Program Head: AI Evolutionist

"And when he is out of sight, quickly also he is out of mind."

Thomas à Kempis c. early 15th century

The “holiday season” closes, as bell ringing, horn blowing, and champagne spouting prompts us toward New Year reflections. This is a gratified sigh in the moment, at the end of the year, with major holidays and the once-traditional "Boxing Day" also behind us. Speaking of Boxing Day… it’s almost like the day’s history is taken, by discount stores and on-line shopping: get your place organized! Buy new Tupperware containers, cardboard and flexible satchels! Use the time to liberate oneself from the clutter that unsettles the mind….! Oh, my. Can't we stay organized?!

After New Year's Day, resolutions are rarely discussed anymore. They’re like perennial champ wannabes at the bottom of baseball standings, discarded and ignored only after a month or two of a new season. But there is a resolution, guiding innovation in a more strategic and intelligent approach. And there's a prime candidate for AI Evolutionist; one whose visibility correlates with firm success.

The Program Management Office was the company's organizing core, citing evidence of progress, tracking change and innovation, small and large. They turned the lights yellow, then red, if promises weren't kept. Yet if program employees thought their job was just traffic monitoring, they had limited understanding of progress assurance. On the precipice of 2026, that view is inexcusable. 

So, tomorrow is the new year of AI program evolutionist, whose accountability will be more than weaver of project storylines and status, and more spotlight operator, lighting the learning network, analyzing outcomes of integrated AI.

Your story, your pedagogy for your stakeholders, owners of projects and sponsors of projects, is explaining your new PMO, a learning and innovation center.

Offsites Behind, and Ahead

Habits die hard. And change only comes with creating habits. To build a stronghold of rigor and discipline, things must become part of the day. Program Managers and PM Offices live this way. Their behavior is in their DNA. But their jobs and accountability are changing; their perspective is widening, their strategic insight is demanded, lest their value is diminished. If AI is assuming control of calendars and callouts, schedules and scoping, then what is Program Management's mission?

They were once coordinators. Now their jobs will be harder, grander, more profound and valuable. They are enterprise-wide orchestrators, no longer asking when, but rather asking why and how.

At your most recent offsite, whether departmental or corporate, was Program Management leading the "change" discussion, describing not just success in terms of calendar capacity, but in terms of internalized value and sharable insights, sprung from the wells of LLMs, navigated via the web of neural networks. Either in body and soul, or as eponymous program head or even a delegated proxy, was the program management's new lexicon shared? Has portfolio management, auditor and assessor of change, assumed the language of artificial intelligence engagement?

They say that Offsite meetings and internal company conferences occur mostly in the March through May period. That may seem far from today, but it's not. As mortal souls we know the next quarter will fly in the blink of an eye. Then now are the moments to strategically assess market position, glean new insights, translate the program office into one of AI partner. Or at least create that mission as one of the PMO's value, and modality.

The offsite logistical effort is never just an afternoon calendar chat. It is crafted months in advance. And prior to that offsite, there shall be a skeleton agenda. There will be creativity, collegiality, fun and work. But the offsite shall begin with team and department updates and reflection. That reflection will also be a strategic timeline, one of the past and one of the future. This will be the time to articulate and share the program management’s new identity.

Renaissance Pros

PMOs are renaissance professionals, they are expected to articulate portfolio missions, identify orchestration dependencies, story-tell scenarios that represent days in the life of the company, and macro ecosystem accomplishments. They must speak to the brand, to the brand expectations by customers, and how the portfolio is directed. Underneath are the change initiatives, the brainchildren of last year’s offsites, the commitment to the change. Sometimes those initiatives are hidden, like a Where's Waldo canvas, when they should be visible and instrumental. 

In the world of AI, the PMO is growing and maturing as thought leadership and partner of change.

The PMO Leadership are translators and decipherers of project value within days-in-the-life of customers. As projects unfold, what is AI uncovering? Are the AI opportunities inwardly focused, like how can one streamline a critical path, how to build a presentation? Those are rudimentary and transactional questions. They are not strategic insights relative to strategic discoveries in the ecosystem, such as what new methods are used in API stewardship. What are the costs of reusing? What are the security risks? What are the advantages of the LLM currently in use? Are there risks with an agentic suite of tools, and why? These are concerns of project teams, and these are the domains that should be highlighted by the PMO, watching for commonality across departments.

No dinosaur fossils were ever discovered with a surface brush. The PMO excavator must expect to scour the AI universe for evolutionary opportunity.

One might say that these are standard jobs of the CTO office, the Innovation office, or COO. Those roles are not excluded from accountability. But the optimal capture of real-world scenarios comes from the launch of new projects and initiatives, designed to fulfil real work company needs. Project enhancement and development are always great detectives.

The Program Management Office was a firm’s coach, the progression core, itemizing evidence of change, tracking movement and momentum, small and large. The PMO turned the lights yellow, then red, if promises weren't kept. Nevertheless, if employees thought their job was just traffic light, task monitoring, they had limited understanding of progress assurance and the necessity for managing the company’s change portfolio. That mistaken premise was evidence of firm immaturity. On the precipice of 2026, that view is even more inexcusable; the world changed. 

The New Value Chain

The management of the corporate innovation portfolio is fast becoming table stakes. And its success measures and insights are necessitated by the AI catalyst. That catalyst is speaking an entirely new language within the PMO, whose influence touches all domains. The classical view of the firm value chain is a set of functions from perhaps Strategy, to R&D, to Logistics, to Development, to Marketing and Sales. Each has a core competency that builds upon the previous, outputting the firm's value in the ecosystem and facilitated by general corporate support, such as IT and HR.

The value chain model now has a new layer: AI, its models, its knowledge, its access, its governance. AI is not simply a supporting function internal to the sequence of competencies. AI is the new ecosystem, which is leveraged in strategic deliberation and innovation progress. It is the bases for knowledge management. 

The PMO AI accountability is about learning, orchestration, shared relational networks. Learnings within one part of the firm, or ecosystem, or client, are shareable and embraced by other parts, be they departments, managers, professionals. They mature and evolve under project advancement which is opening eyes to the universe of experience. As long as the accountability is a strategic one and not simply transactional. 

The entire knowledge canvas has changed. Every brush stroke paints movement. Learnings within one project constitute a breakthrough to be used in strategic foresight. Imagine the permutations of discovery within projects that are facilitated by AI. The spillovers are enormous, and they showcase gems of value that provide us new insight market demand profiles, the risk palettes, the new competitors, new entrants, ready to be dissected and uncorked for glimpses into our own competitiveness. 

AI in the PMO is about shared cognition, Multiple initiatives continuously influence each other through shared data, models, assumptions, and learning—even if they have no formally noted dependency. Are we asking AI to just plot a timeline, or are we demanding it synthesize risks across an ecosystem?

We expect technologists to understand advantages of AI, new risk management concerns, new coding exposures if not validated. We have not expected the PMO to encourage this enough. Across every value chain component within every initiative is knowledge, from sharing immersive data, benchmarking of models, structural design of assumptions, engagement techniques with new LLM. Learning in one area of the project emphasizes decision-making as continuous, static, not transactional nor episodic. Is our PMO leadership articulating this new paradigm?

Happy 2026, New PMO 

Prepare your foundation and set your objectives for the quarter. Expand the program visibility and its criticality. Speak the new language of AI partnership, coaching your project owners and stakeholders. If it is not new to them, then you are working in mature AI collaboration. If it new to them, their perspectives will enhance and bolster the program office's currency with feedback. 

For the next offsite, discuss strategic program exploration with AI. Do not simply identify GenAI dialogs that show number of projects going into yellow status, or some simplistic calculation around team demand and constraints.

Explain your AI foundation as an ally within the PMO, an expected part of your operation in exploring use cases of projects, program challenges experienced by uncovered, external companies, probabilistic successes, latest corporate risks in the ecosystem that could be risks of other internal stakeholders.

The focus is morphing your accountability from schedule policer to landscape sensor, finder of knowledge stores and treasure maps that lead to new strategies and competitive opportunity. 

Uncover AI’s broad tapestry, sharing knowledge and cross-pollinating performance stumbles, because another project may well go through the same.

There has never been such a time of knowledge availability and consolidation. Orchestrators of portfolio value are the new visionaries who recognize gaps and needs, stewards of corporate change and innovation. 

The PMO of yesterday is becoming the AI Evolutionist of tomorrow.