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Episode: Applying CPMAI Methodology to AI Projects: Interview with Chris Mielke [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:10:40

Episode Shownotes

Companies of all sizes in just about every single industry are looking to see how AI, machine learning, and cognitive technology projects can provide a competitive edge, provide efficiencies, and improve ROI in today’s competitive landscape. As a result, this creates tremendous opportunity in the field of AI for professionals

who are CPMAI certified and follow the CPMAI methodology. Continue reading Applying CPMAI Methodology to AI Projects: Interview with Chris Mielke [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
The AI Today podcast, powered by PMI, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:09 Speaker_01
Learn about emerging AI trends, best practices, and use cases on making AI work for you today with PMI hosts and expert guests.

00:00:21 Speaker_02
Hello and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Molch.

00:00:25 Speaker_00
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. And you know, it's really great to be part of a larger ecosystem. You know, many of you have heard, maybe in the introduction to this podcast, you've heard that Cognolitica and the AI Today podcast is now

00:00:37 Speaker_00
part of the project management institute PMI which many of our listeners know about you know still some don't it is the PMI is a brand is big but you know there's always people who are coming to the brand for the first time I think the other thing is that we bring a community that

00:00:53 Speaker_00
we have been involved with obviously since before PMI's day when we developed the CPMI, the Cognitive Project Management for AI certification and training based on methodology for running and managing AI projects.

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And we have a nice growing community in the CPMI sector who has a nice also overlap with the PMI community.

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So one of the things we love to do is to talk to our community, to hear more about what they are working on, some of their insights, some of their perspectives,

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and share that with our audience so that you, our listeners, who may be in the PMI community and the CPMAI community and neither of those communities or both of those communities can really learn some of those insights.

00:01:32 Speaker_02
Exactly. So we're so excited to have with us today, Chris Mielke, who is a project manager at Accela Pharma Sciences and is also CPMAI certified and has his PMP as well. So welcome, Chris, and thanks so much for joining us.

00:01:45 Speaker_03
Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I appreciate you reaching out.

00:01:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, we're really looking forward to this discussion today. We'd like to start by having you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about your background and now your current role.

00:01:58 Speaker_03
Well, thanks for having me. My name is Kurt Smielke. I'm a PMP, and I've also been a project manager for over 20 years. I am CPMAI certified.

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And also, I'm currently working in the pharmaceutical industry for the past year, but I've worked in producing software for video games. I've also done some project management and operations for distilling.

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So I kind of have a lot of projects that I've been involved in where I could see projects from the ground up and then bring them to life. And AI is one of my passions that obviously has come to the forefront in the last few years.

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Yeah, I think that's really exciting. And I think, one, you have a nice broad experience across many different industries.

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Maybe they don't seem all the same or the common, you know, in games and pharmaceutical and distilling and some of the other things you mentioned. But, you know, projects are projects, which is great.

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You know, the delivery, what ends up getting delivered to the customer may be different. But at the end of the day, we're trying to make projects successful. That's actually one of the big

00:03:01 Speaker_00
And I know you also have a newsletter where you are spending some time digging into the applications of AI and project management. I think that's great because it keeps you in the loop, right?

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When you do something like produce content, like whether it's a newsletter or a podcast or videos, it actually kind of forces you to stay aware of everything that's going on. So I think that's pretty neat.

00:03:22 Speaker_00
So in your experiences, both as a project manager, as well as the activities you've been doing with AI, what challenges have you seen in putting these projects together, especially around data, some of the advanced analytics things, and AI as it continues to emerge and change over these many years?

00:03:42 Speaker_03
Well, I think the biggest problem that we've faced is that it's finding the ROI for the AI project. I mean, trying to dig down into what's it going to save us in cost, what's it going to save us in time and resources. the biggest issue.

00:03:59 Speaker_03
And actually, we've had, I've had several experiences where an AI project has been canceled because we couldn't come up with the proper, you know, ROI. What was, what are we trying to save?

00:04:12 Speaker_03
And we figured out that, hey, this method that we're using, if we just improve this method, then that would be the sum of the parts that we needed.

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The other thing that I've been working with AI projects, the hardest thing I've found out is the quality of the data, trying to clean the data you need, enhance it enough to get it to where it's a usable state.

00:04:35 Speaker_03
And that has been a real challenge because you get the data in, everybody thinks that they're ready to go, and then you start to parse through it and you find out that it's just not usable in the current state that you need to have it in.

00:04:49 Speaker_02
Yeah you know i love that you bring that up right because we talk about common reasons why ai projects fail and you're hitting them right the roi and we say it's money time and resources and so.

00:05:00 Speaker_02
I like to hear actually that you didn't move forward with some of those projects that you couldn't find the roi on far too often organizations do move forward and then.

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they realize afterwards that they've spent all of this money, time, and resources on it. And data is the heart of AI. We can talk about this forever.

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But really, you're going to run into those data challenges, no matter how many people want to say that they have good quality data or whatever. And we've even seen it. Data silos exist, access to that data.

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So it's good to hear that you've experienced those too.

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specifically with CPM AI methodology, because I'm interested to see how you've been able to apply that and the, you know, knowledge that you've gained in the methodology itself to help grow key skills, both for yourself and also how it helped provide that lexicon and knowledge and credibility that you needed as you were looking to run and manage these AI projects.

00:06:00 Speaker_03
So it's similar to my software background is that when I started in software, I didn't have all the training, you just kind of picked it up as you went.

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But with your methodology, what I found is that it, you know, it's basically teaching, you know, it's a great teaching tool that you can sit there, absorb the information,

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you're tested on it you can you know then you can know you can get back to a programmer or a data scientist or an analyst and say here's what I'm looking for and talk the language to them.

00:06:31 Speaker_03
I mean that was the most important thing when I did software projects is that when you were with developers and saying, hey, you had to basically talk to their language.

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Even though you might not know how to implement what they were talking about, you just need to have the basics.

00:06:47 Speaker_03
The biggest thing I found out was that in Agile, that's where I came from, in that now you have a different methodology that this is specifically for data projects.

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And when you come from that Agile background, you realize that Agile doesn't cover everything you need.

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You need to know how to select an algorithm or retrain a model or build a model and other data intensive tasks that never were in when you're basically building an app or a program. So that helped out a lot. And that's what I figured out is, you know,

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That was the main thing is everybody who wants to do agile. It's just, you know, it's just not the cookie cutter that it's going to be when you're dealing with AI projects.

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Yeah, I know. It's really very interesting, because that's actually how we originated, how we got to CPM AI in the first place.

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So for our listeners that are not familiar, we brought up a few times here, but it's the Cognitive Project Management for AI CPM AI methodology, which is a six phase approach for running and managing AI projects.

00:07:47 Speaker_00
Loosely based on christian which has been around for decades is a methodology for data projects but those data projects weren't a i projects and there's something uniquely different about a i projects and that were asking these systems to do some of the tasks that otherwise people would do and that means that we have to deal with the fact that we have these machines that are trained on data to

00:08:10 Speaker_00
Detected patterns and then to repeat those patterns which is a very easy way to say what machine learning is all about but we want them to do things that people would otherwise do like what we call the seven patterns of a i the conversational pattern recognition or, detecting patterns and anomalies and predictive analytics or autonomous systems hyper personalization gold driven systems,

00:08:31 Speaker_00
Those are all the things that we are asking machines to do. And that there's a lot of detail in there that the other methodologies don't provide any more substance for. And that's like the big issue.

00:08:44 Speaker_00
And so, hey, if somebody had to fill in the gaps, and that's what we did. So I'm really grateful for you for bringing that up and expressing how you actually applied that in your workplace.

00:08:55 Speaker_00
And so digging into that a little bit, I think that in your newsletter in particular, you spend trying to explain what is happening now with AI and the project management world.

00:09:06 Speaker_00
Some of what we do in the podcast as well, but it's kind of good to do it in a newsletter. You can link to things, you can provide, you know, details on technology.

00:09:14 Speaker_00
And because we usually don't focus too much on tools and products here on the AI Today podcast, in part because we like people to listen to our podcast many months from now. And we don't want things to be stale.

00:09:26 Speaker_00
And of course, we don't want to pick vendors or anything like that. But in a newsletter, you can do that, which is fantastic.

00:09:31 Speaker_00
So maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of the insights that you've gleaned from covering AI in the project management space through a newsletter, maybe some tools that you've started to see gain some traction, maybe some insights even from how AI is being applied in various industries such as pharma or other sectors as well.

00:09:49 Speaker_03
Sure. So the main thing is, is that I've found is that the reason why I started the newsletter is that project managers are unsure of how to start with AI in their companies.

00:10:01 Speaker_03
And I just took it on myself to say, okay, well, you don't have to be afraid. It's just a new technology. And these are some things you can do to bring, you know, do simple steps is that, you know, instead of taking in

00:10:15 Speaker_03
writing out a meeting by hand use otter AI for example as a tool that you can bring into a meeting and then you know experiment with small things and then work your way up to the bigger things you know don't try to bite off more than you can chew but at least get people started with here's terminology and and those sort of things so they can transition into AI

00:10:38 Speaker_03
I think a lot of project managers right now are just dabbling in AI. They maybe have some experience with chat GPT or Claude or something like that.

00:10:47 Speaker_03
And I'm trying to bring a little bit more to the table as saying there's a whole wealth of tools out there that you can use, such as

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The article this weekend is probably date me but this podcast but it's for notebook lm so that's a powerful tool that just came out and it can take in so much data information and synthesize it so that say you have like.

00:11:11 Speaker_03
project managers get these large sums of data, they can bring it into this one tool, and they can summarize to them in a clear voice so that they can go back and say, oh, I understand what this contract means to legal or something like that.

00:11:25 Speaker_03
So that, you know, we deal with contracts, we deal with master service agreements, we deal with all these things that When we're reading them, we don't really understand them fully.

00:11:36 Speaker_03
But if somebody were to read that back to us in a voice that brings it down to our level and say, oh, this is exactly what you mean. I can see there's problems here. I need to address these issues. These are the risks that are coming up.

00:11:49 Speaker_03
So I try to do, you know, bring in tools like that.

00:11:52 Speaker_03
The other thing is you kind of touched on in the beginning is that I bring in some of the principles that are taught by CPM AI is that I go over dealing with the four V's of big data, factors of, you know, selecting a methodology, you know, and even determining, I did an article on, we discussed before ROI.

00:12:10 Speaker_03
So I'm bringing a little bit of teaching into that so that they can understand that AI projects are not similar to the traditional project management projects that they're used to, and that they need a little bit of extra care.

00:12:23 Speaker_03
And hopefully, you know, the newsletter will bring that home to them so that they can, you know, absorb it at their leisure, and it's less than like a classroom or something like that.

00:12:33 Speaker_02
And that's great. We'll link to your newsletter in the show notes for everybody. But if they don't know the name, can you share it?

00:12:39 Speaker_03
Sure, it's the AI Powered Project Manager. It's a very long name on Substack, but if you just, it's on Substack, so if you want to just Google that or put it in on Substack, it should pop up.

00:12:51 Speaker_03
And it's one of the, and actually, you know, it's probably one of the few project management newsletters that are out there that deal specifically with AI and project management. You know, they always say to pick a niche.

00:13:04 Speaker_03
Well, I went niche way down into that project management. So, you know, hopefully people will enjoy it. And we're always looking, I'm always looking for feedback.

00:13:13 Speaker_03
So please, you know, leave your comments once you've read it and it's right now it's actually free. So you can go and join and you don't have to pay anything currently, which is nice for a sub stack newsletter.

00:13:26 Speaker_02
Yeah. And we'll link to it in the show notes as well. So people don't have to Google it if they want to go to the, to the show notes. But I like that, you know, you're bridging the two sides.

00:13:35 Speaker_02
So we always talk about how do you use AI tools for project managers, and then also how to project managers, what methodologies do they use to run and manage AI projects?

00:13:45 Speaker_02
And we really need to be having, you know, talk about both sides of the equation. And a lot of times we focus on the tools. they're incredibly useful they change all the time and new tools are constantly coming out.

00:13:58 Speaker_02
Which is really exciting and also hard to keep up with so we appreciate that you're you're doing that in your newsletter because.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
It is it is also really interesting to see how people are applying these tools and so you know you brought up notebook lm which is.

00:14:14 Speaker_02
Awesome and it's fun to play with and the other thing about these tools and even large language models as we say, you know, just try it because the risk of failure is low and so just.

00:14:25 Speaker_02
Play around with it get comfortable with it that's the only way that you're gonna improve and to actually see how it can provide that benefit to your your role or your organization.

00:14:35 Speaker_02
So as a final note, we always like to ask our podcast guests the same question. Some people are very philosophical. Some people are very practical. Some people, you know, you can take this a number of different ways.

00:14:45 Speaker_02
As a final note, what do you believe the future of AI is in general and its application to organizations and beyond?

00:14:53 Speaker_03
Well, I think, well, for the near future, I think it's all about agentic AI. I mean, agentic AI, if your users or listeners don't know, I mean, it's, it's systems designed to automatically pursue complex goals and workflows.

00:15:08 Speaker_03
One of the things that you can see agentic AI in was the recent event by Tesla. You know, they had the robo-taxi last night that was previewed. And that's a genetic AI where it's full self-driving cars that are coming out and it's those capabilities.

00:15:27 Speaker_03
But I think it's going to go, we're already seeing the future here now.

00:15:30 Speaker_03
I mean, it's already materializing in how it's going to come about is that I think a genetic AI will move past that and you'll get advanced productivity, reduce costs and boost overall efficiency.

00:15:46 Speaker_03
And just you know with analytics is going to be better predicting market trends you know optimizing operations allowing people to gain that competitive edge that they need.

00:15:58 Speaker_03
For their customers and also their customers are of course we talk about cpm is that they're gonna need. you know, we deal with hyper personalization.

00:16:08 Speaker_03
I mean, that's the main thing right now is, I think a lot of the money to be made is actually in that space is that we'll see a lot of things that are just highly personalized products and services.

00:16:21 Speaker_03
And especially in, you know, I'm in the pharma industry and the healthcare industry is that

00:16:27 Speaker_03
You know, I've heard people talk is that what about, you know, say, you know, you can input all your health data and your grocery list and your exercise routine and then somebody is going to come up with, hey, here's I'm going to send out an AI is going to give you here's your health plan and everything and then he's going to follow up with you on.

00:16:48 Speaker_03
A regular basis or you know place those grocery orders in those pharmacy orders for you as you know as AI becomes more and more involved in our daily lives so i think that's.

00:17:00 Speaker_03
What is gonna be a cornerstone of personalization and AI that are gonna bring the next.

00:17:06 Speaker_03
The next wave, I think if somebody can do that in healthcare, which is, I think somebody mentions a $3 trillion industry, that's probably the next place it's gonna, you know, it's ripe for improvement in that area.

00:17:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you about Agentic. We actually first started talking about Agentic AI a few months ago, I don't know, six or seven months ago, and it first started, you know, hitting the awareness.

00:17:29 Speaker_00
And we're like, well, let's define it first, talk about what we're talking about. But we're starting to already see

00:17:35 Speaker_00
all of the elements of agentic AI coming into place where you don't just want to talk, have a conversation with some bot, some chat, generative AI system, and get some content in return. You want it to do stuff. And it's kind of funny.

00:17:50 Speaker_00
I was recently on a conversation here where you have bots participating in conversational systems with people.

00:17:59 Speaker_00
And then if you get other bots responding to the other bots, all of a sudden now we have this kind of funny situation where my bots will respond to your bots and I have my agents responding to your agents.

00:18:09 Speaker_00
Next thing you know, you can just say one thing and kick off this whole exchange. This is kind of where the power of AI is, can turn people and project managers specifically, give them some superpowers.

00:18:23 Speaker_00
But you know people need to learn it's almost like you need to learn that skill need to learn that almost the art even of working with AI systems that doesn't come to a lot of people naturally, you know just like perhaps in the nineties and people first were experiencing the internet you know the searching wasn't.

00:18:42 Speaker_00
part of their normal behavior and you know going online for things as a part of normal behavior buying things online was a part of the normal behavior now it's the default that's kind of, you automatically go there and i think that's the same with a i said one of the things we talk about a lot is just getting experience is kathleen mentioned is the risk of of experimentation is low but i would also say you need to if you want to participate in the economy,

00:19:06 Speaker_00
I would say the future, but it's really the present.

00:19:08 Speaker_00
If you want to be part of this evolving economy and ecosystem and workplace, all you listeners out there, you really need to be spending time experimenting with it, which is why we love talking to you, Chris, especially with the newsletter.

00:19:20 Speaker_00
It keeps you up to date and it keeps all of your readers up to date in the process.

00:19:26 Speaker_00
And so really want to thank you so much for all of your insights and what you've been sharing and we'll stay connected here and keep up to date with everything that you're working on.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
Well, I appreciate the opportunity and thank you very much. And I got to say your podcast is great.

00:19:41 Speaker_03
And I've, you know, when I first started learning about AI, that was one of the first places I went to because it was very accessible and I could listen to it at any time.

00:19:50 Speaker_03
So I appreciate, you know, all the years that you've given into bringing that about.

00:19:55 Speaker_02
Well, thank you. And that's, that's good to hear and glad now that you can be on an episode of the podcast full circle.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
So we'd like to thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights, especially around CPM AI and life as a project manager and how you are bringing AI into that role.

00:20:14 Speaker_02
I know that many of our listeners are either, you know, project professionals or maybe don't identify as that, but are now being tasked with running and managing AI projects and looking for real-world insights. So thank you so much for joining us.

00:20:30 Speaker_03
Thank you, appreciate it.

00:20:31 Speaker_02
Like this episode and want to hear more? With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
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00:20:54 Speaker_02
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00:21:06 Speaker_02
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.