The future of AI in strategic and project portfolio management: 5 key features and trends

Nearly a quarter of businesses are aggressively pursuing AI integration.

Its rapid advance is no more evident than in portfolio project management (PPM)—a process of managing and prioritizing projects—and strategic portfolio management (SPM), which takes a higher-level, overarching approach focused on business outcomes.

We all know that AI can boost productivity by automating time-consuming tasks, such as resource management and reporting. According to Salesforce, it is currently helping seventy-four percent of employees save between four and twenty-eight hours weekly—but AI promises to transform PPM and SPM beyond mere automation.

For PPM and SPM practitioners, AI can enhance decision-making, data quality, efficiency, risk management, and collaboration across your project portfolios, while minimizing human error and bias.

Generative AI, anomaly detection, predictive analytics, particle swarm optimization, and chatbots are five key AI-enabled PPM and SPM software features poised to revolutionize strategy and execution.

1. Generative AI

Recent advances in big data and deep learning have made generative AI absolutely central to the digital transformation journeys of many organizations. Generative AI can analyze historical data, training insights, and human feedback to spot patterns, make predictions, and create novel ideas and solutions. This can enhance SPM by:

• Analyzing past project data to generate potential future scenarios based on multiple, complex variables and presenting them to users via dashboards for comparison.
• Assessing the impact of upcoming projects and portfolios on the business’s goals and making recommendations to ensure strategic alignment and the best return on investment (ROI).
• Recommending solutions and generating new ideas by combining several sources, including project data, best practices, trends, and more.

Consider security and data privacy when selecting a tool that leverages generative AI, as you should maintain authority over all outgoing data. A solution should allow users to define AI use cases, implement them as needed, and deactivate AI technology whenever necessary.

2. Anomaly detection

Forty-two percent of data leaders see data quality as a key hurdle to AI adoption—a challenge that AI itself can help overcome. AI-driven anomaly detection features can enhance data quality by:

• Uncovering hidden trends that business analysts might miss
• Providing deeper insights into anomalies’ root causes
• Analyzing data and flagging issues in real-time for faster intervention

Data anomalies in project portfolios often signal misalignment with business strategy, which can cause significant issues for SPM practitioners.

By continuously monitoring and automatically detecting pattern shifts in this way, AI improves the accuracy and compliance of your data over time. Naturally, this gives decision-makers greater trust and confidence.

3. Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics leverages modeling techniques—predictive modeling—to forecast future demand, timelines, and outcomes. It is a statistical technique that analyzes your historical data to predict results for projects that have similar parameters. This benefits PPM and SPM users by:

• Offering real-time updates to improve data accuracy and maximize productivity
• Analyzing large datasets from multiple sources to support efficient, informed decision-making
• Assessing projects’ strategic impact to allow teams to focus on highest priority initiatives

Predictive analytics isn’t new, but AI advancements mean that it can now be scaled and accelerated with improved accuracy, allowing for faster trend and pattern recognition, data analysis at scale, and real-time performance monitoring. This can be transformative for applications and industries that rely on precise forecasting and data-driven decision-making, such as product development and pharmaceuticals.

To learn more, take a look at our guide on building an AI predictive analytics model and watch our webinar with Patch & Sparks exploring the transformative power of predictive analytics.

4. Particle swarm optimization

Inspired by the behavior of social creatures (like insects and birds) that work together to achieve optimal outcomes, particle swarm optimization (PSO) helps PMOs optimize portfolios, boosting efficiency, accuracy, and continuous development by:

• Handling multiple, diverse, and sometimes conflicting objectives 
• Adapting to changing portfolio priorities, enabling greater agility
• Leveraging predictive analytics and real-time data updates for informed decision-making

Like predictive analytics, PSO is not a novel concept, but its capabilities have been dramatically enhanced with AI. It can balance and allocate resources intelligently across multiple projects, programs, and portfolios, while being mindful of constraints and business objectives.

5. Chatbots

In a PPM landscape, AI chatbots can help automate routine tasks and improve cross-team knowledge sharing. At the next level, in strategic portfolio management spaces, they help project teams stay informed and aligned by:

• Enhancing and facilitating communication through natural language processing (NLP)
• Reducing information silos with real-time, accessible project data and recommendations
• Reducing delays and improving information flow with quick responses to stakeholder questions

Planisware’s AI assistant, Oscar, trained on an extensive large language model (LLM), helps with specialist PPM and SPM requests relating to numbers, durations, and schedules. It can also do the more “basic” AI assistant tasks, such as answering questions, including those about documentation.

With Planisware, you can also integrate your preferred language models with our new LLM Connector.

Selecting a PPM or SPM solution is about far more than just choosing a tool for process automation. Modern AI-enabled software can elevate your projects and portfolios’ strategic value, expedite results, and support more confident decision-making.

Start your organization’s journey to greater portfolio productivity and efficiency—book a one-to-one demo today to see what Planisware can do for you.