AI project management tools for productivity and insights

6 AI tools for project management 

If you’re just starting to play around with AI, or you want to level up the way you manage your time, these scrappy new tools can help you get to grips with your workload as a PM.

1. Trevor AI to organize your day 

Trevor is an AI task management app that claims tasks scheduled with its algorithm are completed at a higher rate than other to-do apps. 

While this might sound too good to be true to project managers who feel like they’ve already tried every possible way to organize their tasks, there’s a definite logic to Trevor’s method. You start by setting your task durations manually, and then the machine-learning model adapts the task length as you continue to track your work. The more you use it, the more realistic your automated daily schedule becomes. 

2. Rytr for AI content generation

In project management, communication is key — it’s the volume of communication that becomes the problem. You can use generative AI tools like Rytr to brainstorm ideas, draft emails, and generally remove the fear of the blank page. 

Rytr’s method is based on use case and tone. It includes a wide range of options for each (it’ll generate an awestruck email chain or a worried social media ad if you ask it to). You can switch between the “Write” function (which feels a lot like working in a Google Doc) and “Chat” mode (which will feel familiar if you’ve ever played around with Chat GPT), and generate up to three variants of your text so you can compare ideas and spark your own thinking. 

More like this: 

• Wordtune is an AI editor that can paraphrase your notes, check your grammar, and switch your writing from formal to casual. You’ll get 10 rewrites daily as part of its free plan. 
• Describley is an AI text generator built for the titles, meta descriptions, and product descriptions that e-commerce teams otherwise agonize over. 
• Quillbot is a text rewriter with a Chrome extension to help you nail your tone of voice in the texts you write online. 
• Copy.ai has a series of free content generator workflows for everything from content ideas to webinars, and sentence and paragraph rewriter tools to help fine-tune your work. 

3. Aha! for idea management 

Part of the wider Aha! idea management platform, this tool’s relatively new AI assistant will help you draft product documents with AI, transform your notes into action items, and analyze the data around the ideas you’re storing and developing in the platform. 

For example, it can spot patterns in your ideas and the feedback you record, surface potential use cases, and determine the features that users feel they need. The beauty of AI here is that you can process feedback faster and at greater volume, which gives you a better chance of spotting the golden observations that spark your next eureka moment.  

4. Clockwise for project scheduling

Managing timesheets and project calendars can be a large part of a project manager’s job. It can also be one of the most frustrating, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks you’ll undertake. 

Clockwise is an AI calendar and scheduling tool that connects with your Google or Microsoft calendar. You tell the tool about how flexible your timings are and block out periods when you prefer to do deep work (or eat your lunch), and the AI optimizes your calendar for focus time and team collaboration. This app also has a neat integration with Slack that silences notifications and updates your status according to your calendar.  

5. Katch as an AI virtual assistant 

Katch is an  AI assistant tool. It loops into your email communication and schedules meetings based on the gist of your messages — which means you don’t forget about appointments suggested while you’re on the go. 

With Katch, you can also message the AI assistant through WhatsApp or even talk to the app to schedule or reschedule appointments or get updates on your availability. 

6. Fathom to catch up on meetings 

Project managers are always in demand for meetings, feedback, and progress reports — so much so that they can struggle to find the uninterrupted time they need to complete the rest of their tasks.  

Fathom is an AI notetaker that records, transcribes, highlights, and summarizes meetings, with summaries generated within 30 seconds of the end of a video call. The app will send meeting notes and tasks to your CRM, and the tool facilitates sharing clips from meetings as well as text transcripts. When your team integrates this tool with video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, you can catch up on the latest decisions when you have time.  

More like this: 

• Otter.ai is a real-time notetaker and transcription service. It transcribes in English, French, and Spanish, and it facilitates a live chat to get answers during your meetings.
• Fireflies.ai is a notetaker that markets itself on the search functions you can use after the meeting notes are transcribed and saved. With this tool, you can easily locate discussions around specific topics, objections, pricing, and more. 

All of these tools can give you a chance to dip your toe in the world of AI project management, boost productivity on your personal projects, and help you work more effectively to manage your team. What’s more, new features are being added all the time, so you can continue to experiment with AI in new areas as you find tools that help you. 

But if you’re serious about using AI project management software, there’s a danger to using too many disparate apps. 

Whenever you switch between tools, you create gaps in your process, which makes it harder to keep all your tasks in view. And, while you might have your own system for juggling your favorite apps, fully embracing AI in your project management means training your team to use it too. You’re much more likely to be met with resistance, confusion, and high costs if you try to onboard a project team to multiple different tools at once rather than a central, collaborative piece of software. 

When you’re looking for the best AI project management tools, it’s important to consider comprehensive, all-in-one project management tools with AI-augmented features as a possible solution. 

Platforms like Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Taskade, and even Trello now include AI-powered project management features in many areas of their software. Here, though, I’ll focus on our platform, Wrike, and the features of our cutting-edge Work Intelligence® AI model. 

Wrike: The best AI features for project management in one central platform

Wrike is a work management tool with sophisticated AI features that can see your projects from ideation to delivery. These AI tools cover many of the functionalities we’ve touched on so far:

• AI task management tools 
• Automated workflow creation and management
• Smart risk prediction, risk management, and reporting 
• Rapid content creation with generative AI 
• Intelligent AI editing, adaption, and translation 
• AI summaries of notes and comment threads

While many tools now list AI as an add-on, Wrike has AI integrated throughout our platform. Rather than using these key features in a range of different apps, Wrike brings them together to create an optimized, centralized source of truth for your team — a shared workspace where you can use these tools to their full potential.

Let’s look at what AI makes possible when it’s applied to the entire project management lifecycle.

AI for smooth project initiation 

When you work in Wrike, our AI tools can get to work as soon as a new project request lands on your desk. Typically, a project manager starts by defining the project, developing a business case for it, and getting it approved. Here, AI helps in two main areas: 

• Generate reports on completed projects to support your feasibility studies  
• Draft documents like project charters, timelines, or briefs based on notes from your clients or brainstorming sessions with your team

When my colleague Emily Westbrooks asked Wrike employees how they use AI at work, many of them spoke about how important generative AI is during these initial project stages, as they use these tools to remove the fear of the blank page and start to get creative. 

Clark Schroeder, our Lead Enablement Program Manager, uses Wrike’s AI to jump-start ideas when he’s planning training sessions for his team, using precise prompts to generate fun and interactive activities and overcome the initial “mental block.” 

And for our users, tools like custom request forms, which you can set to automatically create your project tasks and kick off your workflows, are saving “days and weeks of back and forth” as teams get their new projects off the ground, as Aric Pearson of West Music Company can testify.

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AI for informed decisions in project planning 

The next stages of project management cover the creation and development of your project plan. You’ll set goals, choose KPIs to measure them, and begin to plan the workflows, contingencies, and resource allocation strategies that will act as the engine of your project work. 

When your project management platform includes integrated AI, you can make all your project planning decisions based on real data about the way your team has performed in the past, rather than relying on hypotheticals and hunches. 

For example, instead of just assigning a set number of tasks to a certain job role, Wrike’s AI tools mean you can base your delegation on real-time time tracking, capacity planning, task complexity, and data on historical performance. 

And, rather than basing your project plan on a generic workflow, Wrike suggests ways to break large tasks into smaller, actionable subtasks to guide you through your project work. You can easily adjust or accept this suggested workflow, and then track your tasks as they move through the workflow stages in real-time visualizations like our dynamic Kanban dashboard.

When you start to put your project framework together and kick off your work in Wrike, you set yourself up for a more efficient experience. Once your tasks exist in Wrike, they won’t fall through the cracks, and you’ll gather valuable data about progress and performance to drive the AI alerts and insights that keep you on track during the next project stages.

AI for responsive project execution, controlling, and monitoring 

As your team starts to complete their project tasks, Wrike’s AI functions keep you up to date and alert you to the potential risks to your project milestones. For example, you can set up your workspace to do the following: 

• Generate regular, automated reports tailored to your preferences and KPIs so you can track your progress more effectively 
• Get automatic notifications when tasks are at risk or delayed, so you can quickly step in to avoid the knock-on effect on your project timeline 
• Send automated notifications and reminders to your team as tasks come closer to their due date, so you can keep your deliverables on track without taking time away from your focused work 
• Use dynamic task tracking, like Gantt charts that automatically update when tasks change status according to the dependencies you define, so you have a real-time view of how your team is progressing through their project work 
• Stay up to date with the latest team decisions by using AI summaries to identify the main discussion points and action items in text files, meeting notes, and comment threads 
• Integrate all the tools you’re using for your project work to use AI across your entire workflow

For project managers, these tools make your resource management more effective and direct your energy to the team members that most need support. Wrike’s AI uncovers insights that show you why a task is overdue, a team member is over capacity, or a piece of work is stuck in a bottleneck. When the root cause is clear, you can focus on solving the problem and keeping your project on track.  

The team at the RBPA Tax Law firm uses Wrike’s reporting and risk reduction features to manage their daily work. Without AI tools like automated reporting, its complex projects would become unmanageable and the team would lose track of the details. Ricardo da Palma Borges told us how Wrike’s AI features have changed the game as his team executes and monitors projects:

Wrike changed our daily work by providing us with tools for effective project control and risk reduction. This boosts confidence in our performance and diminishes concerns of failure.

Ricardo da Palma Borges, Managing Partner

AI for meaningful project closure

At the end of a project, managers tie up loose ends, hold reflections on the outcomes, and organize the project materials so they can be recalled easily. 

When you work with Wrike’s AI tools, you can lead the closure with comprehensive evidence of how the project ran, using reports and snapshots generated from your data. Alongside feedback from your team, this is the best way to spot parts of your project that went well, or the areas where your process needs improvement. Plus, by returning to the generative AI features available within Wrike, you can add these learnings to reports and messages to your stakeholders to convey the insights in just the right tone. 

At the end of an automated project workflow, Wrike will route your project files to a designated folder. This means you can easily recall them with an AI search when you need to view them again — either for auditing or to use as a template for a future project. 

And, for the whole duration of your project, Wrike’s machine-learning capabilities will have noted patterns in the way your team completes their task lists. The end of a project is the perfect opportunity to evaluate Wrike’s AI suggestions and find new ways to automate your processes or integrate your tools for the next time you complete a similar project.

The benefits of AI tools for project managers

Integrating AI tools throughout the project lifecycle can have huge benefits for project managers and the teams they lead. 

It will always be important to prioritize the areas where this new technology will bring the most significant benefits, find tools that your team can easily adapt to, upgrade your processes over time, and choose tools that fit the security protocols at your company (read about Wrike’s enterprise-level security and commitment to the fair use of AI here). 

But done systematically and with the right onboarding, AI project management tools excel at offering: 

• Increased efficiency and productivity, as your team spends less time on data entry and project updates, and more time on the strategic, creative, or client-facing tasks that can’t be automated 
• Cost savings, as automation can both lower labor costs on routine tasks and eliminate expensive mistakes and delays
• Improved decision making, as predictive analytics process project data more quickly than humans, and identify the insights and project risk factors managers should act on
• Burnout prevention, by balancing task assignments, anticipating peak times, and eliminating frustrating, unsatisfying tasks so your team can focus on the collaborative work that excites them

Intelligent project management, simplified

Managers have the opportunity to bring AI into every aspect of their work, from planning their personal schedules to delegating the work for an entire organization.  

Whether you’re still experimenting with AI tools to streamline certain parts of your project work, or you’re considering a full AI project management platform, find out more about what Wrike’s cutting-edge Work Intelligence tools make possible. 

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