AI is everywhere in project management tools now.
It writes your status updates. It summarizes Slack threads. It drafts sprint retrospectives. It generates project plans.
Everything happens faster. What used to take an hour now takes 30 seconds.
But here's the uncomfortable question: Are we actually communicating better, or are we just creating more noise?
The Promise
The pitch is compelling: AI cuts through information overload.
Your team has 47 unread Slack messages? AI summarizes them. Your backlog has 200 tickets? AI prioritizes them. Your stakeholders want an update? AI writes it.
You get clarity without the grunt work.
Sounds great, right? Except...
The Reality
Here's what's actually happening:
Everyone's using AI to generate content. Status updates, meeting notes, project plans, summaries. The volume of content is exploding.
But AI generated content is often generic. It's grammatically correct but substance light. It sounds right without saying much.
So now you're drowning in plausible sounding updates that don't actually tell you anything useful.
The AI writes a status update. You skim it. It seems fine. But did you actually learn what's happening? Or did you just read 200 words of filler?
The Amplification Problem
AI doesn't just summarize. It also generates. And when everyone has AI tools, the amount of content grows exponentially.
Before AI: You write one status update per week. Takes 20 minutes. You make it concise because writing is effort.
With AI: You generate status updates every day. Takes 30 seconds. You don't bother editing because it's so fast.
Now your stakeholders get 5x more updates. But are those updates 5x more informative? Or just 5x more noise?
AI lowers the barrier to creating content. But it doesn't lower the barrier to creating good content.
The Summary Trap
AI summaries are particularly dangerous.
They make you feel informed without actually informing you. You read the summary, get the gist, and move on.
But summaries lose nuance. They miss context. They flatten disagreement into consensus.
You think you know what's happening, but you're operating on a lossy compression of reality.
And when everyone's reading summaries instead of source material, collective understanding degrades.
When AI Actually Helps
To be fair, there are cases where AI genuinely reduces noise:
Consolidating scattered info: If your project context is spread across Slack, Jira, Notion, and email, AI can pull it together.
Translating between audiences: AI can turn technical updates into business language, or vice versa.
Catching what you missed: If you were out for a few days, AI can get you up to speed without reading 300 messages.
Drafting tedious documents: Things like meeting notes or status reports where the structure is predictable.
But the key word is supplement, not replace. AI should augment human judgment, not substitute for it.
The Discipline Required
If you're going to use AI for project management, you need discipline:
Edit the output. Don't just accept what AI generates. Make it concise, specific, and useful.
Know when not to use it. Sometimes a three sentence manual update is better than a twelve paragraph AI generated one.
Don't generate content just because it's easy. Ask: does this update add value, or am I just feeding the content machine?
Read the source, not just the summary. At least for important decisions.
The tool doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to communicate clearly.
The Bigger Trend
We're seeing the same pattern across knowledge work:
AI makes it easy to create content. So content explodes. But most of it is low value.
The bottleneck isn't creation anymore. It's curation. Figuring out what's worth paying attention to.
In project management, this means:
More status updates, but less actual status clarity.
More summaries, but less deep understanding.
More documents, but less shared context.
We're producing more while communicating less effectively.
The Counterintuitive Solution
The answer isn't "don't use AI." It's use AI to create less, not more.
Use AI to make your updates more concise, not more frequent.
Use AI to identify what's important, not to generate summaries of everything.
Use AI to reduce the number of meetings, not to transcribe and summarize all of them.
The goal should be less noise, not faster noise.
The Litmus Test
Before hitting "send" on that AI generated update, ask:
If I had to write this by hand, would I bother?
If no, don't send it. The world doesn't need more content just because it's easy to create.
AI should amplify signal, not noise.
Use it to clarify, not to obscure. Use it to cut through information overload, not contribute to it.
Because a faster way to generate noise is still just noise. And nobody needs more of that.