Will AI Make the PMO Obsolete?
Why automation won't kill the PMO — but it will transform it.
Published
May 8, 2025
AI Will Eat the PMO (As We Know It)
I’ve spent the better part of my career inside transformation programs — the ones with big ambitions, big budgets, and usually, big frustrations. If you’ve ever led or supported a PMO in an enterprise, you’ll know the feeling: despite all the planning, reporting, and governance frameworks in place, something always slips.
The team is out of sync. The plan is out of date. Everyone’s busy, but no one’s sure if what they’re doing still matters.
We don’t fail because of bad ideas. We fail because we lose situational awareness.
Now, with AI entering the picture, a new question is being asked in boardrooms and strategy teams: will AI automations make the PMO obsolete?
No. But they will finally make it strategic.
Why AI Will Upgrade the Way We Do PMO Work
I’ve led major programs across large enterprises and scale-ups — multi-year transformations, acquisition integrations, digital overhauls. And I’ve watched a familiar pattern play out in nearly all of them:
We lose the plot.
Teams fall out of sync with the mission. Priorities shift, but no one updates the plan. Strategy becomes a backdrop, not a driver. And by the time the post-mortem rolls around, everyone agrees: “We had the right ideas — but something got lost in execution.”
To make this point, all I need to say is "Nokia," and I’m sure you’ll know what I mean.
Through more experience, I’ve come to learn that "that something falling out of place" is usually situational awareness. And that’s where AI — and more specifically, In Parallel — is changing the game.
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: most PMO work can be a bit of process theatre. Status reports. RAG dashboards. Timeline management. Slide decks no one reads.
Someone at the recent Strategy Execution Forum in Amsterdam described project dashboards as watermelons: all green on the outside, red in the middle.
AI can help transformation leaders, program managers, and strategy execution practitioners do the important work of maintaining programs — better, faster, cheaper.
And it should. If your PMO is still running on manual check-ins, static spreadsheets, and once-per-quarter insights… you’re not managing strategy. You’re managing inertia.
GPS: From Slide Decks to Situational Awareness
What AI Can Do Now
Lack of Situational Awareness Kills Most Execution Initiatives
I’ve seen this at every level:
At Nokia, during the height of its market share in mobile phones, programs moved fast but often lost the thread of strategic alignment — often competing internally more than externally
At a large bank where I used to work, agile transformation became complex too easily, with increasing numbers of tribes and silos to manage
In a scale-up, where I ran strategy, everyone was “busy” but few could explain what really mattered in that moment
No framework or tool solved these problems. Even with OKRs, Balanced Scorecards, or quarterly business reviews — we were too often flying blind. We had goals. We had metrics. But we didn’t have awareness.
We didn’t ask:
What’s the most urgent obstacle today?
Which team is solving the biggest problem?
Which solution has stopped being relevant — and why are we still funding it?
With GPS, those questions aren’t afterthoughts. They are how we manage success.
PMOs Are Not Dead — But They Need to Grow Up
AI won't replace the PMO. But it will replace old PMO thinking. That’s a good thing.
The PMO of the future isn’t a status gatekeeper. They’re a strategy operator.
Their job is to:
Continuously observe the terrain (inside and outside the business)
Orient the team around what’s changing
Decide and act — quickly — before issues compound
Sound familiar? That’s John Boyd’s OODA loop in action. GPS makes it real.
In Parallel’s Intelligent Operating Model lets AI do the grunt work:
Pulling signals
Clustering patterns
Surfacing problems
So humans can do what they’re best at:
Framing the right decisions
Judging and adapting plans
Making the hard tradeoffs that AI can’t see
A Better Way to Prioritize
We didn’t set out to build an AI PMO. We set out to solve a frustration we know too well:
Strategy doesn’t fail at the goal level. It fails when new problems emerge — and no one adjusts.
With GPS at the core of our AI-native operating model, we help teams:
Track goals and the obstacles in their way
Prioritize based on problem severity and solution impact
Make every solution a new goal in the hierarchy — with visibility and accountability baked in
That’s not a dashboard. That’s a new operating rhythm. And we think it’s what every modern PMO should be striving toward.
Final Thought: Strategy Is a Loop, Not a Plan
AI won’t magically make your strategy succeed. But it can help you stay aligned, aware, and adaptive — unlike anything that’s come before.
In the end, the best PMOs won’t be the ones who resist AI — they’ll be the ones who wield it.
If you’re a PMO lead, program manager, or strategy exec trying to rally your team — or just tired of watching the same mistakes on repeat — contact us for a better way.
Let’s stop chasing last quarter’s plan.
Let’s build for what matters now.