As AI continues to make inroads into every industry in the world and the buzz around it continues to grow, we’re seeing EPC organisations leave behind their historical hesitation about emerging technologies; in fact we’re seeing many aggressively stepping up their exploration into the use of AI in project management out of curiosity, if nothing else. That curiosity is justified because if AI is indeed the Next Big Thing the EPC industry will see in the near future, understanding its role in project management will be a critical factor in how successfully and effectively companies will be able to adopt it and how much ROI they will see from it. However intention and understanding are two separate things, and since AI in this context (ie the EPC project management context) is still a very recent development, there is also a lot of ‘noise’ and hype surrounding it, which seems to have generated a fair amount of confusion and trepidation as well. So let’s delve a bit into the exact role AI will play in the industry and in EPC project management. Specifically, let’s talk about the role of AI in project monitoring.

It goes without saying that incorporating any advanced digital technology, not just AI, into project monitoring & control will greatly increase the level of efficiency and reliability that can be expected from these critical tasks. AI is just the next step in that direction. Let’s take the example of smart chat engines and chatbots; these tools can be programmed to handle simple enquiries, like enquiries about a project status or work progress on a deliverable. The use of chatbots will free managers from such routine queries and allow them turn their attention to issues that require human decision-making and human judgement. The chatbots use NLP – natural language processing – to make it easy for workers to interact with them intuitively and extract the information they need without having to learn any level of coding or any programming skill, and this creates a comfort and ease-of-use which increases the likelihood that people will start relying on such AI-driven tools rather than on manual information management mechanisms.

Another area of project monitoring where the use of AI will show immediate and dramatic improvement is in the planning and allocation of the project’s manpower resources. Nowadays, many struggle with the lack of skilled manpower or a constant ebb and flow in manpower pools, necessitating a constant tweaking of team schedules and rotas, and AI makes this easier by giving managers accurate and up-to-date information about every aspect of the team and its workers. It will provide reliable information on who needs what and when, what resources are available during that time, if there are any gaps, and so on, and it will analyse past project data to help managers come up with the best possible resource plan for the current project (or multiple concurrent projects that share the same resource pool), and allow them to make better-informed decisions. Keeping in mind that manpower is a high-cost and constantly fluctuating resource, smart project managers will also learn to leverage their AI-powered project monitoring system to create strategic contingency plans for the future.

Not only can an AI-driven project monitoring system automatically update schedules and resource allocations, which would in turn help project managers effectively control time and manpower management, with such a system as their foundation managers would be empowered to make key decisions quickly and with confidence. In fact it would be a simple matter to track progress in real time, anticipate and avoid problems, or recover from them in the shortest possible time and with the least possible damage.

Another aspect of the role of AI in project monitoring is the use of Machine Learning or ML algorithms. ML algorithms essentially analyse past patterns (in archived past project data) to recognise similar patterns in current projects. This means the system can predict potential problems based on past problems, and can even suggest tried and tested solutions. So the role of AI is not just preventive, it is proactive, in that it can help managers create better risk-management strategies based on what worked in the past.

To conclude, when it come to understanding the role AI will play in project monitoring systems and project monitoring & control in the future, EPC companies need to know that its primary role is to help human managers make better decisions and deliver better outcomes. It would not be an exaggeration to say that AI will dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation’s managers, when it comes to keeping stakeholders informed, planning and monitoring manpower utilisation, enabling collaboration among the various teams, and facilitating successful procurement management. Thus, the cumulative effect of AI will be that more projects get successfully completed, without delay or overrun.