Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
The New Rules of Project Management in the AI Era with Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI
Pierre Le Manh, PMP, has been serving as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Project Management Institute since September 2022. A global executive with a multicultural background and experience in leading companies across multiple knowledge industries, he has a proven track record of delivering results and guiding organizations through complex transformations and globalization. Before joining PMI, he served as CEO for North America and as Global Deputy CEO at Ipsos. Pierre played a crucial role in transforming Ipsos from a primarily European-focused organization with $700 million in revenue in 2004, to a $2.5 billion global industry leader by 2021, and in growing the company to more than 18,000 employees operating in 90 countries, successively leading various regions and global business lines.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How AI is reshaping project management and upskilling
- Why PMI is betting big on personalized, AI-powered learning
- The difference between managing AI projects vs. using AI in projects
- How PMI maintains the PMP as a global gold standard
- The potential of collective intelligence in professional education
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:20] Pierre Le Manh’s path to PMI and passion for global professional education
[00:05:02] How the skills economy is reshaping lifelong learning and certification
[00:08:36] PMI’s multi-format approach to personalized learning at scale
[00:11:20] Leveraging ChatGPT and PMI Infinity for AI-driven upskilling
[00:18:15] AI’s dual impact: Transforming project work and enabling AI project leadership
[00:23:39] Why PMI sees AI project management as a distinct and certifiable skillset
[00:32:48] AI-powered translation and localization to scale global learning
[00:46:47] Unlocking collective intelligence through a connected professional network
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Pierre LeManh: When you think about it, the way projects are successful is of course, doing your project management well, right? So being properly organized, reducing waste going faster. But it's also about making sure that the scope. Addresses a real need. Making sure that your stakeholders, your clients, your investors, understand, perceive the value that the project is bringing.
And chatGPT and all the LLMs and GenAI, and even AI in general as a tool, are so powerful at helping you convince people, but also making sure that what you're doing actually address their needs. Right.
[00:00:40] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders. The. Technology industry from funding rounds to impact to ai developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work.
[00:00:53] Ben Kornell: You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer our event calendar and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.
Hope you enjoy. Today's pod,
[00:01:20] Alex Sarlin: Pierre Laman. PMP has been serving as the president and chief executive officer of the Project Management Institute since September, 2022. A global executive with a multicultural background and experience in leading companies across multiple knowledge industries. He has a proven track record of delivering results and guiding organizations through complex transformations and globalization.
Before joining PMI, he served as CEO for North America and as global Deputy CEO at Ipsos, Pierre played a crucial role in transforming Ipsos from a primarily European focused organization with $700 million in revenue in 2004. Two, $5 billion global industry leader by 2021 and in growing the company to more than 18,000 employees operating in 90 countries, successively leading various regions and global business lines.
Pierre Lam, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks for having me. I am really excited to talk to you. You have a really interesting role with one of the largest professional organizations in the world. It's the Project Management Institute. You've been in the role for a couple of years. Before we jump into what you're doing with PMI and with EdTech, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to PMI.
[00:02:39] Pierre LeManh: Sure. I was born and raised in France from a. Vietnamese dad, a French mom. My dad came to study, became an engineer. My mom was also an engineer. They had their own construction company, and I grew up in a French suburb, like in a suburb of Paris. I studied there. I. Then I went to Canada when I was doing my time in the military, and then I came back to work for Accenture for a while.
This is where I learned. And then from there, you know, I moved on in the corporate world. So I became A CFO. I became a CEO. I worked in publishing. I worked in some direct to consumer businesses, and I started to go more. International. I run a company called Cons Data, which was focused on first party consumer data that was operating across Europe and in the US in Canada, in China.
So that's when I really started to be more international in my career and focus. And then from there I joined a company called Ipsos, which is one of the largest market research companies in the world, and consumer insights and consumer analytics. Initially I was running the European business and then.
A number of global practices and at one point we made a big acquisition, which you know, had some integration issues in the US in particular, which was our largest market already by far. So I moved to New York, that was 12 years ago initially to run our North American business, complete the integration.
And then from there I left at one point and I wanted to. Work in education. This is something I had a lot of interest for. So I started to work for a P back European company called Glio. They own a number of higher ed organizations, companies, schools, and ed tech as well. So I worked for them to build, I.
Their portfolio or a pipeline of acquisition, let's say in the America's region. And then from there I was offered to join PMI to run it in September, 2022. So that's how I joined PMI, which is in the part of education that I like the most. The professional education, which, you know, gives you lots of opportunities to be involved in discussions with businesses, with companies, governments, and.
A professional audience as well, so. I found it very interesting and fun.
[00:05:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, we are in this really interesting moment, I think in time for PMI because it's an age where skilling, you know, skills-based hiring up-skilling, re-skilling have just become the language of the day in all levels of education.
And I think, you know, project Management Institute has known about skills based education for a long time and has done skills based certification for a long time. Your take on the skills movement in hiring, in corporate training, and what role you feel like PMI will play in that era?
[00:05:37] Pierre LeManh: Yeah, I think everybody understands that what you learn in school, especially on the technical side, is not going to last.
Your entire career is not gonna be relevant forever. So. We're seeing this, it's true that in the US in particular, there's a sort of a movement to even skip higher ed and start in the workforce. I think most of that is more due to the cost of going to university and college in the us, but definitely we're.
Seeing all this research from multiple sources. Remember the World Economic Forum at one point said that the high life of most workplace skills was about five years. They said that in 2017, and then they updated it a couple of years later saying, now it's four years, even 2.5 for some technical skills.
And four years ago it was more like 10, 15 years. Right? So we're seeing this acceleration. Definitely. And with the rise of ai, there's even more that sense of. Urgency that the way we work to get today, especially in the knowledge economy, is going to be fully disrupted. So yes, we are definitely in this age of skills and competencies and the need to constantly upskill yourself, stay current, and definitely that has impacted us also what we do at PMI, our own strategy and how we think about.
The future of professional development and our investments. Now, I still believe that you cannot only base your personal. Development on learning skills, right, or short term skills. You have to also focus on principles and competencies and things that are transferable, right? And that will last. If you think of critical thinking leadership skills beyond the pure methodologies or techniques, we also insist a lot on that at PMI.
If you think of how AI is going to affect the future of work, especially the knowledge work, you also want to make sure that you develop yourself as a full package individual and leader, and not just someone who masters a few techniques that would become obsolete.
[00:07:39] Alex Sarlin: I'm very excited to talk about AI with you because I think, you know, AI is changing.
That set of skills and exchanging the way we train and learn on a daily basis. But before we get into the ai, I'd love to hear you talk about PM i's strategy. It really has been ahead of the curve for quite a long time in the sort of certification space, the professional certification space, lots of different methods of delivering education both online and in person.
The PMI exams are really the sort of the gold standard, not only for the project management in industry, but sort of one of the gold standards for any kind of corporate training, at least in my mind, because they're so comprehensive, they are so respected within the world. They're basically become, I. A must have for many, many project managers around the world.
So tell us about how PMI thinks about its different educational channels. How do you provide education and assessment to aspiring and current project managers?
[00:08:36] Pierre LeManh: Yeah, people like to learn in different ways. My own. Personal preference is online and self-paced. Part of that is also because I travel a lot and I'm always on the move, but I also learn better that way.
I think I was a very impatient child and very bored in class, and even today, if I have to stay for hours listening to people talking on the stage, it bores me a lot and I do prefer. Doing this at my own pace. But other people have very different preferences as we know, you know, and in fact suffer from being on their own and lack the motivation, the self drive.
I mean, all the things that de describe and prefer the interaction with like a sort of in-person environment, an in-person environment can provide. So at PMI, we're trying to meet people where they are, right, and to adjust the way we train people to how they want to be trained and learn. So it could be.
Synchronous online training that is sequential or not sequential. We have in-person sessions as well. We have a whole ecosystem. So we deliver trainings ourselves, but we also deliver through a huge ecosystem of partners from, you know, and by the way, within structures from all around the world, different languages.
We also use different formats, right? So there's various intensity of learning, right? So if you prepare for your. PP, let's say the flagship certification of PMI that everybody knows us for. You have to go through a number of hours of training. You know it's set at 35 hours. You gotta go through that, but you can do it at your pace or you can go through classes that we organize or that our partners organize.
But we also have a lot of other ways to. Learn at PMI. It doesn't have to be to prepare a certification. So we have our online courses, we have sessions at our global summits or any events that we organize. We have workshops. We also try to address the development needs of our volunteers. You know, we have a lot of people who are involved in the profession.
In supporting PMI, developing our content or animating our local. Organizations that we call our chapters or branches, you know? So all of that requires some development. You can't just run a chapter without understanding how you run an organization. And we provide that kind of development opportunity and training as well.
So we've got all these different formats. All different of moments to try and really meet people again where they are and when they wanna learn. And as much as possible, make sure that the PMI promise is the quality that will be provided, right? Because we are that gold standard, as you say, for our profession.
And people look up to us and wanna make sure that whatever PMA provides is of high quality.
[00:11:20] Alex Sarlin: So let's jump into some of the ai. I know this is something you think about a lot and are excited about for PMI and just in the world of education and corporate training at large. So AI is transforming many different industries.
It's moving very quickly. The models and the tools themselves are continuing to evolve at a very fast rate, including now we're moving into a sort of agent. Style world. How do you see AI as a tool for both your learning platforms and, well, let's start with the learning platforms, but I'd also love to hear you talk about how AI is a tool for project management as an industry.
'cause I'm sure it's promising to transform that industry in a lot of ways as well.
[00:11:58] Pierre LeManh: Yeah. If we cover the learning part of your question first, let's start, let sorry to ask a bit more. This is still the Benjamin Bloom two Sigma problem, right? Which at the time. Changing everyone to find a scalable way to do better than just passive courses.
And now with ai, we probably have a game changer solution to. I mean, you can call it skill tutoring, right? Or whatever you wanna call it. But having a sort of personalized way of learning at skill. And I'm actually currently learning Spanish because I just bought a house in Spain and I already speak French, Italian, so I'm kind of confused a little bit.
Like my brain struggles through separate Spanish from that. So I'm using three different things, right? So I'm using Duolingo like everybody does. I have a grammar book. I hate reading, but having learned Italian before, I know you gotta go through the grammar and all of that, otherwise you will never speak properly.
But I also used Chad G pt and the very first day when I started to learn Spanish, which was three months ago, I told Chad, GPT, can you teach me Spanish and develop a learning program for me that works. And. It's unbelievable like that GPT told me, look, do you want me to test your current level of Spanish?
You know, and of course that was pretty bad, but give me a questionnaire. And then started to develop a plan for me, and we're doing this every single day. Like I talk to Chad, GPT, asked it to memorize what I'm doing and personalize this, the whole thing. A lot like when we, sometimes I write. To people in Spanish, and based on the mistakes I make, it offers me to focus on certain areas, right?
So it's not perfect and it's not been even designed for that. So imagine if you develop a proper language learning program using chat GPT, how more powerful it's gonna be. So we think about that. The same way with PMI. You know, we've very quickly launched. A number of AI tools to help our profession learn project management or stay current.
And we went in two directions. So on one side, we very quickly came up with an agent that we call an exam prep simulator. So basically we put some old questions, retired questions from our exams. And you can use that. And some people right away loved it and said, well, it's great. I can use it in my own language.
And we did not even realize that when we tested it. 'cause we came up with a product four hours after the marketplace was opened by OpenAI. And then I tried it myself in other languages and I realized, yes, actually it works very well in multiple languages. So that's like a very simple way of course. And in a way.
Pretty basic way of using or leveraging ai. But then we created a platform. Initially it was not for learning. We created something called PMA Infinity, which is an AI assistant. Or co-pilot for project managers with the idea that project managers need to make sure that the sources that are used by the LLM are vetted.
And also that whatever questions they ask would be confidential and won't help others. So it works on a specific instance that, you know, nobody can use. The LLM cannot use that to develop their own algorithms. So we created this BMI Infinity AI Assistant. We're already at version two. We launched last year, and now we realize that we can.
Create some specific learning modules. We call them guided experiences where let's say you are a project manager and you are interested in how you can incorporate more sustainability in your projects. And so we have specific areas of that platform. Focus on that in particular, right? And help you learn by asking you questions, giving you content, suggesting it's just a customization, if you will, of the LLM using specific content that we put it in there, right?
So it's very, very powerful and I wouldn't say that. I would envision a future where you only learn through that kind of tools, although it's possible for certain people, but it becoming one of the main ways of learning is definitely something that I think would happen. You know, it's already happening with BMI.
Yesterday I posted on LinkedIn. I. Reminding our community about all the free stuff that we give to our members, and that platform is part of it. And you have people who comment, commented on it, said, I'm actually using those guided experiences. I'm using PMI Infinity, and it's very, very effective, powerful for me to stay current and learn and learn as I'm practicing it the same time.
Right. Which is very powerful. You can upload your own documents, your own project context, and it helps you right away. So it's very powerful.
[00:16:24] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. I just wanted to build on what you're saying there, because some of the things we've been seeing, talking to a lot of different education entrepreneurs about their AI techniques and what they're planning to do with it.
I think you're talking about something extremely important that's. Hyper important for Project Management Institute, but it's also useful for the whole field, which is that AI is very good at taking learning principles or techniques or you know, sort of all curriculum and then transferring it to a particular use case or a particular area of interest.
So when you talk about. Sustainable project management. Well, that makes total sense as a place to drill down, but project management as a field is used in every industry. It's used so widely that the idea that AI can help you tailor what you've learned about the Iron Triangle or what you've learned about project management to your exact use case, to your industry, even to your particular company or your particular project.
Feels like a real killer app of ai. And then of course the other one you mentioned is the translation and the language learning. And that's something we have begun to see really pop in the last year. There are beginning to be those exact types of programs that you're saying that build language practice partners or language acquisitions, curricula.
Personalized to individuals. So you're doing it directly with the core tool and people are trying to figure out how do we even enhance that further?
[00:17:46] Pierre LeManh: Absolutely.
[00:17:47] Alex Sarlin: So they're both huge trends and it's really exciting to hear you talk about them in that way. So let's talk about, I. The effect of AI on project management as an industry because project management is, it's a complex skillset.
It involves tracking many different factors, people, it involves communication, it involves scheduling a lot of things with data that AI might be really transformative for. I'd love to hear you talk about how AI is gonna change project management itself.
[00:18:15] Pierre LeManh: Yeah, I think it has, it's important to understand that it has two different effects.
One is the transformation, the AI transformation of project management, which is what you're referring to.
[00:18:24] Alex Sarlin: Yes.
[00:18:24] Pierre LeManh: But then there's also the project management of AI transformation, right? So all the opportunities and the career opportunities that are opening up for project professionals who are. Really equipped to manage an AI transformation.
[00:18:36] Alex Sarlin: Tell us about both, which to an
[00:18:38] Pierre LeManh: extent, you know, has the same characteristics as any project, but there are also specificities. Yeah. So if we talk about the first part of that opportunity or problem, or whatever it is, transformation, disruption, how does AI change project management? So we're constantly researching our profession and try to understand how they use ai.
So there are three levels, right? The first one is automation of basic processes, and then you have. The augmentation of what you're doing, right? And then you move to the area of like finding, creating use cases from scratch almost. And I will give you a few examples. On the automation side, about 40% of product professionals worldwide already use chat GPT or equivalent LMS almost every day, right?
There's no more meeting minutes, especially online meetings, right, that are not supported by AI managing your. Emails, like sending emails, reports, you know, all of that can be massively automated. Just before we started that podcast, I received a very heavy Excel spreadsheet with a ton of verbatims on something that we've done.
The first thing I did is to upload this in chat g pt, and say, look, gimme a sense of all those verbatims, categorize them. Gimme a breakdown by type and he does a pretty good job at that, right? And then even having a discussion, what do you advise that I'm focused on, right when I read that? 'cause I don't have the time to go through 4,000 lines of verbatim, right?
So where should I go? You know, which keywords should I use to try and take a look at what matters? And it helps you do that very quickly, right? So this is the whole automation process and how you. Become as an individual way more productive. And then you have those things like augmentation around. For instance, I wrote a project charter, but let me give you like, uh, all the emails I received about that project and tell me if I should improve that project charter, right?
So it's a way to get your job to elevate the output of your work to another level, and it works extremely well. Once you start understanding how to do it properly and prompt properly, you can really leverage that. And what we were describing before to an extent, like I want to incorporate more sustainability.
How do I do that? So it fuels your creativity, your helps you idea. Also anchors it in actual knowledge and past cases and arguments and all of that. And then you have this whole area of inventing new ways of working. So for instance, you are building a project team. How do you do that? Well, before ai, basically you call the people you know, maybe you a bit of research on LinkedIn, you know, you call other people who can.
Help you. But with AI you can automate all these processes a lot. Like you can actually get job desks written. Get AI to find profiles on LinkedIn for you, read their profiles, and then help you find the right arguments to convince them or help you prepare for your interview by listing the points you probably wanna check.
To make sure that they fit with the profiles that you're looking for. So there's a whole area now of new use cases, so doing things that we were not doing before at all, because it was not realistic, just like we talked about for education. I. The, the very, very personalized way of learning. You can also do things that we were not doing before.
Right? So that part I think is particularly exciting and is transforming project management. And this is where the people who are curious, the people who learn, the people who experiment. We'll have a massive competitive advantage in the workplace. But I would also say that what is important to us is to understand how this will increase project success, right?
So beyond you as an individual making you very valuable for any employer or client, how is it going to help you be more successful or make projects more successful? And you know, when you think about it, the way projects are successful is of course doing your project management. So being properly organized, reducing waste going faster, but it's also about making sure that the.
Addresses a real need. Making sure that your stakeholders, your clients, your investors, understand, perceive the value that the project is bringing. And Chad, GPT and all the LLMs and Gen ai, and even AI in general as a tool, are so powerful at helping you convince people, but also making sure that what you're doing actually address their needs, right?
[00:23:02] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:02] Pierre LeManh: So I am very optimistic about how AI is going to in itself. Once we master it properly in this profession, help us be better at delivering more successful projects.
[00:23:13] Alex Sarlin: I wanna hear about the other side of it, the project management for AI projects. But just a quick question beforehand, do you anticipate there being, you know, given what you're saying about 40% of project management professionals are already using LLMs on a daily basis, do you anticipate a certification coming from the project Management Institute about, you know, AI project management, or would that ever become part of the PMP is what to automate and how to do it?
I'm curious how you think about that.
[00:23:39] Pierre LeManh: So we chose to. Really clarify what we call a professional certification and what we call a course and a Certificate of completion. Professional certification is something that has to be stable enough because you want this to become a currency. PMP is a good example of that.
Of course, PMP in 2025 is very different than PMP in 1995, but it's something that people know about. It is big enough to become a currency, so all employers know it. All employees know it, and some governments force their own suppliers to have a number of PMP certified professionals. The same goes with more advanced certifications we have, or a little less advanced certifications.
AI is an area that is evolving very quickly. You know, the tools themselves evolve very quickly. Our understanding of the use cases is progressing by the day, so we feel it's a better area for learning a. Then having a certification of, I know how to use AI in doing project management, but continuous learning, definitely, yes.
And we are launching courses after courses, like we have already four courses plus you know, the platforms that I was mentioning before. Now that being said, and it links us to the second part of the question you asked me earlier, managing an AI transformation project that's a little different. And having a certification, professional certifications that testifies, there's a testament to your ability to manage an AI transformation project that is absolutely realistic.
And by the way, we do have one. So we made an acquisition last year. We acquired a company called Analytica, which is now PMI Analytica, and they had a professional certification, actually a number of them, more or less advanced to help. Professionals manage an AI transformation project. And so we have that, and of course we're improving it, scaling it, and potentially making it global with our global reach and footprint.
So that's what we're doing currently. So we see the certification more on that side. Then learning the techniques to automate or more use cases in project management, which is more learning for us.
[00:25:40] Alex Sarlin: That's fascinating. I'd love to double click on it if possible, just because I think this is something that so many of our listeners are in the midst of some level of AI transformation of their companies.
Whether it's for internal efficiency and productivity or cost savings, or whether it's for developing features or developing, you know, education products that are AI based. What aspects of creating an AI project are different than creating, you know. A project writ large, which could be anything from, you know, a space shuttle to a, a new email system.
[00:26:12] Pierre LeManh: We actually have a free course that tells you like in a few hours how that works. And you could find that on our website. In a nutshell, data is so important in an AI project that a lot will be around how to make sure your data sources, the data quality and the data governance are done. Right.
[00:26:32] Alex Sarlin: That makes sense because ai, it is so dependent on data and corporate, you know, internal data has to be kept very carefully managed and private, like you were mentioning in private
[00:26:42] Pierre LeManh: instances.
This is the number one obstacle to AI adoption in most big companies. That's the safety. Side of things, the lack of transparency a little bit, or perceived lack of transparency of how the models use the data, but also how the employees will interpret the data. Do the L LMS model make mistakes? How do you deal with this?
And you know, I'm always telling people, you guys think about you. Like cha PT as a human being almost. It is so human. You know, people think that it has no creativity, and creativity is for humans. That's absolutely untrue. Like it's very creative, it's lazy sometimes, you know, you gotta ask several times and again and again.
Otherwise it takes shortcuts. It's just a, an incredibly talented human, you know, if you think about it that way, then you know, it can make mistakes. You know, is gonna sometimes tell you what you wanna hear, right? So think of all the usual shortcomings of human beings. Apply this to Cha GPT or any other LLM, and you'd get a better sense of how to use it properly.
[00:27:46] Alex Sarlin: That's good advice. I like that. I think that's, it makes sense. It's like almost having, you know, an intern that is just the most eager to please, but also happens to know everything and can make sense of a spreadsheet with 4,000 lines in, in seconds and all of these things that are beyond any, you know, regular human capacity, but they still do it with some human-like components.
[00:28:06] Pierre LeManh: I have a good one for you, like if, I don't know if you've done that before, but if you use chat GPT, for instance, go to chat G, PT and and ask chat GPT to talk about your relationship and what chat GPT knows about you and how it adjusts to you, your style.
[00:28:23] Alex Sarlin: Oh, interesting.
[00:28:24] Pierre LeManh: Your way of communicating your tendencies to.
You know, sometimes take shortcuts yourself. It's very interesting.
[00:28:32] Alex Sarlin: That
[00:28:32] Pierre LeManh: is
[00:28:32] Alex Sarlin: interesting. And then when it tells you about yourself, you could say, well, this is not my best quality, so maybe you could treat me like somebody who doesn't do this and change our relationship.
[00:28:42] Pierre LeManh: I do other things, like I test it. I sometimes ask the GPT after like a long session where for instance, I don't know, I fine tune the communication, like some press release or whatever.
Like I'm working on something and I need some support and I'm throwing ideas and we. Like have a session with Chad GPT for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and then I asked Chad, GPT, so how would you feel if you were a human? And we work together and it's very interesting to see the answer. Wow,
[00:29:06] Alex Sarlin: that's a fascinating question.
[00:29:07] Pierre LeManh: And it gives you a good feedback on how you operate. Like for me, tells me it's very intense.
It's good. I mean, I think, again, I don't think our interactions would be limited to AI tools, the future, but whatever we can learn from that interaction, I think it's very good for our own self development. A hundred percent.
[00:29:27] Alex Sarlin: And, and I think that it's almost like managerial feedback, right? It's like if you were my employee, what kind of 360, you know, upward feedback would you give to me?
That, that's very powerful and a very safe space to do that. And of course, you know, without an actual human who's going to.
[00:29:41] Pierre LeManh: You'll see that you have to make it a safe space for JGPT to give you feedback. Otherwise it won't. It's gonna be very pc.
[00:29:49] Alex Sarlin: I find it so interesting talking to people who use the LLMs on a daily basis.
I have become one of them very much so myself, about the different things they're trying. 'cause as you mentioned, it's a very new space. You have to be creative. You have to sort of try new things. I noticed in reading a number of books about AI and education, they always start with the same thing, which is when this technology came out, I just spent hours and hours talking to it and trying to figure out what it could do and what it couldn't do.
And I stayed up all night and it's like, if you haven't done that. It's hard to even grasp how deep Absolutely. And how meta you can get and you don't think to ask questions like that. If you are a human, how would you react? How do you think of me? What is our relationship like? It takes a while to get that meta about it to zoom out, but once you do, incredible things start to happen.
I've started to take walks almost every day and talk to Claude a lot and do a sort of conversational chat with Claude, and by the time I sort of circle around and get back to my door, I have this whole. Complex plan in place, ready to email to myself ready to execute. But it's like a walk and talk meeting with a really talented colleague.
[00:30:52] Pierre LeManh: Yeah. And our courses, I think, reflect that. We have a, a course on prompt engineering. I. Where we give ideas, but also we explain how to structure your prompts. Maybe that's a science, by the way, that will disappear soon because the interface with AI would be so simple that you won't even need to learn that.
But it's like I learned to code when I was younger. It's not a bad thing, right? It's not very useful to me today. But it does help understand how a machine works. We have a course about data, right? Definitely. We have a course. About use cases where, by the way, we do encourage our profession to know more tools than just JGBT, so cloud is one, but also understand how you use copilot and all the AI embarked or embedded tools that exist in many product management softwares.
The other application we have for us, of course, is using AI for translation of our own products. It's been a problem forever that because. We have technical content. The pace of our translation has always been extremely slow, and now I'm still fighting a little bit the battle of good enough, not good enough, and also, even if it's not good enough, I.
The work that is required to correct a translation made by an AI tool today is going to be minimal. Right. Compared to what it was when we had to translate everything from the get go and, and the benefit you have in going so much faster to market with multiple Yeah. Languages is massive and you, we can't miss that.
And then yes, we were experimenting like many others how to. Use AI to, even in our courses, so I'm not talking about the AI platform that we use, the PMI Infinity, but in our courses themselves, how do you test the knowledge and, and readjust the content and you know, the things that I guess Duolingo is doing to personalize your personal journey.
Based on ai. Right. So we, we are of course experimenting that and I think within a year or two we'd have some AI components behind the scene in every of our courses.
[00:32:48] Alex Sarlin: I was gonna ask you about that earlier actually, because I know that PMI, as you mentioned, has this global network of providers and partners and many of whom do that sort of localization in translation.
Right. If you have a, you know, a PMI. Approved institute in the Philippines or in Chile. Part of what they're doing is translating and localizing it to their local populations, and it feels like the ability to translate the test itself, but also you know all your materials internally, can create a much smoother and more standardized way for it to Google.
[00:33:20] Pierre LeManh: Our courses are definitely, our exams are managed centrally, right? So we do not delegate this to anyone for multiple reasons. You know, we need to constantly develop new test items and make sure, you know, 'cause we have to fight fraud and all that, which is another challenge of AI of course. So we don't do that.
But locally they do marketing material content, they develop their own content. And the vision we have is that we wanna also use AI to help people communicate. In some markets, people don't speak English very well, like less than we think. And in project management you have a lot of engineers and people who come from the technical side.
They may not speak English very well, very comfortably. And we have a global community, but we want to maximize the opportunities to interact, to mentor each other regardless of the language barrier, right? And, and so with ai, frankly. It's today already. We have devices that exist, right, that we can use. I'm learning Spanish.
I don't know if it's really useful. I like it from a cultural standpoint, but in practice, I don't know, in 10 years if that would be that useful anyway. 'cause people will have devices everywhere to understand each other. And definitely when you have a a online meeting, you have plenty of ways now to. Use different languages and not have people speak English.
But for us, PMI, it's really critical that everything we do, the whole PMI experience, including learning connections, giving back, volunteering, has to be smooth and powered by ai. You know, as much as possible.
[00:34:48] Alex Sarlin: It's really interesting. You can imagine an international study group for the PMP where you have people speaking different languages in different countries, but when they get on a telecommunications platform, everything is translated into the language they need to go in real time and suddenly you, you break down language barriers that way or through be through a text form or anything like that.
There's so many opportunities.
[00:35:07] Pierre LeManh: We do this like in our conferences already. I was in China earlier, I go at least once or twice a year because it's a big, very big market for us. And now when I go on stage. I am translated real time and conversely, by the way, I can attend, I don't need to wear a translation device anymore.
The translation comes on the screen. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? Yes.
[00:35:27] Alex Sarlin: And it'll get better
[00:35:28] Pierre LeManh: Exactly. Within a couple of years. You know,
[00:35:30] Alex Sarlin: Ethan Molo always likes to say, remember, you're always using the worst AI you're ever gonna use. It's just continually gonna get better. Absolutely. It's an, that's a very good comment.
Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask about two things that I think are so core to what PMI does, and I'd love to hear your take on them. One is you mentioned the PMP test as a currency. I think that's a really fantastic way to put it. It's an established, valuable being. PMP certified has real monetary value and it's.
Absolutely essential for getting lots of jobs. One thing that we've been thinking about in Ed Tech about assessment is that as AI gets more and more advanced, you can have more and more authentic assessment, right? Rather than multiple choice tests that says, how would you react to this type of email? Or how would you manage this software?
You can just manage the software, react to the email, or have a conversation with a colleague. I'm curious if you see the future of the PMP or any of your assessments moving in that direction where you'd actually go in and do a project and at the end of the project it would say, okay, now we'll give you your score.
[00:36:31] Pierre LeManh: Yeah. I, I completely see that. I think it's gonna be a slower move because of all the science that goes behind the, um, assessment. We have a. Nancy certification. We, as you know, this is, so all the psychometricians are very careful and we will need to prove right if we assess that way. It is in fact, at least as reliable as what we've been doing so far.
And of course opens up to a much more interesting way of assessing people's skills, right? As you said that a multiple choice questionnaire or you know, the things that we're doing, which are close to that. So yes, I see that future, definitely. Yes. I think we will have an appeal battle with. More conservative specialists and I wanna respect that too, right?
Because it's very important that we, as we're ly guarantee fairness and, and credibility in our system. But I think you are absolutely right, you know, and we already have, you know, for instance, eligibility you to be eligible to our certifications. You have to meet certain requirements. So projects that you run, you know, things like that.
Depending on the level of the certification, it could be very stringent or a little less stringent. But definitely AI can already help check if the requirements are met. So it's just, it can't be the only thing, but it helps. Now, the flip side of that is fraud, right? So you have people who create entire fake personas, and we already seeing that on LinkedIn, for instance, people have like fake profiles completely generated by AI just to trick.
Algorithms, right? And has all the, the tests. So I think we have plenty of changes and opportunities at the same time, and we're still discovering how to make that work.
[00:38:13] Alex Sarlin: It's fascinating and that arms race, I like to call it sort of that arms race mentality between learners and assessors, which can mean individual teachers in a classroom or global organizations like the PMI is a really interesting aspect of this AI moment where, like you're saying, a clever individual could do all sorts of very sneaky things like create a full, I've never heard of that, but that's amazing.
A completely fake LinkedIn profile with all these projects and jobs that they've done and then use that to, to pass the eligibility requirements. Blows my mind a little bit, but yes, that is possible right now and it's only gonna get more empowered. But so are the assessors and so are the fraud
[00:38:51] Pierre LeManh: integrity.
Yeah, I think the world of professional education would be more, probably less cautious in a way and more adventurous because it's easier for us to do as well. We are. Regulated by, we're not really regulated. So we, but we have accreditation of course, by, you know, we have iso, we have ansi like I mentioned before, but we can be a little more bold and also make sure, talk directly to the clients, right?
So talk directly to the corporations, the governments and the profession to advance all of that. And I think we adopt it faster than, um, let's say higher ed for instance. But there's still a lot of work and, and thinking that has to go. Before we are able to do it that way. So basically you have an interview with an AI tool and that interview will say if you passed or not, but I can absolutely see a future like that, or at least part of the test being done that way.
[00:39:42] Alex Sarlin: I wonder if there are aspects of assessment that we're not. Really possible. You mentioned, you know, an interview is an example. We're seeing more and more hiring platforms that do basically video interviews and then use AI to assess the answers or to assess the, the sentiment or the likability, for lack of better word, or various aspects of people's video answers.
And that was something that was never possible in the past. I'm curious if you anticipate that. PMI and and organizations that certify individuals are going to start incorporating that type of technology to expand what they're assessing. And so beyond the hard skills or knowing the principles or knowing the actual techniques, will it involve how you communicate or how you come across to others?
[00:40:25] Pierre LeManh: I think if we use AI as an assisting tool, I'm absolutely good with it. I do think that. So either we're talking about a test, a pure test, and for that, frankly, if we can demonstrate that scientifically the assessment is reliable, then I'm good. If we're talking about checking the experience of people and.
Having a conversation about the projects that they've run as we have in certain certifications. I think doing this AI only is probably not the experience we wanna provide to our community. Mm-hmm. But, but I don't have a final, honestly, in 10 years from now, maybe I would listen to myself and feel like, how could I say that?
It doesn't make any sense. I feel, you know, being helped by ai, but still having some people making the decision. The way I see the evolution of knowledge work is that a lot of things will go away, including creativity. You know, that empathy. We said before, Claude, Chad, BT are very empathetic tools. If you ask them to be, you can say they're faking it, but human beings also fake it sometimes, but the things that won't go away are accountability.
So you still need to be accountable in the end. So someone has to be accountable. Can many of the tasks of A CEO being automated and definitely yes, by ai, augmented by ai, all of them can, to be honest. Will I escape my responsibility in the end? I don't know. You know, that is something that I think will stay and a few other things like, you know, that will stay.
But accountability is one of them. So I think we need to have this in mind. And make sure that whatever system we put in place there is accountability as well. The second thing I wanna say about all these processes of AI selecting the cvs and filtering and all of that. We've made the process of applying to a job and filtering candidates extremely scalable thanks to technology and AI in particular.
Now, the downside of that is I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday with people are applying to 1000 jobs and don't get any answer. This is very demoralizing as well, right? So. Scaling is sometimes good, but maybe not always great. And we have to think about the consequences on people of if something is so scalable that for any job offering, you got like 3000 candidates as we do at PMI.
Now we're getting to that point. What is the experience we're providing? You know, and it's terrible, right? 'cause every, most people will keep trying, trying and not understanding. And then because the the process is not very transparent, it will assume that it's because the algorithms is rejecting them for reasons that are unfair.
And then it will start trying to find ways, you know, to go right around that. Like we said before, that's not a good outcome for society. So it doesn't really answer your question, but I think we have to think about the consequences, all of that as well.
[00:43:08] Alex Sarlin: I think you're onto something very interesting, which is sort of the human psychological impacts of some of these AI tools.
I love the way you're highlighting the difference between a, you know, psychometrically validated and reliable assessment. Versus tools that may be useful and supportive and augment people's practices, but may not be used for a hardcore decision. And I think hiring is, as we all know, a hardcore decision, right?
Hiring is exactly one of those, uh, selection processes where people are one of many applying to a particular role. So
[00:43:40] Pierre LeManh: in no time, Alex, if the interview decision is made. A machine, people will come up with tools and the candidate will be a machine. It's guaranteed, right? So you'll have a way to apply to 1 million job offers with a fake yourself that it would be very difficult to detect.
You know, even by human beings, right? So if this is where we're going, I don't know what is the positive outcome, right? I, I, I don't think this is the right way of building teams in the future, right? So we gotta be careful about that as well.
[00:44:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It reminds me of how when universities were using standardized tests as a big part of admission criteria, I.
Everybody optimized for the highest test score and then they got all of these candidates with the optimal test score. You look at the people who apply to Harvard, they still have like a single digit acceptance rate, but almost everybody applies, has like these stellar test scores. So yeah,
[00:44:30] Pierre LeManh: we have the same problem at PMI.
You know, like we, of course people offer courses to maximize your changes to pass the test. And I passed some of those tests myself. Right? And I understand that when you're like two days before the exam, what you want is a practice test and you want to make sure you score. For us, it's very important to have an ecosystem here where the learning journey is also respected.
So using tools like PMI, infinity, sometimes talking to others. So we have those things called study hold, where we create cohorts, right? So people are preparing together and speak that process. May not be in itself the most efficient if you try to maximize or minimize your effort to get the score you are looking for, but they're so important to what we're actually trying to accomplish in the end, which we should never lose sight of, which is for us, increasing project success.
[00:45:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:45:18] Pierre LeManh: So if we're building a whole generation of people who are great at passing a test because they have the right AI tool that gets away with the AI selection process. We've accomplished nothing, so that's not what we want.
[00:45:30] Alex Sarlin: I think there's a great parallel in that with project management as a field, which is that project managers have different ways of working.
Some are sitting with their project management tool set and it's them and Asana or them and Jira, you know, all day long, but. At the same time, project managers are often the lubricant, they're the people who help everybody work together. They're the ones who have to communicate. They're the ones who have to make everybody feel comfortable and belonging.
And that same sort of split between working just with a AI or just with a machine and working with a group, maybe facilitated with technology or ai. Feels like a important distinction that we're gonna see going forward in education and work AI to facilitate communication. Like your study hall is very different than ai, that it's just me and my AI trying to beat this test together and there's no other people involved.
We could talk about this all day. There's so many interesting things that you're doing at PMI and I mean it when I say I think PMI has been decades ahead of the curve in terms of. Understanding the role of certification in the workplace ecosystem, but when you look forward, you obviously spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
What is a trend that you see in the corporate training or education space that you think maybe people haven't even quite seen coming yet? What's something that you see from your particular perch as a CEO of Project Management Institute? What should people keep an eye out for?
[00:46:47] Pierre LeManh: So again, we talked about ai, right?
So I think people are seeing it coming, how this is actually going to revolutionize education is still something we, we have to invent, right? The other thing is, and it's a little bit linked to an extent, but especially for us, this notion of the knowledge that sits right now in the head of every professional and we have 40 median product professionals.
That knowledge, how do we make it available to everyone, right? How do we create, if the vision is, we become a network and each of us is just like one neuron or synapse. How do we make this collective intelligence communicate? Right? And of course you, there are problems with this because sometimes people have the wrong knowledge.
But let's assume we can find a way to just like Wikipedia, right? It's a great example of not any single individual has all the knowledge, but once you put everyone together in the end it gives a very high quality product and very granular. So think about how the future a education can be us all communicating together.
The chances we have to communicate and benefit from the knowledge that others have, so we can all keep learning, keep experimenting, and then transmitting. For the collective knowledge that we accumulate.
[00:48:01] Alex Sarlin: When I hear you say that, what I envision is a classroom of the future where what you're doing in the class is collaborating with a global community, that with an AI at the center, which is helping facilitate the collective intelligence, but you're tapping into everybody's different perspective there.
Different life experiences. There are different perspectives to solve a real world problem together, and then the AI can sort of help synthesize it, help make sense of it. I mean, wouldn't that be just a totally different way? To see the education system or frankly the corporate training system. You know, if you're working on collaborative projects, that would help the whole field.
I love that idea of unlocking collective intelligence. It just feels really inspiring to me. I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much. This has been a conversation. This is Pierre Laman. He is the president and chief executive officer of the Project Management Institute. Thank you for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
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