summarizing and composition, which are sooo 2023 ;) , features that help me reduce Project Management busy-work are:

Asking Outlook to give me the time zones of a list of colleagues. This helps me select better times for meetings.
Having Outlook not only improve composition of my message, but coach me to be a better communicator.
Having Stream find decisions in the Teams meeting recording and give me timestamp references, so I can verify correctness. (Computer Engineering is heavy on jargon and technical details. Transcript summaries have improved a lot during 2024 but can still be inaccurate.)
Having Stream give me the timestamp when <person> talked about <topic> so I can jump to it and save the turnaround time of contacting the person to confirm certain points.
Having Excel identify common themes in a table of survey results where respondents could answer in free-form text.
Having Excel quickly highlight cells with a certain type of information. Copilot suggests and can apply the conditional formatting.

I’m currently disappointed with Gemini’s capabilities for Google Workspace, as I haven’t been able to use it for some of the above assistance. I also had a hard time just figuring out what exactly Gemini could do. Since I couldn’t find a published roadmap, I ended up asking Gemini what it can currently do in each tool. BUT, generative AI is evolving rapidly. Microsoft Copilot shows what is possible for productivity, and competition drives technology advancement. So, I am hopeful that Gemini will offer these features eventually.

Getting different perspectives on a problem

When you’re analyzing a problem, if you want to be strategic about it, you would look at the problem from multiple angles. If you don’t have all the required expertise yourself, you would want to have a conversation with a diverse set of experts. But, you don’t always have access to these people, or it can be a long time before you land an appointment with them.

By asking a well-trained generative AI chat tool to adopt a persona for a chat, you can get a sense of the perspective that these experts might provide. Make sure to use a separate chat for each persona, so that you don’t confuse the tool. And remember, as you might take a person’s opinion with a grain of salt due to their biases, do the same with the chat output.

(Not familiar with asking for a persona? See Persona Pattern in PMI’s free prompt engineering workbook [4])

Identifying and comparing potential solutions

Once you feel like you’ve understood the problem you’re trying to solve, you can then dive into brainstorming, shortlisting potential solutions, and comparing them.

Similar to above, you’d ideally involve the relevant experts. But, if you don’t have access to a human with a perspective that you think would be valuable to include, you can have a conversation with a persona-based generative AI chat to ask for solution suggestions and pros/cons.

If you like to brainstorm in digital sticky notes, Microsoft also has Copilot in Whiteboard. It can kick-start your brainstorming by generating ideas based on your prompt, then organize the sticky notes into colour-coded categories when you are done.[6]

Conclusion

Generative AI tools can help Project Managers to approach our work more strategically. These tools can help us clear time for deep thinking, quickly give us simulated access to a greater range of perspectives when analyzing a problem, and help us to compare and categorize potential solutions.

This blog post covered the highlights of just the AI module of “Evolving into Strategic Leaders: Strategies and Tactics for Women in Project Management”. If your company would be interested in getting the full workshop or the version aimed at a mixed-gender audience, please reach out to info@kestrel-omnitech.com .