Business and operations
Project Management
The problem
The earned-value formula is right, but the causal story AI builds on it invents suppliers, events and contribution percentages. The monthly report then explains the variance with causes that never happened.
30 courses · 5 specific to this profession
A process from your work
How long does it take you to write up the minutes of a meeting?
- Step 1The tool transcribes the meeting and drafts the summary and the actions.
- Step 2You separate proposals from decisions and compare every deadline with what was said.
- Step 3The minutes go to the participants only after you have read them.
- Where the tool goes wrongThe minutes record as a “Decision” a delay the contractor only asked for.
- The verification stepFor every “Decision” line, find in the recording when it was stated; otherwise write “Open issue”.
More: what was measured and the full check
What changed, as measured
Staff reported saving 0.7 hours per task on average when transcribing or summarising meetings with the tool; the evaluation found no evidence that the time saved raised productivity.
Who was measured: Staff of a UK government department in a pilot of an office AI assistant, noting in a diary the time saved per task.
The caveat: Estimates by the staff themselves, not measured times, and no comparison group.
The check, step by step
- For every "Decision" line in the draft, find in the recording or the transcript the moment the decision was stated. If there is only a question or a proposal there, rewrite it as an "Open issue".
- For every action, check that the person named accepted it in the meeting and that the deadline was said. Leave a deadline nobody said as "not set" and ask the person.
- Record changes to schedule, budget or scope as decided only together with the body or person who has the authority to approve them and the reference of that approval. Without these, keep them in the change log as a pending request.
- Send the draft to the participants with a deadline for corrections, and update the works schedule only once the minutes have been approved.
The course covers drafting, editing and checking text with AI, with no invented facts and no personal data in public tools.
We can help you with this process: “Project management AI: Documents and communication”, 8 hours.
A documented failure pattern
A request for a delay, minuted as a “Decision”
Meeting minutes that an AI tool drafts from the recording of the weekly project meeting, for the project manager, who sends them to the participants and uses them to update the works schedule.
Source: Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting, 2024, and 3 more.
Why it is easy to miss
A two-week delay enters the works schedule and the status report without anyone with authority approving it. In the meeting, the contractor asked and the manager deferred the matter to the funder; the minutes record it as a "Decision" and reduce the funder's approval to "informs". The deadline "by Friday" was never said: the tool inferred it from context, a plausible conclusion with no direct basis in the conversation. Those who attended approve the minutes without checking them against the recording, because every element of the line really came up: phase two, the two weeks, the funder.
Where the failure pattern is documented: Academic studies of AI summaries of conversations and meetings (ACL, August 2024; University of Göttingen, October 2024); a joint statement by the AICD and the Governance Institute of Australia on minutes and AI (May 2025); Microsoft documentation of Teams meeting recaps (September 2026).Sources: Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting, 2024; University of Göttingen, 2024; Australian Institute of Company Directors and Governance Institute of Australia, 2025; Microsoft Support, 2026.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.
What it looks like
From the meeting transcriptContractor: "Can we move the delivery of phase two back by two weeks?" Project manager: "The funder has to approve that. We cannot decide it today."
The AI tool's draft minutesDecision: the delivery of phase two is moved back by two weeks. Action: the project manager informs the funder by Friday.
Translated from the Albanian original.
Specialist courses for this profession
Project management AI: Orientation
Project management AI: Workflow
Project management AI: Documents and communication
Project management AI: Data and analytics
Project management AI: Quality and evaluation
What you leave with
The monthly variance report, with each cause tied to the delivery logs, the procurement trail, the calendars or the supplier list, or marked as unsourced, and with a list of what was cut. It goes to the project office and the director in this form.
Project Management
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