I had lunch yesterday with a dear old friend and retired colleague. Somewhere between the burgers and the lemonade, she started lamenting the demise of the buggy whip industry.
Let me explain.
Meet Obi-Wan:
She and I worked together on several projects over the years, and I always considered her one of the more tech-savvy people I knew. Whenever I had a computer problem I couldn’t solve, I went to her first. My nickname for her at the time was “Obi-Wan,” as she’d do what felt like actual magic on whatever tech mess I’d gotten myself into.
She’s been retired for several years now, but she’s still active in professional organizations, volunteering, the whole bit. She’s also married to a software engineer, and her son’s in college.
I’m telling you all this because this isn’t a person who’s afraid of technology, or who’s been left behind by it, or who doesn’t understand it. Which is exactly what made what came next so interesting.
The Declaration:
Somewhere between drink refills, my friend announced — with heartfelt conviction — that she’s anti-AI. Extremely anti-AI. She refuses to use any form of it. Full stop.
When I mentioned I use AI pretty much every day (like essentially every working person I know does, in one form or another) she actually shuddered. She told me she’s never going to use it. She’s dying on this hill.
Okay. That’s her right.
But I’ve Heard This Before:
Here’s the thing: this conversation felt familiar. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced various versions of it before from otherwise-smart people:
80s: “Writing on a word processor isn’t real writing.”
Early 90’s: A draftsperson refusing to even try CAD software, because it’s not “real” design.
Late 90s: “I’ll never use email. It’s soulless spam and not real dialog. I’ll always use the phone instead.”
Early 2000s: “I don’t need a search engine. I have a library card.”
Mid-2000’s: “I would never use Grammarly. It’s going to miss things. And it creates words and sentences that aren’t me or in my voice.”
2010: “Slack will never replace a well-crafted email. I will not use some ‘asynchronous’ message board!”
Look, you can take a “principled” stand on just about anything you want. That’s fine. But at some point, reality stops caring about your principles. You have to ask yourself whether willful ignorance or the refutation of reality is in your best interests or not.
Fine, AI Has Problems:
Let me steelman my friend’s position on Artificial Intelligence for a second, because she’s not wrong about everything.
Are there real dangers with AI? Sure.
Is it an unregulated space that can be used for genuinely malicious purposes? Of course.
Is it infallible? Not even close.
Will it eliminate jobs? Sure, but new jobs will take their place.
Will it stop genuine human thought and creativity? It can if you let it.
Will it produce confident-sounding misinformation? Absolutely, and that’s a real problem we have to guard against.
But (and this is the part that always gets left out) you could have said every one of those same things about email and CAD and Google and spell checkers when they first showed up. New technology is both scary and messy at first. Sometimes for a long time. That’s not, by itself, a reason to refuse it.
Here’s the Actual Point:
AI is here. It’s not a fad, it’s not a phase, and it’s not going anywhere. Technology changes, evolves, and gets replaced.
This ain’t new.
Rewind back to the late 1800s, when buggy whip manufacturers looked at the horseless carriage and refused to acknowledge it was even a thing. Not “we’ll adapt later.” Refused to acknowledge it.
You can stick your head in the sand. You can actively rail against something. Neither of those changes the fact that it’s already here, it’s already now, and it’s already everywhere.
I saw exactly how “everywhere” it is a few days ago when visiting my daughter at her medical care facility. I watched two nurses’ aides there (i.e., GED-level, minimum-wage staff) putting together genuinely funny, professional-looking videos using an AI app on their phones. Nobody trained them to do this. Nobody had to.
If it’s there, it’s everywhere.
So What Do You Actually Do With It:
Here’s the part that matters more than my rant: the answer isn’t blind adoption, nor is it blind refusal. It’s using AI the way you’d use any other new tool. Hammer. Spell-checker. ChatGPT.
Don’t let it think for you. Don’t trust everything it tells you without checking. Stay in the loop; you’re still the one accountable for the outcome. Don’t get lazy and hand your thinking over to a machine.
Those are the exact same rules that applied to email, to Google, and to spell-checkers when they first came out. There’s nothing new here except the tool itself.
Okay, So How Does This Relate to Project Management and the Blueprint?
Fair question.
AI isn’t a replacement for us Project Managers, nor for thoughtful execution of the Blueprint’s 10 steps. But it is a tool that can help PMs, speeding up our work within frameworks like the Blueprint.
For instance, I’ve used AI to draft a rough first-cut mission statement from a pile of raw stakeholder interview notes (Step 1). I’ve also used it to stress-test a risk register by asking “what am I missing here?” against a list I’d already built (Step 9). In both cases, what I got back was the help and input from a second set of eyes, not a finished answer. It’s really the same idea behind the “strawman” reference design I’ve written about before (here); i.e., a deliberately rough first pass you build specifically so you can react to it and refine it, not something you hand over as final.
The most important part is this: you’re still the project manager. AI can draft, suggest, review, and accelerate. It doesn’t own the Charter, it doesn’t own the WBS, and it sure doesn’t own the results of the Project. It doesn’t talk to your stakeholders for you. It is not a project management replacement. It’s a tool that project managers can/should/will use.
The Bottom Line:
Like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is here.
Buggy whip manufacturing isn’t.
Draw your own conclusions.
You can have my buggy whip when you pry....oh, ok, wait.
I've also been thinking a lot about our conversation, and your encouragement to start writing again. I've been developing some ideas on that front, and this topic, and you & our other conversationalist will be the first to hear of it. Past that, we shall see!