Hard truth: if your program is vague, political, and data is scattered, AI won’t save you. It’ll just produce polished nonsense faster.

But if you give it clean inputs and clear boundaries, AI is like a tireless junior PMO—fast, decent, and needs supervision.

Where it actually helps:
– Status rollups: Turn Jira/Linear exports into a clean, exec-friendly update in minutes.
– Risks and dependencies: Spot the hidden “this breaks that” problem before the demo breaks.
– Comms hygiene: Draft 3 versions of the same update—for engineering, design, and execs—without losing the plot.
– Scenario planning: If scope slips by two sprints, who screams first? AI can simulate the scream.

Where it won’t help:
– Ambiguity. If you don’t know what “done” is, neither does it.
– Politics. It won’t persuade the VP to cut scope.
– Accountability. It can suggest; you still have to decide.

How I use it (simple, boring, effective):
1. Keep a single Program Brief (one page): goals, scope, milestones, owners, definitions of done. Update it weekly.
2. Export issues (CSV) by epic each Friday. Paste into AI with the Brief. Ask for a one-page status with green/yellow/red by outcome, not ticket count.
3. Feed last week’s risks (RAID). Ask it to refresh risk descriptions and suggest owners/mitigations. I accept or reject. No auto-pilot.
4. Ask for a stakeholder pack: two paragraphs for execs, bullet list for team leads, and a draft Slack note. Edit for tone, send.
5. Generate a quick dependency map. Prompt: “Create a Mermaid diagram showing Epic A depends on B and C, highlight critical path.” Takes 30 seconds.

Tools that don’t fight you:
– Jira/Linear + a decent LLM (ChatGPT/Claude) for summaries.
– Read.ai or Fathom for meeting notes that aren’t useless.
– Notion AI for RAID hygiene.
– Zapier/Make to stitch weekly exports into a doc without you babysitting it.

A tiny habit that compounds: keep a consistent status schema. Literally paste this every week:
– Objectives (unchanged/changed)
– What moved (by epic)
– Blockers (owner + date)
– Risks (probability x impact)
– Next 2 weeks
Then tell AI: “Fill this from the CSV and Brief. Flag anything that smells off.” You’ll catch rot early.

AI isn’t your program manager. It’s the intern that never gets tired and never learns office politics. Use it for the heavy lifting. Keep the judgment for yourself.