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Episode: Cognilytica is now part of PMI! [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:21:28

Episode Shownotes

We have some super exciting news to share with you all! And, we want our community to hear this news directly from us. Project Management Institute (PMI), the world’s leading organization for the project management profession has acquired Cognilytica and Managing Partners Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer have joined PMI’s

Senior Leadership Team! In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer reflect on Cognilytica’s and AI Today’s journey these past eight years. Continue reading Cognilytica is now part of PMI! [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
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_00
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_01
Hello, and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Walsh.

00:00:25 Speaker_02
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. And you might have noticed something different there in the introduction to the AI Today podcast.

00:00:34 Speaker_02
You might be thinking, or maybe you're not even paying attention to the intro, but if you were, you're like, Hey, something sounds different. Hey, something looks different.

00:00:41 Speaker_02
That's because Cognolitica, the firm that's behind the AI Today podcast that Kathleen and me, we work for, we develop, we build Cognolitica. is now a proud part of the Project Management Institute, PMI.

00:00:57 Speaker_02
Yes, if you had heard the news, Cognolitico was acquired by PMI, and that news was made live. Well, today, as of the date of the release of this podcast on September 19th, 2024, what say you, Kathleen? Things are different.

00:01:14 Speaker_01
Exactly. So we're super excited and we wanted to make sure that we got to share this with our audience and our listeners so that you could hear it from us firsthand. And we're really excited that Cognolitica is now a part of PMI.

00:01:27 Speaker_01
So we wanted to spend some time on today's podcast talking about who is PMI, what this means for you, our listeners, and for you, our audience at Cognolitica, and what's to come. And so, first and foremost, what happened and where are Ron and I now?

00:01:42 Speaker_01
Well, Cognolitica, we have built this since 2017, and we've been working hard on this. I know our audience has been with us through everything that we've done, so thank you so much for all of that. And now PMI is Project Management Institute.

00:01:58 Speaker_01
It's the world's leading organization for the project management profession and project professionals. And they've acquired Cognitolitica, like Ron said. And now both me and Ron have joined PMI's leadership team.

00:02:10 Speaker_01
So we want to spend just a little bit of time talking about who is PMI and then what's next for all of us.

00:02:18 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:02:19 Speaker_02
Now, for many of you who've been following Cognolitica, you know that one of our core pieces of intellectual property, a thing that we have developed over many years, is this methodology for running and managing projects called CPM-AI, the Cognitive Project Management for AI methodology.

00:02:33 Speaker_02
And it rests upon a base of some previous approaches that have been around but haven't been that good for AI, whether it's CRISP-DM, which is an approach for running and managing data mining projects, not particularly agile, definitely not AI.

00:02:46 Speaker_02
but was a good data-centric way of running projects. Of course, we've had other non-AI, non-data methods for running products in general.

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Agile methodologies, traditional waterfalls, so-called predictive approaches, hybrid approaches, but those are literally for anything. You can use

00:03:03 Speaker_02
Agile and Waterfall for building skyscrapers, for developing aircraft carriers, for medical devices, for anything, right? It's not specific for AI projects.

00:03:13 Speaker_02
And what people realized is that AI projects have a unique set of failure modes that we have spent so many times on these podcasts.

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And so what we needed to do with AI was develop something specific, a specific framework, if you want to call it that, a specific

00:03:29 Speaker_02
approach, a specific methodology, whatever words work for you, a specific approach for running and managing AI products to help us get around these areas of failure.

00:03:40 Speaker_02
Now, many of you had said it would be great if we could combine forces with a larger organization that has much better reach, has more support, and has a bigger team.

00:03:54 Speaker_02
than Cognolitica, which a lot of people have even had trouble spelling and pronouncing our name. So, I think for a lot of you, you'll say, this makes a lot of sense.

00:04:01 Speaker_02
This is a great combination here for Cognolitica, all of our content, and our methodology, and our certification, the CPMI training and certification, to be part of that PMI family.

00:04:14 Speaker_02
So we'll dig a little bit into that as to what's going to happen with the certification.

00:04:18 Speaker_02
And maybe a little bit for those of you that are still not familiar with PMI, kind of what, you know who we are maybe, but you may not necessarily know who they are. So let's talk a little bit about their IP and their

00:04:29 Speaker_01
Exactly, who they are and why it made sense that Cognolitica and now, you know, PMI are one and why they acquired us. So what is PMI and who are they? Well, they are officially the Project Management Institute. A lot of people call them PMI.

00:04:47 Speaker_01
They are a U.S.-based, not-for-profit professional organization for project management.

00:04:53 Speaker_01
So many of our listeners might know PMI for its project management professional, the PMP certification, which is probably the certification that it is most widely known for.

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And PMI serves more than 5 million professionals, including over 730,000 members in 217 countries and territories around the world. with over 300 chapters and over 14,000 volunteers.

00:05:21 Speaker_01
So you may have also noticed that in the past number of months, Ron and I have been speaking at a number of PMI chapter events.

00:05:28 Speaker_01
So if you've followed us and joined us from one of those PMI chapters, then welcome, and we're so excited to now be a more formal part of PMI. But we have been working closely with them for quite some time, and it really just does make a lot of sense.

00:05:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I think, you know, if you want to think about what else PMI has. So PMI is not just a new professional organization. They are and not just PMP.

00:05:53 Speaker_02
They have a lot of other things that are part of their community as a whole, because they are trying, in many cases, succeeding in supporting the project management profession as a whole.

00:06:05 Speaker_02
So you might think of, you know, every major profession has sort of a community group, an association that supports the growth

00:06:12 Speaker_02
of those who are working in that industry, whether they're in the legal industry or HR or different healthcare professions or even teachers.

00:06:20 Speaker_02
Everybody has a professional organization because if you're working in that industry and you want to build and develop your career, you should be able to, one, network with other professionals, maybe continue getting education to keep you up to date, get some advocacy for your job, get some support.

00:06:37 Speaker_02
And then in the case of certifications, maybe employers might look to some sort of endorsement, some sort of formality to say, hey, I'm not just going to hire anybody as a teacher. I'm not going to hire anybody as a heart surgeon.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
I'm not going to hire anybody as a lawyer. You need some sort of credential and certification. Some industries are formally licensed. You know, there's like state organizations and international bodies.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
And some are more certifications in terms of the organization itself has built enough of a reputation for itself that its certification is worth. value. So that's what's happening here.

00:07:07 Speaker_02
So PMI's gold standard, as they call it, Certification PMP, there are additional certifications as well that service different aspects of the project management profession. So you might also know the Certified Associate in Project Management, CAPM,

00:07:23 Speaker_02
You might know about the program management, PGMP, or the portfolio management professional certifications. They even have more specialized certifications for things like PMI construction professional or risk management professional.

00:07:37 Speaker_02
They've spent some time focusing on Agile. I know that there are many other organizations that have built a name for themselves on Agile, but as a project professional association, PMI has to say something about that, too.

00:07:49 Speaker_02
So PMI has their Agile Certified Professional Practitioner, that is a PMI ACP.

00:07:54 Speaker_02
They have their they have their the PMI Professional Business Analysis, the PBA, the and then they have recently also acquired an organization that focuses on project management organizations, PMOs. and the PMO professional community.

00:08:09 Speaker_02
So they have the PMO-CP certification that they have brought over from the PMO Global Organization, the PMO-GA. So they do that. And in addition to that, they support their community through education, additional courses.

00:08:23 Speaker_02
They've been doing a lot recently with AI. Obviously, now that they've acquired Cognolitica assets, we are hopeful that they will bring a lot of that into the core of their educational library. We already helped them.

00:08:35 Speaker_02
with their prompt engineering course. So you may or may not know this if you've taken PMI's prompt engineering course. It's one of three of their most recent generative AI courses. Kathleen and I were, I would say, critical.

00:08:47 Speaker_02
to the development of that course. And maybe we're in the notes there somewhere. But now, of course, all of our work is just part of PMI as they've acquired all of those assets. So in addition to that, they have a huge army of volunteers.

00:08:59 Speaker_02
They have tons of chapters, as Kathleen mentioned. Hopefully, if you're part of the organization, now that you know we are part of the organization, too, you should you should look for us. You should ask for more of our content.

00:09:09 Speaker_02
You should ask for more of the other PMI people, not just Ron and Kathleen, even though, yes, we're awesome. We're great people.

00:09:16 Speaker_02
more of the PMI organization and the chapter members should become very versant in everything that Cognitive has developed that's now part of PMI, whether it's our methodology or our content, seven patterns of AI, all that good stuff.

00:09:29 Speaker_02
We're bringing all of that to the table.

00:09:31 Speaker_01
Absolutely. And there's a lot going on. So we're really excited to be here. Now, of course, with any acquisition, it's always, well, what's next?

00:09:41 Speaker_01
And so we wanted to spend some time with our listeners and our community to talk about what's next, because while this is incredibly exciting for everybody, we know that change can sometimes be hard and change can also bring disruption, both good and bad.

00:09:56 Speaker_01
So we really are so excited for this opportunity to engage with the larger PMI community and get to continue the groundbreaking work and thought leadership on AI best practices that we've developed at Cognolitica over these number of years.

00:10:10 Speaker_01
So now that Cognolitica is part of PMI, we will continue to provide our customers and our community with thought leadership on AI best practices, obviously on running and managing AI projects, We are big advocates of that.

00:10:23 Speaker_01
We've been big advocates of that to have a step-by-step approach for running and managing projects so that you don't fall into that 80% of AI projects fail statistic. And also with our AI Today podcast. So this is not going anywhere.

00:10:39 Speaker_01
We have a number of wonderful interviews lined up. We have a number of wonderful podcasts. I know we're in the middle of our use case series, so we still have that going on.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
definitely stay subscribed or subscribe if you haven't done so already so you can get notified of all of those upcoming episodes. We're very happy and excited to continue working with the podcast.

00:10:59 Speaker_01
But we also understand that some changes are inevitable with an acquisition. We are committed to making this process as seamless as possible and to continue all of that great momentum that we've had and really continue to keep this community thriving.

00:11:14 Speaker_01
So we wanted to just answer a few questions that we think some people may have. We also have resources on our website, including an FAQ. We'll link to the press release as well that announced all this. And of course, we're always available.

00:11:28 Speaker_01
Reach out to us on LinkedIn. you know, Ron and I aren't going anywhere, and we always love to hear from our listeners in our community. Many of you do reach out to us, and we love that, so continue to engage.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
But first and foremost, you may be saying, well, what's happening to the CPMAI certification, right? We've been big advocates of this now for a number of years. We talk about it on our podcast regularly.

00:11:48 Speaker_01
We are excited to say that the CPMAI methodology is here to stay. We've spent a number of years Really, you know, establishing this.

00:11:56 Speaker_01
I know that many of our listeners and folks in our community have become CPM AI certified and they've spent a lot of time and resources and invested in themselves and CPM AI is here to stay. So the methodology will be included in

00:12:11 Speaker_01
you know, we're going to keep the methodology around and we're going to be working with PMI to transition to PMI's learning system over time.

00:12:20 Speaker_01
So for now, still come to, you know, our site to sign up, but we will be transitioning this, but the CPMAI methodology is here to stay.

00:12:30 Speaker_02
Yeah. And so a couple of very specific answers so that we're not too general here. So it's the CPI methodology, as we mentioned, will become a PMI specialized certification in the new future under a new name.

00:12:41 Speaker_02
So obviously we're trying to coordinate to make sure this is not some sort of weird black sheep here. It's going to be part of the PMI certification family and done in the very same way that all PMI certifications are, but we've gotten the commitment

00:12:55 Speaker_02
We've gotten the endorsement from the PMI folks who are in charge of certification training that they will bring the CPMI certification on board as a PMI specialized certification, possibly with a new name, but bringing in the, as mentioned, the CPMI methodology.

00:13:10 Speaker_02
So anybody who is an existing Cognolitica CPMI certified, if you're certified and you've gone through that and you've gotten your certification, You will basically, you will maintain your certification and you will even receive a new badge from PMI.

00:13:23 Speaker_02
So that will be an official badge from the PMI site.

00:13:26 Speaker_02
And customers who have not completed, so if you're still enrolled in CPMI, you should definitely complete your CPMI certification because we're going to keep the Cognitica Learning Management System up. It'll be up and running.

00:13:38 Speaker_02
during the whole transition period. And as Kathleen mentioned, we'll even enable new enrollments. So if you haven't enrolled, you can definitely enroll. And when you complete the certification, you will continue to earn that certification.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
And then you'll get this digital badge that provides evidence that you have learned the CPI methodology. So as we mentioned, CPI methodology is not going away. The certification is not going away. It's going to become

00:14:00 Speaker_02
even more part of the PMI certification. You'll get PMI badging and there will be a new PMI certification that will come out that will basically pick up where CPMI has left off and add even more value to that certification.

00:14:15 Speaker_01
Exactly. And if, you know, we know that people will ask if they've received that certification, if they've already successfully completed and received their CPMAI certification, especially when a new one comes out.

00:14:27 Speaker_01
So yes, everybody who has successfully earned their CPMAI certification for any version, I know right now we're currently on version seven, but we're honoring this for all previous versions because I know we have a number of people in our community who maybe have taken previous versions.

00:14:42 Speaker_01
So you will receive the new PMI-branded certification badge once it is ready, and PMI will email all customers who've earned the CPMAI certification with details on how to receive their PMI badge soon. So definitely stay tuned.

00:14:57 Speaker_01
Once that's ready and available, an email will be sent out. If you're unsure if the email that you have on file is your most

00:15:04 Speaker_01
current one, reach out to us, connect with us on LinkedIn as well, you know, and we'll make sure that everybody has a seamless experience.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
And again, like we said, it's really important to understand that you can sign up now during this transition period, that you can still enroll in CPM AI training and certification.

00:15:26 Speaker_01
And we're excited to continue to accept new people who enroll and new registrations because You know, we've spent a number of years developing this and we're really excited to now have that larger community who's engaged.

00:15:41 Speaker_01
So again, it'll be on Cognolitica's learning management system for now. So just go on like you always have and sign up.

00:15:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, so there are many other specific questions. We actually have an FAQ up, so you should definitely read the FAQ.

00:15:57 Speaker_02
It's questions that will answer on things like how long you can have access to the LMS, if you've enrolled, before that we've migrated, the content and the training certification of the PMI systems. I would say go on there.

00:16:07 Speaker_02
That's a very tactical question, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Also answers to the questions about what's going to happen to your existing Cognitica CPMI badge and certification.

00:16:17 Speaker_02
the documentation part, all of that's going to be migrated over. We talk specifically how that's going to work. So let's now get back into us. What's going to happen with Kathleen and myself and what's going to happen with the content?

00:16:27 Speaker_02
So we are part we have we are now fully PMI people now. Kathleen and I have PMI.org email addresses. We've have even PMI laptops now. I mean, we're official. We are part of the organization.

00:16:40 Speaker_02
As I like to say, Kathleen and I are known for being really ahead of the curve here. We're known for being thought leaders and in many ways disruptors. Sometimes we say we're whirlwinds of disruption, which is true. That's the goal.

00:16:52 Speaker_02
Hey, look, we're here to advance thought leadership and AI, and to do that, you're going to have to break a couple of eggs to make those omelets. It's just sort of the reality of the game. So we are in there.

00:17:03 Speaker_02
We are in there to hopefully provide to PMI the expertise and the guidance and the leadership around running and managing AI practices, AI best practices, and even all this content.

00:17:13 Speaker_02
We've like thousands and thousands of pieces of content that we've developed over all these years, not only the going to soon be 500 episodes of the podcast, but tons of articles, white papers, infographics, LinkedIn carousel, so much stuff.

00:17:27 Speaker_02
And hopefully you'll start to see more and more of it appear under the PMI branding.

00:17:33 Speaker_01
Exactly. We're really excited for this. Like Ron said, now both of us are officially with PMI. All of our content is with PMI. This is going to be a transition, so we will work to get all of our content up on PMI.

00:17:48 Speaker_01
But like Ron said, we're looking forward to having more of that shared in the coming weeks and months ahead.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
We have a number of upcoming podcasts, some really wonderful interviews lined up, and also make sure that you connect with Ron and I on LinkedIn as well.

00:18:03 Speaker_02
Yeah. So the biggest thing that we have for you, so this is going to leave you guys with a takeaway before we wrap up this podcast. We have a bunch of podcast episodes coming up, so obviously tons of new stuff. You can hear a lot of great stuff.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
However, it's up to you. Now that you know that Cognalytica is part of PMI. There's always so much that we can do on the inside. There's so much that we can do to tell the PMI leadership how important thought leading our articles and content has been.

00:18:29 Speaker_02
There's always so much that we can do to even reach the audience. We have a limited reach, right?

00:18:34 Speaker_02
If you love us, if you love our content, if you love all the work that we have done, and you want to see this not only continue, but grow, we need you, our audience, to speak up. Many of you have commented on our podcast. That's great.

00:18:49 Speaker_02
Many of you have sent us emails. Many of you, of course, enrolled in our courses and participated in many of our activities. But we need you to tell the leadership at PMI

00:18:59 Speaker_02
Not just the leadership within PMI, like the people who actually work for PMI, they're important. Tell them how great the CPMI certification is, tell them all this stuff. We need to tell the other PMI members.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
We have engaged so many chapters out there, and a lot of them honestly are not even aware of the things PMI is doing now. That's like without adding Cognolitica to the pile of things that PMI is doing.

00:19:24 Speaker_02
PMI is doing a lot of stuff, and a lot of it has to do with AI, but people are just unaware of it. I would like to say that PMI is really super effective at promotion and marketing, but they're not.

00:19:35 Speaker_02
Like many organizations, they have their own challenges.

00:19:38 Speaker_02
Instead of us trying to just push more out, I think you as our listeners need to go out there and demand more from the audience, demand more from your community and go in there and be part, especially if you want to see this continue.

00:19:51 Speaker_02
Because one of the dangers as always with an acquisition, as much as everybody is enthusiastic and sees the promise and sees the growth, when organizations combine, there's always chaos, there's always

00:20:05 Speaker_02
moments of missed opportunities, and it's going to happen. I just want to point out that it is going to happen. There will be missed opportunities. You'll be like, oh, man, you know, PMI, you know, why did they do that?

00:20:15 Speaker_02
They don't even realize they had this Cognolitica content. You will see that. And I think the best is for them to hear from you because they will listen to you, our audience, maybe even more than they will listen to us. So I would say get out there.

00:20:29 Speaker_02
Don't forget about us. Don't forget about all the great content and be part of the PMI community because we will be.

00:20:38 Speaker_01
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.

00:20:48 Speaker_01
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00:21:01 Speaker_01
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00:21:13 Speaker_01
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.