Developing ‘AI Intuition’: The New Essential Skill for Project Leaders

WRITTEN BY: KELLY HAUGE

AI is reshaping project leadership in ways that go beyond AI-driven efficiencies. The conversation often focuses on AI as a tool for handling workflows, predicting risks, and optimizing resources, with recent studies showing it may be reducing critical thinking across teams. While these capabilities are undeniably powerful, the real transformation runs deeper: AI is redefining the very role of the project leader.

Ethan Mollick’s book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, highlights a critical mindset shift: AI isn’t just a tool to be used; it’s a system to be worked with. True success doesn’t come from passively trusting AI outputs. Instead, it emerges from fostering an active, iterative relationship with the system. To do this effectively, project leaders must cultivate a new skill: AI intuition.

From Project Coordinator to AI Curator

Historically, great project leaders developed a gut instinct for risk, bottlenecks, and team dynamics. Now, they must develop that same instinct for AI-generated insights. AI intuition is the ability to:

• Interpret AI recommendations critically—understanding where AI excels and where it falters.
• Train AI to think more like a project leader—refining prompts and inputs to get better outputs.
• Recognize bias and blind spots—knowing when AI is oversimplifying a complex issue or missing human context.

Rather than replacing judgment, AI can expand the range of decisions project leaders make. It enables faster scenario planning, uncovers unseen risks, and generates insights at scale. But those insights are only valuable if project leaders can evaluate, challenge, and refine them.

The Power of Human Judgment with AI

AI offers powerful insights, whether suggesting resource allocation, identifying risks, or optimizing timelines. But its value doesn’t lie in simply following the machine’s recommendation; it’s in how project leaders interpret and apply those insights. AI can point out trends or patterns, but it doesn’t understand the complexities of the environment in which those patterns exist. Just last week, our founder Kate MacCabe chatted with The Information, pressure-testing the value of AI, simply for AI’s sake. A key example is Meta’s ambitious Meta’s forecast for ad growth due to AI in 2025.

A project leader with strong AI intuition digs deeper, they explore the why behind them. They ask: 

What’s the broader context here? 

What might the data be missing? 

In doing so, they ensure that decisions are aligned with the long-term strategic goals, not just short-term optimizations.

This is where the real strength of AI lies, augmented by human leadership. It’s the project leader who brings empathy, context, and foresight to ensure that AI outputs are not just understood, but applied effectively to drive the project’s success.

Becoming AI-Literate: The First Steps

Building AI intuition doesn’t require technical expertise, but it does require active engagement. Project leaders can start by:

• Experimenting with AI models – testing different prompts and analyzing variations in responses.
• Pairing AI insights with human oversight – treating AI as an advisory partner rather than an authority.
• Challenging AI outputs – asking why AI made a recommendation and whether key nuances are missing.

AI is reshaping not only how project leaders work but also how they think. The future will favor those who view AI as a catalyst for deeper strategic insight, rather than a replacement for expertise. In this new landscape, developing AI intuition is essential, it’s now a defining skill of effective project leadership.

Are you working on unleveling the business operations within your organization and looking for support in accelerating your progress? Schedule time with Kelly to build efficiencies in your organization.