What to Expect in 2025: A Guide for Project Professionals
Transcript
What can project professionals around the globe expect to face in 2025? We talk with project leaders to help you prepare.
Sanjukta Ghosh, PMP, data and AI leader at Siemens in Erlangen, Germany, and Alexandra Schutz, PMI-ACP, PMP, director of the program management office at Appfire in Washington, D.C., discuss what’s next for artificial intelligence in the project sphere, the increasing role sustainability and project management offices (PMOs) will play in value delivery and the must-have skills for 2025. They also share what they’re excited for in the new year.
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
I love the way that project management is expanding. It provides so many opportunities because you’re taking simple concepts, but when you layer them on, and you add a million details and issues and risks and people, different circumstances and perspectives and cultures and languages, all of those things come together and then you have a project.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
With a new year comes a new chance for project professionals to look ahead. What will spur the continued need to adapt and evolve in 2025? That’s ahead.
In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.
Thanks for joining us for another season of Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.
For project professionals, each new year brings a fresh set of challenges and opportunities—from industry trends to emerging technologies to socioeconomic shifts. And 2025 is no different. In fact, the pace and nature of disruption is as dramatic as ever. Of course, there’s the rapid advance of artificial intelligence into the project sphere, as well as the evolving role of project management offices, or PMOs. The PMI Global Megatrends 2024 report explores six megatrends, from building a resilient workforce to urgently developing sustainable practices in the face of the climate crisis. Click on the transcript for this episode to check out the full report.
With all these trends in mind, we’re sitting down with two project leaders who share their thoughts on what to expect in 2025—and how project professionals can position themselves and their teams for success.
Before we start that discussion, if you enjoy Projectified
Okay, let’s get to the conversation. We’re joined by Sanjukta Ghosh, data and AI leader at Siemens in Erlangen, Germany, as well as Alexandra Schutz, director of the program management office at collaboration software-maker Appfire in Washington, D.C.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Okay, let’s predict the future. In 2025, what do you expect the landscape to look like for project professionals? What will be the biggest issues, the biggest challenges, the biggest opportunities? Who would like to prognosticate first?
SANJUKTA GHOSH
Let me take you back a bit into time. So, this is like 15 years ago. I was with a customer in a factory which makes valves or, let’s say, two abstracted industrial parts. And they come in different sizes—things which you could hold in your hand, and then right up to big stuff, which you need to really hoist using cranes. And they needed us to develop this visual inspection system and read off some numbers from them. And it was so challenging because you had to get the cameras. You had these different sizes. You need to send these images to some remote computer and so on, right? Now, if I look at 2025 and the options that I have available to solve this problem, it’s amazing, the kind of opportunities that I have here, especially with AI. Of course, with the increase and the improved sensor technology, communications, and the big possibilities of using multimodal models in AI.
One of the most exciting things for 2025 is really the use of data and AI-enabled technologies to drive really critical projects, which could make a lasting impact. And the interesting thing is that this technology is evolving at a very rapid pace, and that’s where it’s probably the issue and the challenge as well. Because you could be a child in a candy store looking at so many cool stuff, which is developing every day. And you might just pick up one and try to work with it, and you spend a lot of your time and resources on it but soon realize that it’s not getting you the results. And I think this is where project professionals could really play an important role of balancing these conflicting needs and demands. And moreover, we’re also living in a very complex environment. It’s very volatile, uncertain. You have a lot of these health and environmental considerations, and also geopolitical situations. This makes it all the more challenging for project professionals.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Awesome. Thank you. Alexandra?
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
I definitely agree with Sanjukta. AI is huge. I’m absolutely confident that AI, automation, all of those things are going to continue to dominate the conversation in 2025. And I think that that’s going to give us both challenges but also opportunities that she talked about. So these technologies are already reshaping how we currently manage our projects. We’ve seen that routine tasks are automated. We’ve got all these massive amounts of data that we can now analyze in seconds, giving us these data-driven insights. And I think this is really only the beginning. There’s probably so much more potential ahead that we haven’t even considered.
One of the biggest challenges, though—and I think is a critical necessity—is going to be adoption. We already know that there’s going to be ethical concerns or data privacy, and those are going to play a really big role in AI. And I think it’s going to be very important that companies are addressing these before employees, stakeholders and their customers can actually feel confident that we’re using AI responsibly. In recent conversations I’ve had with industry professionals, I was actually surprised by how many organizations are still in the early stages of their AI journey. Some are just dipping their toes in—they’re exploring possibilities, but they aren’t actually even implementing AI in a sustainable way. So, while I thought that 2025 would be really about companies refining their strategic integration of AI, I actually think that for some of them, it’s going to just be focusing on how do they adopt it in general? If employees don’t buy in or actively participate, or even learn how to leverage the technologies, it’s going to be impossible for these companies to integrate AI effectively and then continue to deliver strategic outcomes. Obviously, this is going to require a shift in terms of education and engagement, but I think it’s also going to require a commitment to tackling ethical considerations and ensuring that we’re really compliant with data privacy standards.
How AI will dominate projects in 2025
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What can project leaders do this year to make sure that the AI ramp-up happens smoothly and doesn’t derail years’ worth of projects, as companies figure out how to do things right?
SANJUKTA GHOSH
That’s very interesting. Because, as Alexandra also mentioned, the hype is there. There is probably people starting out. There are others who have really been advanced—they’ve invested a lot, but they’re not even seeing the return on investments. And especially so with generative AI, right? So AI has transitioned to now the more, let’s say, fundamental capability, which means you have more and more complex projects, which are very demanding because you have this whole fast-paced environment. The fundamentals of project management do not change, and one really needs to do this in a disciplined manner.
Of course, what we are now seeing is that we need to deliver business value as well. It’s now not enough to say, “I use this cool technology, but I’m not able to deliver some business results or some business value or create some impact.” And there [are] also the legal and the governance aspects of it. So, there’s a really complicated evolving regulatory scenario. You have statutory regulations in countries, non-statutory regulations, domain-specific, industry-specific and so on. You really need to keep all of that in mind, and this really comes down to the project professionals. I still believe doing the fundamentals right—planning, really training the people, having proper plans—so that the skills of the people are developing in the right direction, along with having the legal aspects also addressed, are really important in order to ensure that these AI programs are successful.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Project managers are increasingly working on AI projects, whether they’re deploying AI or developing AI tools. What does that mean for 2025?
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
I think that as more organizations adopt AI initiatives, project managers, they just have to kind of upskill. They’re going to need to lead really highly technical and complex projects, and education absolutely is going to be a part of this. How do we get people to be able to do this? I think part of that actually requires a different mindset. [Project managers] are going to have to expand themselves and broaden their expertise, be proactive in learning and being curious and wanting to keep up with what’s happening within the world. [Project managers] I think are going to need to become more technically savvy. You oftentimes, and companies, have maybe your regular or your business project manager, and then you have your technical project manager. Those business project managers are going to need to understand technical concepts more so that they can speak to them, they understand what their teams are saying. I’m not saying that someone needs to become a subject matter expert in all of the areas, but they’re going to need to be able to help navigate the discussions on the topics and even challenge their teams. And so, in order to do that, you have to broaden your own expertise. We’re going to see some of those ethical considerations and what the implications are. How are they going to handle those? They’re going to need to upskill themselves in order to stay effective and relevant as project managers.
SANJUKTA GHOSH
I agree with you, Alexandra, completely. So, project managers really need to understand the whole AI ecosystem. There is so much complexity to it. You have, along with the technology, also [an] increasing number of parties who play different roles somehow in this whole game, right? You have people at the model layers. You have all the infrastructure layers, and then you have the more application layers, and there’s so much to it along with the tooling in it.
And now another interesting aspect in this full thing is that, while life, of course, becomes a lot more challenging and interesting for the project professionals, there’s also the AI-enabled tools at their disposal. Let’s not forget that you have a lot of interesting tools available now, which really help project professionals, I believe, go beyond the place where you are trying to really come up with schedules and to move beyond that somehow. To really look at trends, look at insights, look at your past projects or past similar projects across the organization and even beyond. Learn the lessons much faster. So, I think as project professionals, we are also equipped somehow to do things much more efficiently and productively.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So, we’ve covered AI’s expected domination in 2025. What about areas like sustainability, agile and the role of PMOs?
SANJUKTA GHOSH
We’re looking at agile teams now, and I think it would really evolve to more agile organizations and even ecosystems, if you will. If you look at our company, Siemens, we have Siemens Xcelerator, which is the digital transformation that we are driving for our customers and even internally for ourselves. And it comprises of not just us but our ecosystem partners, and it really needs all of us to be agile if you want to drive digital transformation at the base and the scale.
And sustainability [is] very important. And I’d really like to make this link between AI and sustainability. I think in 2025, these are also not independent pillars, but also very interconnected and integrated, I would say. You can use AI to really achieve and drive sustainability. For example, integrating renewable and distributed energy sources into the grid with dynamic, predictive monitoring or supply and demand, let’s say. Or analyzing real-time energy consumption data, weather and market conditions to optimize energy distribution. Or to improve climate monitoring and air quality forecasting for certain regions, especially urban environments. These are different ways where you could really see how AI could play into the sustainability goals of companies as well. I think these are now going to be way more integrated data and also value driven. So PMOs, for example, they would move from more governance to, rather, really strategic enablers. Overall, we need to see how we are driving value—business value, not just doing independent tasks, [but] moving more at scale into production.
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
Sanjukta, I agree with some of where that’s going for sure. You talked a little bit about PMOs. I absolutely see that PMOs are going to continue their evolution. In 2025 the conversation’s just going to continue to focus on, what can PMOs do to drive business transformation? How can they improve cross-functional collaboration? How can they enhance decision making? How can they do more of these strategic-level items that the companies need them to do? I think that the emphasis currently on PMOs is, again, more sort of toward execution. And really, they’re going to continue to move toward being much more adaptable, technology savvy and focus on long-term value for the organization. I’ve seen a lot at conferences and speaking with people within different companies and just kind of asking what they do with their PMOs. And I’m seeing people say that they have EPMOs, enterprise PMOs, that they have VMOs, value management organizations. They have TMOs, transformation management [offices]. Oftentimes, they start from this role of a project management or a program management office, but the asks from the business are becoming larger.
As Sanjukta noted earlier, we’re in this dynamic world, super-fast paced world, and we need to be able to be flexible and change and pivot and adapt. And it’s necessary now for someone, which I think is a great opportunity for project professionals and PMOs in general, to fill a gap where they need to drive organizational agility, innovation. How do we do that? Well, you bring the PMO in, but now it might be called a VMO, a TMO, a CMO. There’s all sorts of different functions that I think are organically being created to fill gaps that are becoming larger and larger for businesses.
Especially with some of these trends or topics, they’re just no longer buzzwords. They’re now expectations of companies. Projects that are incorporating these sustainable practices, they’re absolutely a must in their planning and execution. They know that they’re going to be impacting specific communities. So, companies are having to increase what they’re delivering because the expectation from everyone outside is that this is no longer something that is a bonus or a plus. It’s now just our average way of working. This is the way the world works, and so I expect that this is going to be something that I’m going to receive as part of what’s being produced. So, I think, especially for PMOs, this means that it’s really necessary to even embed sustainability metrics into the way that we’re defining success. Aligning them with broader organizational goals, making sure that your organization is actually focusing on these things, those types of things are all going to matter very much.
Adaptability, strategic thinking, AI acumen: Skills you need for 2025
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So, for the project leader who is listening to this, thinking of the new skill they need to hone, certification, read up on technical expertise, power skills, any of the above—in light of what we’ve talked about, how do you recommend project professionals consider leveling up to be more successful amidst the changes we’re describing?
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
Adaptability, because we’ve talked so much about everything’s fast paced, everything’s dynamic, things are becoming more complex. So, adapting to that and being able to pivot and change very, very quickly is going to be absolutely critical. Embracing new challenges and still being able to, within the unknown, take action and make decisions.
I also think that critical thinking is going to be really crucial. And why I say this is because, as we start using all of these AI tools, they’re doing so many more things for us. And I was even noticing that I was summarizing something in ChatGPT about a month ago, and ChatGPT just dropped out, and I could not get it back up offline. I ended up doing whatever the task was that I needed to do. It took me about an hour, and it probably would’ve taken me 10 minutes or less with ChatGPT. So, I was relying on it to save me this time, and then I had to do it the slow, normal way. So, I think it’s really important that we’re leveraging AI but not relying on it. And that means that we have to have these soft skills and continue to hone them, because they’re just as important as the new technology that we’re finding. It’s just still so critical to be able to actively think through problems, to be able to challenge their teams and assumptions, to be able to proactively identify risks and issues and think about mitigation strategies. I think digesting complex information and being able to distill that information and then delivering that and communicating that in a clear manner in which teams and stakeholders can understand, that is absolutely a piece of critical thinking, but it’s imperative for project professionals as we move forward.
SANJUKTA GHOSH
Absolutely. Adaptability and resilience [are] such important skills for project professionals. [And] more strategic thinking. You had this traditional thing of projects and programs and portfolios and so on, right? But you kind of see the lines blurring now, if you will. And it immediately opens up project professionals to more strategic initiatives. So, in addition to all of what Alexandra said, which I completely agree to, I believe that’s something which project professionals need to keep in mind.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What about any technical or sector-specific skills?
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
For me, in a technical company, security is huge. Cybersecurity is massive—securing systems, securing data, ensuring that everything is [as] secure as possible, that we’re following regulations, compliance. It’s absolutely huge. I want very much, actually, to start looking at cybersecurity and just understanding the security domain in general, because we’re seeing that we’re getting a lot more initiatives like that, and we need to be able to manage them. So, you need to have an understanding of what those concepts are. As project managers, we don’t need to know all of the details, because we have a team for that. But at the same time, we still have to understand the concepts, otherwise we don’t know what we’re trying to help be implemented or executed or replaced. So, I think security for me is going to be a big one.
SANJUKTA GHOSH
For me, if AI has to be successful, what a lot of organizations often miss out on is the data bit. If you don’t have good data and a good data strategy and a good operationalization of the data strategy, you would never succeed with AI. You have data from different regions spread all across the world, and you have things like data residency, which means that the data cannot move out of countries, for example, and you have to design systems in such scenarios. How do you deal with that? Also making them secure. So, I think these are technical skills which are needed, in addition to, of course, all of the things like AI tools. What are the frameworks? What is the next framework for, let’s say, designing AI agentic systems and workflows? That’s something that we need to look into and understand. But there are the peripheral stuff and the fundamental stuff around the data and the security, cybersecurity, which are equally important.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
OK, now let’s look back at 2024. Was there anything that especially surprised you? [It] could be something that happened in your industry or that affected your projects, or a trend you expected to blow up but didn’t—anything like that.
SANJUKTA GHOSH
Yeah. So, I remember around January of 2024 I was working as an AI expert along with some strategy colleagues. And we were thinking about, “What’s coming up next in AI? How should we go about it as a company?” And so on. And back then, open-source models was not such a big thing. To me it was really surprising, the pace at which the open-source AI models came into being, and the rise of the open-source models and the smaller ones as well, and the pace at which it evolved. And the performance gap with the large, closed ones, it’s narrowing—it’s fast narrowing. So, the implication on project professionals, then, is that you have a lot more of these models somehow used in AI projects, which means that you need to really be able to understand how to harness the power of these models. So, to me, that was really surprising.
As a project professional, you also cannot keep changing your stance and your strategy. And again, as I said, you’re looking at more strategic initiatives, which means you would, perhaps as a project professional, also be a part of investment discussions. So where does the company invest for the future growth and so on? It’s really important to be able to take these objective decisions, which means then you need to really understand the technology—not be an expert but understand it to the extent that you could apply it in the right manner and take appropriate decisions.
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
I don’t think I have too much to add to what Sanjukta just said. I think it’s important for businesses to take a look at what they think is actually going to become reality, and, as Sanjukta said, be objective. What are the right decisions for their business? Not, “What are we not doing that’s a trend that we should jump into?” I think that’s probably a really quick way for your business to go down in flames. So, thinking really critically about your customers—what do they want? Not just what are they hearing within the AI space and what seems really cool at the moment, but what are their actual needs? What are the gaps that you’re filling? If we focus on those, AI and the opportunities around AI will help fill those gaps, and we can utilize them. But we’re not just jumping after every new cool toy in the candy store.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
To close out this conversation, I’d like to know: What has each of you most fired up about being a project leader in 2025?
SANJUKTA GHOSH
For me, it’s doing more innovative applications with data and AI in the industrial context. And the industrial context can be quite different from the consumer context, right? Because we have to be trustworthy. We have to be consistent when we are using AI—it needs to give similar responses. There’s a lot of noisy environments and so on. So, there’s different sets of challenges in leveraging AI in the industrial context. And there’s lots being done on the infrastructure side, on the model side, but how do you really use that in applications to solve some real customer problems? And also, to bring in these interdisciplinary teams to address these problems and evolving as a leader in the process.
ALEXANDRA SCHUTZ
That’s awesome. Interestingly enough, I’m not really sure what I’m excited for in 2025. I think I’m excited for the unknown because, though terrifying, it will be so interesting to see what’s going to blow everybody out of the water. I know there’s going to be some sort of a gamechanger that’s going to come up that nobody expected, and as project professionals, we’re going to have to pivot. But what is that going to be? I can’t even imagine what it’s going be. I’m still waiting for flying cars. They haven’t happened yet, but maybe that will come up. We’ll see.
But I think one thing that is going to be important for 2025, at least for myself and my team, is taking lessons learned from 2024 and really thinking about, what do we need to do in order to continue to support where the industries are all going in 2025? It was funny because, Sanjukta, you mentioned one thing much earlier in our conversation about foundations and how important they were. And I was thinking about this because I think one of the biggest lessons learned that I had from 2024 is just how important this is. As we’re continuing to layer on complexity to our projects, organizations, responsibilities, it’s really easy to overlook the foundation, and you can’t really keep building upon that without making sure that your base is solid. So I want to really step back and revisit fundamentals, because I think that that’s going to just make the core principles so much stronger. So that when we have something really huge pop up in 2025 and nobody’s expecting it, you’re going to have all the foundation in place, and it’s going to be really, really easy to pivot, because you’re just kind of ready for it. That’s kind of what I’m looking for, is what’s going to hit us in the face, and then how are we going to react to it?
STEVE HENDERSHOT
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