As AI technologies become mainstream, software solution providers are integrating AI into their existing systems to improve productivity and deliver superior user experiences. CRMs, business management solutions, finance & account software, and of course, project management tools, are just a few platforms that are leveraging AI.

Artificial intelligence has a very broad scope, though, and AI tools range from text generation tools (trained on large language models) to process optimisation technologies and forecasting systems. So, to help you choose the right project management tools with AI, we’ve compiled a list of top PM software that leverage AI in different ways.

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What should you look for in project management tools with AI?

Most mainstream project management tools have integrated AI to help users unlock greater productivity gains. But there are hundreds of project management solutions, and dozens of popular ones, so choosing the right software for your needs isn’t always simple.

Our advice? Consider these factors carefully and choose a solution tailored to your needs:

  • Who is it made for? While some project management tools aim to attract everyone, you’ll find many that are more niched down. For example, Microsoft Projects is tailored for enterprises using the Microsoft Suite, while Caflou is designed for small businesses with up to 100 employees.
     
  • Integrations. Does the software support other relevant tools in your tech stack? In general, more popular project management tools support integrations with more platforms. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider smaller vendors – because many of them offer integrations that their target audience values the most.
     
  • AI capabilities. Don’t be fooled by a tool’s AI suite; make sure it has tools and capabilities that are relevant to your business needs. Otherwise, it’s better to steer clear of features that don’t serve your interests.
     
  • Resource management features. Most project management tools will include basic resource management features, like assigning tasks. But some offer more advanced features, like AI-powered demand forecasting for new projects. 
     
  • Collaboration features. Some PM tools offer basic communication features, like commenting and tagging, while others provide more sophisticated features, like in-platform messaging and video conferencing. 
     
  • Automation. Automation is essential to unlocking productivity gains, and it pairs nicely with AI technologies. At the very least, a project management tool should integrate with third-party automation tools (like Zapier or Make). But it’s best if the platform has its own built-in automation features, too.
     
  • Customisation. If you’re using a tool that’s designed for your business, e.g., Caflou is ideal for businesses with under 100 employees, then getting set up is relatively straightforward. However, some project management tools are designed for a very broad audience, so make sure they have the right templates and customisation features before investing in them. 

Top project management tools with AI (plus some AI tools for PMs)

Here’s a quick rundown of all the tools we’re about to review:

1.    ClickUp: a well-rounded project management tool with extensive AI capabilities.
2.    Asana: a simple, centralised project management solution.
3.    Caflou: manage your essential business functions and get visibility into your entire organisation’s operations. 
4.    Microsoft Projects: for enterprises looking for a heavyweight project management system.
5.    Process Street: tap into AI-powered process automation.
6.    Forecast: make essential decisions with data you can trust.
7.    Read AI: the meeting assistant that takes notes and identifies action items for you.
8.    Product Monkey: create product requirements and documentation in record time.
9.    PlusDocs: give your presentations AI superpowers. 
10.    ChatGPT: this viral AI software has plenty of use cases in project management, too.

6 Best project management solutions with AI

1. ClickUp

ClickUp is a popular, highly customisable project management software with over 8 million users (as of 2023). It’s also one of the most feature-rich work management tools in the business, with an integrated online whiteboard, document editor, folders, and extensive features for managing tasks and project resources.

ClickUp also has one of the most advanced AI feature sets of any project management tool – it quite literally transforms the way you work. Some ways you can use ClickUp’s AI include:

  • Summarising documents
  • Writing documents (e.g., a projects requirement document)
  • Creating custom fields
  • Generating action items and subtasks
  • Forecasting capacity needs and improving resource allocation
  • Translate and localise information
  • Make project cost estimations

And more. 

Plans: ClickUp offers a generous “Free Forever” plan that includes unlimited users and tasks, in-app video recording, 100MB of storage, 24/7 support, collaborative docs, and other essential features. But you’ll need to choose the Unlimited plan – or higher – to unlock ClickUp AI, more storage space, and more advanced features (like time tracking, guests with permissions, email from ClickUp, etc.)

2. Asana

While ClickUp is a powerful, highly customisable platform, Asana offers customers a distinguished benefit: simplicity. Asana is very simple to get started with – just enter in details about your business, and the platform will help you get set up. Creating mindmaps and project boards, managing resources, and organising data is easy and straightforward.

Asana’s artificial intelligence features aren’t quite as extensive as ClickUps, but they’re well thought-out and do a great job at improving productivity, reducing errors, and decreasing repetitive work. You can use Asana AI to:

  • Define SMART goals based on historical data. Just give the AI a description of your current project and let it analyse previous projects to suggest relevant goals and objectives.
  • Get updates in real time. Asana AI monitors projects and pulls work data in real time to alert you about roadblocks, potential risks, 
  • Organise your work better with AI-generated custom fields.
  • Give your team members a smart onboarding experience that walks them through each project’s tasks, resources, and goals.

Plans: Like ClickUp, Asana has a generous free plan with unlimited tasks, projects, messages, different views, 100MB of storage, and other essentials. But Asana’s free plan limits you to 15 members, so you’ll need to upgrade to the Premium plan (or higher) to add on more members and access more advanced features. Asana can also become quite expensive as your team grows.

3. Caflou

End-to-end small business management

Caflou is much more than a project management tool; it’s a complete business management suite that lets you:

  • Manage customer relations, projects, tasks, and resources in one place
  • Leverage data to optimally manage finances, budgets, and business economics.
  • Automate repetitive tasks with built-in automations or integrations with Make.
  • Improve productivity with text-to-speech AI capabilities. 
  • Tell AI to summarize important documents, create work breakdown structures, and more.
  • Use Caflou’s generative AI to outline project milestones, create checklists and tasks to execute, and create content like project briefs. 
  • When managing project costs, use Caflou’s AI to extract data from relevant invoices.
  • Manage customer relationships with a fully integrated CRM. Record your contacts, manage comms, track income and expenses, and manage your projects and documentation.

Since Caflou lets you manage essential business functions in one place, it gives you a more holistic overview of your business. For example, you can see which customers bring in your most profitable projects, remarket to previous clients, leverage historical data for more accurate forecasting, etc.

Here’s what Arvydas Kublickas, CEO of NJ Optimal, has to say about why his company switched over to Caflou:

“We were using a total of five applications, each one for something different. When we wanted to make a prognosis, we had a hard time tracking down the data. It was time-consuming and difficult.”

Plans: Caflou’s free plan lets you add up to five users and includes the platform’s essential features, with a file storage limit of 100MB. Caflou’s paid plans start at 12€/month/user, but as you add more users, it gets much cheaper. For example, for 20 users, the activate plan will cost you just 6.8 €/month/user. This makes Caflou an affordable option for businesses looking for an end-to-end business management tool with reliable automation and AI capabilities.

4. Microsoft Project

For enterprise project management: 

Microsoft Project has everything you’d expect from a polished project management tool, including:

  • Different project views (Grid, Kanban, and Timeline)
  • Project planning capabilities with Kanban and Gantt views
  • Advanced reporting features to track resources, portfolios, progress, etc.
  • Timesheets for payroll and invoicing
  • Resource management and communication features
  • Integrations with other essential tools, including Microsoft’s suite of professional tools

And more. You can also tap into Microsoft’s AI project management capabilities for better resource planning, creating work breakdown structures, making risk assessments, and more. 

Plans: Microsoft Project has both cloud-based and on-premise solutions. The on-premise solutions start at $719.99 (one-time purchase), while the cloud-based solutions cost $10.00/user/month and upwards.

5. Process Street

Process Street is an AI-powered process management tool that lets you build and automate your workflows. Project managers use Process Street to integrate their workflows, automate repetitive tasks, improve data analytics and forecasting, and more. Unlike project management tools, Process Street focuses on managing processes by synchronizing your workflows across different platforms.
 
Process Street uses AI in two key ways to improve workflows, which include:

  1. Workflow generation. You can describe your process or workflow to Process Street, and it will bring your workflow to life with steps, due dates, assignments, approvals, and variables. You can customise these workflows further and automate tasks within them.
     
  2. For automating certain tasks. Process Street lets you specify “AI tasks” that will automatically be executed by AI. For example, you might use AI for data collection or generating reports.

Plans: Process Street’s cheapest plan – the Starter plan – costs $1000/year if you pay annually, or $100/month for monthly billing. Process Street also offers a free 14-day trial (no credit card required) on its Pro plan.

6. Forecast

Forecast is a data-driven project resource management tool that helps you maximise your project returns by optimising the way you manage your finances, resources, and teams. The app integrates with your tech stack, centralises your data, and provides intelligent recommendations to maximise returns.

Forecast’s AI capabilities include:

  • Risk monitoring. Forecast proactively flags potential issues, so project managers can take preventative action.
  • Resource management. Make sure your team is focusing on the right things at the right time with intelligent recommendations and insights.
  • Real-time financial insights. Learn where you need to cut costs and how to increase your profits with holistic, intelligent financial insights.
  • Forecasting capacity needs. Not sure if you have the resources to take on a new project, or whether you’ll need to hire additional talent? Use Forecast to analyse the potential project and determine its impact on your business.

Plans: Forecast offers custom pricing, so you’ll need to contact them directly for a quote. The app has two plans – Pro and Plus – and the latter offers everything that Pro does, with additional features like AI-assisted capacity and demand planning, AI-assisted timesheets, advanced analytics, etc.

Top 4 AI tools for project managers

Looking to improve your day-to-day productivity with AI? Here are some tools that project managers love to use.

7. Read AI

Read is an AI-powered meeting assistant that integrates with popular communication and collaboration platforms, including Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Read helps you get the most out of your meetings – without any additional effort – by generating transcripts, recording sessions for playback, providing summaries, and more.

After integrating Read with your communications systems, you can use it to schedule meetings (with smart scheduling). Read’s AI will also analyse your meetings history to make suggestions about optimal meeting slots. Then, when your meeting starts, Read’s AI will join the session to record it, transcribe it, create a summary, and make notes. You can then access the meeting notes in text form, with a summary of the meeting, action items based on what was discussed, and key questions that were raised. 

Read also has a really interesting “AI highlights” feature, that shortens long meeting recordings into concise, shorter videos that address action items and key points. 

Plans: Read’s free plan limits you to five meeting reports per month, with a max recording duration of 1 hour. The Pro plan, starting at $15/month (for annual billing), takes you up to unlimited meeting reports and 4 hours per recording. The Pro plan also gives you more advanced features like integrations & webhooks, and topic progression.

8. Product Monkey

Working on a new product? Product Monkey can help you create requirements and tickets at record speed with the help of AI. The tool takes your product design and wireframe images and converts them into detailed engineering task tickets and product requirement documents. 

To use Product Monkey, start by uploading up to 10 images that depict your user flow. Then, Product Monkey’s AI will generate drafts of requirements documentation and tickets, which include detailed descriptions, acceptance criteria, user stories, tags, etc. You can then make any necessary modifications to the drafts before passing them along to your team. Product Monkey also lets you transfer the generated requirements to your project management software of choice, like Jira or ClickUp.

Plans: Product Monkey offers a generous free plan that supports up to 200 tickets (per year). The Business plan, which costs just $79/user/year, gets you better limits and 24/7 support.

9. PlusDocs

PlusDocs is an add-on for Google Slides that brings AI capabilities to your presentations, helping you save time developing them while also making them more interactive. PlusDocs lets you add dynamics “Snapshots” to your presentations – like a snap of specific data (like a trends forecast or a table with customer data). These snaps are self-updating and always display data in real-time, and you can embed them into Google Slides, Notion Docs, Slack, and similar platforms.

Plans: PlusDocs free plan lets you generate three presentations and create single-slide layouts, so it’s only fit for simple, one-off needs. If you plan on using it regularly, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans – which start at $10/user/month (for annual billing). Paid plans unlock unlimited presentation limits and more advanced features, like AI rewrite and remixes, custom themes and instructions, etc.

10. ChatGPT

ChatGPT doesn’t really need an introduction, so let’s focus on how project managers use it. The powerful generative AI tool offers simple use cases, like making your emails more concise or summarising reports, and more advanced ones, like crafting user stories, drafting project plans, creating product documentation, and generating work breakdown structures based on relevant inputs.

Of course, using the free or Plus versions of ChatGPT comes with data privacy concerns, so you’ll want to be careful about giving up any proprietary information. ChatGPT Enterprise offers greater security and privacy, but at a cost. 

Plans: ChatGPT’s free plan gives you access to all of the platform’s features, including text generation, custom prompts, access to community prompts, etc. However, upgrading to the Plus plan ($20/month) gives you faster response times, access during peak demand, and priority access to new features. And if you’re worried about data privacy and security, you can contact OpenAI to get a quote for ChatGPT Enterprise.
 

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