Can AI supercharge the operations role?
AI, AI, AI. I think ever since I started my career in tech PR over 10 years ago I have been writing and talking about how my clients can use AI to "unlock new opportunities." From making manufacturing smarter to improving healthcare it's been a hot topic amongst the techie audience for years.
Then, BAM! It really hit the mainstream in 2023 didn't it? Even my grandparents understand what it is and what it can do.
Towards the end of last year you may have seen that Hu.Man.E launched its AI tag. This tag can tell you the number of grams of protein in a handful of almonds to translating languages in real-time. It's mind-boggling stuff.
In all honesty, I'm on the fence about that level of AI becoming part of my everyday, non-work life but with technology this smart how could it enhance marketing agencies and, in particular, my ops role? Crucially, what do I need to do now to future proof my career in the long-term ?
These are big questions with no clear cut answers, yet. Everyone, the world over is still trying to figure it out.
Most organizations and project leaders are still using spreadsheets, decks, docs and other applications that haven’t evolved much over the past few decades. These are adequate when you are measuring project success by deliverables and deadlines met, but they fall short in an environment where projects and initiatives are always adapting — and continuously changing the business. I'm sure we've all been there when new info comes in and we have to update it in a million places.
The biggest area of opportunity for Gen AI in my role is for it to streamline all of our different client projects and tasks; enabling the team to save time. If it can automatically update the team on changing priorities based on new information coming in, monitor progress and adapt when needed then a huge chunk of the project management/ops role would be taken care of. When it comes to Project Management for example, AI can be extremely useful in building the base of project plans, providing your prompt is detailed enough. For example you could try something like this:
"I have a 5 person team consisting of a junior social media analyst, a project manager, a copywriter and a senior social media analyst. Build me a table that can serve as a rough project plan, including hours, that takes place from 8th February to 22nd February that would allow us to generate a 30 page report including time for analysis of 5000 lines of data, copywriting and fact checking. Please also provide a breakdown of hours assigned to each member of the team."
Typically, building that type of plan would take me roughly 1-2 hours but with AI it'd likely spit out a recommendation in a matter of seconds, and from there all I'd need to do is check it and tweak it here and there.
There are so many PM tools on the market to help with this too and if you're new to this space my advice would be to conduct a thorough audit and testing phase before you commit to one.
We use Asana at my company but at the end of 2022 we decided to trial Motion AI with the creative team but it didn't quite improve the PM experience for us. PMOtto is another virtual project assistant that sounds pretty cool. You can ask PMOtto to “Schedule John to paint the wall next week and allocate him full time to the task.” The assistant then might reply, “Based on previous similar tasks allocated to John, it seems that he will need two weeks to do the work and not one week as you requested. Should I adjust it?” This could be useful when it comes to scoping and resourcing creative and analytics projects to make sure timelines are accurate and the right team are in place.
So where does that leave the ops role? Are we just handing everything over to the technology and putting our feet up? Well, no.
In my mind, and it's an area I am very interested in exploring more this year, is that our role will become more focused on coaching and stakeholder management than on administration and manual tasks.
With a shift away from administrative work, the project manager of the future will need to cultivate strong soft skills, leadership capabilities, strategic thinking, and business acumen.
We must also be prepared to coach and train our teams to adapt to this transition. A greater focus should also be placed on ensuring that our teams remain high performing, and receive what they need to grow and perform at their best, all the while remaining alert as to how AI is being used.
Based on the reading I have done to date, I am personally of the opinion that no matter how advanced AI gets, there will always be an unceasing demand for human connection. We will want to show each other how we feel as people and we will want to use our creativity and problem-solving skills to work together and continue improving the human experience.