Project Mgmt & AI in the Age of the ‘Insta-Expert’

I continue to marvel at, and be baffled by, the number of books and courses and posts published (seemingly every week) by those who purport to be an ‘expert’ in AI, or at least be an expert or have expertise in how AI will affect/impact project management.

(Note: I’m using AI as a catch-all term here, not to indicate any specific technology)

Just to be clear, by and large the authors of these books and courses aren’t ‘experts’ in AI, how to use it, or what it will mean for the profession.

AI as a technology is in its infancy. The first mainstream, publicly available LLM (ChatGPT) was only released two and a half years ago (Nov 2022).

So at the most, these ‘experts’ have 2-1/2 years of practical, hands-on experience with any AI. Hardly long enough to claim any sort of expertise, and most certainly not enough to be in a position to suggest they have any ‘special’ insight to be able to advise anyone.

In reality, at most these “Insta-Experts” can claim “I experiment with the tools a lot.”

But that’s not the same as ‘expertise’.

Most of us have been using Microsoft Excel for a decade or more, and have ‘experimented’ or tried to get it to do something (often failing).

But few of us would presume that that experience qualifies us to market ourselves as ‘Excel Experts’.

And this is one of the problems of new technology in the Age of the Insta-Experts, where everyone falls all over each other to claim the high ground or ‘first mover advantage’. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large – we spend a few day/weeks playing with something shiny, and suddenly we’re convinced that we’re experts, when in fact we’re not even really ‘knowledgeable’.

Still convinced you’re an expert? Go watch the movie ‘AlphaGo’, or the just released ‘The Thinking Game’ and tell me you understand *any* of it.

AI is arguably the most advanced technology we’ve ever seen, and the advancement and complexity is compounding at an astonishing rate (daily it seems). So it’s almost comical to realize that the minting of new AI Insta-Experts is following roughly the same growth curve, when in fact, the more complex AI gets the *fewer* non-technical ‘Insta-Experts’ there should be.

When it comes to AI and project mgmt, and what this will look like in the future, all we really have is a puzzle in a box.

The pieces are there, but we don’t know ‘how many’ pieces are in the box. Or how many are ‘supposed’ to be there.

So we can’t know for sure *all* the pieces are there yet.

And we don’t really know what the picture’s supposed to look like. We can see some of the colors, and we’re starting to get an idea of whether the picture will ultimately be bold and vibrant, or more muted shades. But we don’t really know yet if it’s going to be a landscape, a sci-fi theme, a western, or a still life. It’s too early to tell.

And because there’s still so much we don’t know about the puzzle, it’s certainly too early to hazard a guess for ‘when’ we’ll be done.

But we’re in a place now where as we stare at the box of pieces and consider how or where to start, we’ve being pitched by the ‘Insta-Experts’ that although they have the exact some box of pieces, because they’re played around and connected a few edge pieces they’re now in a position to not only tell us how to put our puzzle together, but also to tell us what the picture is.

And it’s natural to want to learn more, and to seek out experts. But in this mad rush of ‘Insta-Experts’ I think we have to be clear that anyone claiming any sort of expertise is in reality walking the same (untrodden) path as you, and they’re at best only two steps in front of you.

Does that really qualify them to be your ‘guide’?

Would you pay someone who’s only 3 feet in front of you to tell you which way to go?

Originally published on LinkedIn