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1. Introduction
This paper addresses the confluence of the potential offered by project management as a domain ready for incremental and disruptive change due to the new affordances offered by AI and analytics tools and approaches. Paraphrasing Christiansen (1997), we can differentiate incremental changes as ones that add relatively small innovation to an existing product or platform from disruptive ones that substitute largely new platforms for old ones. In this essay, the domain of project management is viewed as ripe for incremental change, certainly and possibly disruptive change as well. Interestingly, pondering the confluence of AI technology and project management is not new (Hosley, 1987; Foster, 1988; Diekmann, 1992), but with the continual expansion of AI and analytics capabilities the potential for use of these tools to revolutionize project management continues growing. Of course, many domains of human activity find themselves subject to incremental and disruptive change. Project management is particularly important because: (1) it is a vehicle for enacting organizational strategy through specific concrete actions (Alsudiri et al., 2013; Lord, 1993; Pinto, 2019); (2) it is widely held that there is much room for improvement upon currently standard techniques and approaches (e.g. Shenhar and Dvir, 2007); Widman (2008), Cerpa and Verner (2009), Shaw (2012), Johnston (2014) which implies significant economic benefit from improvements and (3) it is largely through projects that new products are advanced, new policies created and new organizational initiatives are developed (Pinto, 2019). Numerous examples of possible ways that AI and analytics tools and approaches offer the potential to change project management are presented throughout the rest of this essay.
1.1 Project management
Projects tend to be defined rather narrowly as nonrecurring tasks, performed by cross disciplinary teams, with stated goals and resource constraints (Pinto, 2019). Such a definition describes well a central tendency, but does not quite account for the colorful and diverse range of projects large and small, formal and informal, that span organizational domains or are focused narrowly within a single functional area. Developing a new application or implementing one already completed can both be characterized as projects while having strikingly different action components. It cannot be assumed that any tactic or approach will be relevant to all projects, therefore, in referencing specific techniques, such as risk...