The impact of AI on expert labour and professions: a neo-traitist analysis of project management

This chapter discusses the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the professional status of Project Management and proposes a ‘neo-traitist’ framework to evaluate potential impacts. The framework categorises data arising from a piece of research into this question, funded by the UK Association for Project Management, conducted with project managers and artificial intelligence experts. It was found that artificial intelligence presents both threat and opportunity for the status of project management and project managers in society and to the experience of project management for individual practitioners. Artificial intelligence has the potential to create new resources and capabilities to enhance the status of project management. However, the profession must identify its defensible traits against inevitable encroachment by AI if the occupation is to remain as a basis for valid status-claims in the lives of professional project managers. Project management is an occupation that has recently risen in prominence and acts as a good model of expert labour or the kinds of profession that have been created through the development of capitalistic organisation. Therefore, our analysis here has potential for application to a range of other types of professions in contemporary organisations that are facing the encroachment of artificial intelligence into their professional activities and the imitation of their traits.