What Will Project Leaders Stop Doing Because of AI?

Tim Fisher: Hello, and welcome to The Future of AI in Project Management, where we go beyond the pitch deck and look at how AI is actually changing the way teams plan, deliver, and run work. Today, we're featuring Projectworks. If you run a consulting or professional services firm and you're trying to work out where AI can genuinely reduce non-billable admin, this is the conversation to be in.

So joining us today is Mark Orttung, CEO of Projectworks. Mark has spent three decades building technology platforms and leading consulting firms, with deep expertise in professional services, operations, and scaling technology businesses. Today, he leads Projectworks, helping consulting firms use AI to reduce operational complexity and run their businesses more efficiently.

Mark, great to have you here.

Mark Orttung: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Tim Fisher: So give us the 30 second version of Projectworks for folks who might not be aware. What does it do? Who's it built for?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, we think of it as what I call a consulting growth platform, so it's effectively a platform to run your firm, everything from proposals, contracts, projects, financials, resource planning, and then some of the tactical stuff like time sheets and expenses leading into invoicing and getting paid.

So it's really that end-to-end process, and hopefully we take away all that back office admin and make you-- give you more time to go work with clients, which is what, what you should be doing.

Tim Fisher: Maybe a comical question in 2026, but why is AI such a big focus for you guys right now?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, it's really a natural fit when you think about a couple things.

First off, and I hope I don't offend anybody, but I think most services firms are really bad at running their own firm, as they should be. They're out with clients, and they spend all their time on billable work, and no-- especially if you're in an SMB firm, maybe 50 people, 100 people, nobody has time to work on the back office, and yet you need to, to keep your margins up, to get your growth up.

And so we're here to help both automate that, but also with AI, it just naturally can begin to do the work for you and just give you time back. In many cases, it's do the things that you're neglecting. It's not even giving you time back in some cases, it's just taking care of things that you should be, but you're not.

Tim Fisher: So you spent years building around the way consulting firms actually operate. So as firms get bigger, where do you see the biggest operational friction showing up? And what tends to pull senior people away from the work they actually got into this to do and are actually paid to do?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, I think it's a few things.

I've written about this. I think there's a couple of walls you hit as you grow a firm. So in the very beginning with a small firm, the founder or group of founders should do everything. And then there's a point they hit somewhere around five or eight million in revenue where they are the bottleneck. So you need to be able to get a team that can extend your bandwidth, so you can still be involved, but they can help you do things.

They need information to do that. You need to decentralize the information, so having a platform that shares the information really makes that possible The second wall is somewhere between 25 and 35 million typically, and that's where you really need to begin to decentralize leadership. Again, having people who can run parts of your firm and having all of you sharing a view of information, both what's happened historically and what's going to happen in the next month or quarter, is crucial to getting past this second wall where you're really beginning to bring in

What, what I did when I ran a, a firm, when we passed the $40 million number, we had to get five general managers who effectively were each running their own firm, and you need to give them information to do it.

Tim Fisher: So as companies are busting through these walls and they're getting bigger, what tends to break first operationally?

Like resourcing, forecasting, connecting sales to delivery, something else?

Mark Orttung: I think the very most basic thing is project financials and client financials, and really deeply understanding which of my projects are most profitable, which ones are not. Are they, you know, knowing two months ahead of time that they're off track financially?

I think that having that core discipline around projects and gross margin is the first piece. Quite often the next piece is resource management There's usually a person who knows everyone and knows all their skills and all their interests, and you can do that depending on how good your person is, up to fifty people or eighty people.

But you really at some point just need a system to help you keep track of who's working on what, how long are they committed for, how much of that is contracted, how much of that we think will happen but isn't contracted, and really kind of keeping all that straight.

Tim Fisher: We've been talking a little bit, you know, around losing sharp people in the business to the administrative work.

Like, where do you see that happening the most, and what does it actually cost a firm beyond just, like, non-billable hours?

Mark Orttung: I think that one of the areas that it happens the most actually is in selling new work. It's easy to say we're not gonna bother with our admin, but you're not gonna skip out on writing a proposal or answering an RFP.

And that almost always involved, at least in my experience, our most senior people. You get your practitioners, you want them to help tell the story. They're the only ones who really have the best content to put in the proposal. So you're burning hours, and you're sort of burning the person a little bit too, right?

It's... In my experience, it was like, "Can you do this in the evening? Can you do this over the weekend? Because we still need you at the client, and the client needs you billable most of the time." And it's both your most expensive people, you're kinda burning them out, and so it's both expensive and draining.

Tim Fisher: So there's definitely a disconnect between winning the work and actually delivering on it profitably. So, like, why is it so difficult for firms to keep proposals and resourcing and budgets and delivery all, all that aligned?

Mark Orttung: I think historically there's been sort of different systems. There's been a CRM and there's been a resource system, and they're not typically that well integrated.

That's one of the things we've really strived to do, is to build this end-to-end view from proposal to contract to immediately getting into your project financials and your resource planning and having all that data flow really smoothly. And so that's something that I think has only recently been available, and it's something we're really passionate about, that kind of end-to-end flow of data.

Tim Fisher: When you talk to consulting leaders right now what are they under the most pressure to improve? Growth or profitability or utilization or doing more with what they have? What are you, what are you hearing out there?

Mark Orttung: I hear growth, because if your firm isn't growing, all these other things break.

So typically, to have a great services firm, you wanna hire the best people you can. They're ambitious. They want more challenge. They wanna always be learning. They wanna take on more responsibility. If you're growing and you have more clients and more projects, all those things are, are required of your firm.

If you're stagnant or shrinking, then you don't have new opportunities for your talented people. You wanna give your people great raises, compensate them well. If you're not growing, you're not able to hire new people on the more junior levels to kinda keep your overall pay at a roughly the same level while the people that you have move up.

So yeah, growth, it just solves so many of the other challenges and it makes it a lot easier to run the firm.

Tim Fisher: How do you see the role of the project or delivery leader changing?

Mark Orttung: First, I think it's that human in the loop, it's that judgment call. The system's gonna come up with a lot of things it's suggesting, and you really still want somebody to be applying judgment to it and saying yes or no.

You also need to be asking the right question.

Tim Fisher: Let's fast-forward a little bit into the future. It's three years, five years from now. What do you think running a professional services firm looks like when AI is enabled across the business?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, I think it's a couple things. One, I think that a lot of the stuff that is admin that's taking away your time or that you're neglecting because it's admin will be automated, and so I think it frees you up to do more work for clients.

I think if you look around the world, we have a lot of really, really hard problems. I think the world needs experts more than it ever did. So I think AI will also be a part of how you deliver, and I think it really multiplies that expertise and accelerates the expert's ability to solve problems. So it makes me an optimist.

You know, I think more time of really smart people being really productive against this really hard set of problems we've got as a society and then less admin. It makes me excited for that future, I think. Hopefully we'll spend more time on the hard things and get really good progress.

Tim Fisher: I share your perspective.

So this next question, I... You have it pretty clear, and we even talked about it a few minutes ago around just meeting people where they are. But as time goes on, do you think people will spend more time in connected conversational places like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever future iterations any of these things are?

Or do you think there's always gonna be a place for a native UI and UX and all of that in the future?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, it's a great question. I personally think that people will divide into different groups, and some of them, the nerdiest of us, are gonna spend most of our time in, in chat or in Claude or, you know, and they're gonna be programming, and they're gonna actually sort of say it's all gotta be command line, and it's g- you know, the most efficient thing possible.

But I talk to a lot of people who aren't sort of that mindset. They want to interact visually. They want to see, "Show me where my resources are. I want a heat map. I want to absorb all this information quickly, and I wanna m- manipulate it through the interface." And then there's a few that I've met that are kind of in between those two.

They're like, "I wanna see it, but then I also wanna prompt it occasionally." And so that's why we're doing all three, and I, I really think all three will have a place. There'll be certain applications where you just wanna see it, and you can absorb so much information in a picture. And other things, you just wanna ask it a question and have it go do a bunch of work and come back and give you a relatively quick answer.

And then there'll be the people... there's always gonna be Lots of other tools, and we just wanna be a member of that community, if you will. So all the data we've got should be there. If you've got meeting note takers, there's dozens of them, we're not gonna do that. We'll just let you pull that right in.

Yeah, so we wanna be, as I said earlier, we'll meet you where you are.

Tim Fisher: I love it. What future challenges do you think your customers are gonna face? Everything is changing and very quickly, and, like, how are you prepared to help them solve those with AI?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, I think a lot of it is they're not sure how to take AI and really change their business processes.

I think there's this great analogy that we covered on, on our podcast where when electricity was introduced, the, the very first thing everybody did was get light bulbs. And so in the factory context, now you have a light bulb, and it, it lowered injuries, and it made people slightly faster in their individual task.

The second thing they did is they shared a motor, and they have these crazy pictures of 12 people huddled around a motor that's working their machines through these crazy belts. And then they show the Ford assembly line, where they actually rethought the whole process, whole thing changed, and they were able to pump a car out every minute or whatever it was, you know.

And I think we're all mostly with light bulbs, like talking to ChatGPT, mostly just in our own work area. Some people have moved to the work team, and so part of what we're trying to do is help people really think about that business process of winning work, delivering work, getting paid for work, and get to that more sort of assembly line kinda view.

And that's, I think, where a tool like ours can really help because we are thinking in business process, and we're thinking about most people just don't have the time to do that for their internal work, and that's something we obsess about every day. So we can help with that.

Tim Fisher: I like that analogy a lot, and if you don't mind, I'm gonna steal it because I have one I've been working on for years and involves a rocket and horses, and it's just not nearly as good as what you just came up with, so thank you in advance.

Lastly, without giving away any secrets, unless you choose to, can you give us a glimpse on what's next on your AI roadmap? What excites you a lot about where your product is headed and what you guys are gonna be coming out with?

Mark Orttung: Yeah. It's, it's a few things. We started Kea with resource planning and time sheets.

Very rapidly, the team is expanding it across the whole everything in our product, and it's actually even moving faster than we had planned, which is one of the great surprises and great joys of AI, is that we're using it ourselves to build it, and it's amazing how fast you can move. So the way we think about it is there's sort of a system of record, so we are the place where we can be the source of truth for what work did you do?

Was it profitable? Who charged how many hours? All those kinds of things. And now we have what we talk about as a system of action, where we're gonna try to do the work for you, and that's really Kea is gonna come in and say, "Let me do that task for you. Let me get your time cards done. Let me get your invoices prepped.

Let me help you with your proposal." So I'm really excited about the combination of those two things, like having a source of truth and having someone helping me do the work.

Tim Fisher: Now it's time for Q&A. So one question that came up that comes up frequently is, okay, somebody's just getting started with Projectworks, and they love what they're seeing here.

The AI stuff is really cool. They can't imagine this world where they can move everyone around and do time sheets in an instant and have all this access to Claude, but they're just getting started. So how much historical data or setup does Kia need before its resourcing recommendations become actually useful?

Mark Orttung: One of the things I think sets Projectworks apart is we, when we deploy a new customer, we bring a lot of your historical data, and we're working with small and medium firms, many of whom are coming off of no platform or their platform is this amazing Excel spreadsheet, and we will grab that data. We'll-- So we'll get your old projects, we'll get your clients, we'll get your time sheets, we'll get your invoices, we'll bring them in.

So from the beginning, we've got a lot of data, and Kia becomes very smart very quickly because of that Yeah, so I would say almost immediately you'll be up and running and lots of great stuff to work with.

Tim Fisher: At what point does the human approve and what does it do when it is incompetent? And I'm assuming that's referring to Kia.

So I think like a general sort of commentary around it maybe is enough and not necessarily a deep dive into the, the technical like borders and things like that. But we all have experienced situations using AI where it's pretty clear that there is a desire to provide you an answer even if there's not a good answer to be provided.

And when you're basing conversations on top, when you're sitting conversations on layer on top of really important data that does exist in like numerical form all over project works, like where are those lines? How have you guys thought about how to handle that properly?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, it really does matter what context you're in.

As you saw, there's a lot of prompting about, "This is what I'm going to do, approve." And so especially when we're writing something, we're gonna almost 100% of the time we're gonna be asking for permission to make this edit. Sometimes I'll cancel that because I'm not entirely sure that it's correct, and I'll-- I maybe I'll go dig around and look at the data a little bit more before.

You can always go get that prompt and put it back in, and you'll get right back to the place where you were, and then hit Accept if you decide, "Okay, actually, I didn't realize that, but this is correct." So you do get y- if it's gonna write something, you're gonna get a chance to say yes or no. And if it's reading something, it'll ask you, I...

and most, as I mentioned earlier, I almost always say, "Go for it," when you're reading data. Like I'll, I'll let it do that because I know it's got our access control built in, and so it's not gonna read things it can't or shouldn't.

Tim Fisher: Where else are customers seeing the fastest reduction in this like painful non-billable work that we're all trying to avoid?

Mark Orttung: Yeah. One of the things that I've seen that's actually fascinating to me is not so much a reduction in time, but an increase in your business results. So we've divided our customer base into two, those that plan two months into the future using that resource tool and those that don't. And so the planners, if you will, get about 8% higher utilization.

They have about just under 25% higher revenue per employee And their growth rate is about 20 or 25% higher. So it's-- they're kind of staggering numbers, and a lot of it comes down to that point where you're trying to get your pipeline and your people, and you're trying to hire and sell work at the same pace.

And for me, it was always the dreaded, "Okay, we've got a new team of eight. They're ready to go," and then the client actually doesn't start for three more weeks. And now you've got eight people, you're paying them... If you're running a 33% margin and you just burn three weeks, you've now gotta work nine weeks billable, and you're back to zero.

So, getting that start date lined up correctly really impacts your revenue per employee. It really impacts your utilization. To me, I think one of the greatest levers, and I thought it was fascinating that the tie between operations and growth is so strong that if you operate better, it actually affects your revenue and your growth rate as well.

So I think there's this sort of flywheel, and that's really why we wanna do this end-to-end process and help you get proposals, projects planning into resource planning, and all of it makes you more efficient and more profitable.

Tim Fisher: Cool. Kind of a similar question, but, but a little higher level. Like, how should a consulting firm measure the ROI of AI when the value is sometimes a confusing mix of time saved and faster decisions and better utilization?

Do you have a, do you have an opinion on that?

Mark Orttung: Yeah. I think you'll start with time saved. So proposals is a great example where it's your most expensive, most valuable people often doing work like trying to find the last time we did this, trying to find the right content to put in. Th- that was what we always did, right?

So having that content library, having the old proposals loaded saves them time. So that's easy to measure. And then I think you'll start to see your win rate go up, and so that's a second order that is just fantastic if you can start to measure your win rate. And some of that is gonna be writing better proposals, getting more of them out, and some of that will be better judgment around, "This isn't a great one to work on," or whatever it might be.

But having a system, having everybody working together, you can hopefully both save time and win more of what you do work on.

Tim Fisher: Great. What do you think people are going to just stop manually doing in the next few years? A little bit related to some of the other future ones that I loved talking about earlier, but really specifically, what are people just going to look back and go, "I can't believe we ever did this ourselves"?

Mark Orttung: I think one that'll be on the list is time sheets. I think everybody hates-

Tim Fisher: Please and thank you ...

Mark Orttung: time sheet. Yeah, right? It's just painful, and there's enough information in the world now between your Jira tickets and your calendar and your status meeting and all these things that AI can... You know, we-- I showed a little bit of that.

AI can digest, give you a draft. I think we'll-- pretty quickly we'll all be reviewing a draft rather than trying to remember what exactly did I do. That's one of my favorites I think all the groundwork and proposals will be gone shortly. I think just write a story, write a good story arc, and be compelling about that, and even get feedback on it.

"This isn't that compelling. Are you sure this is what you wanna go with?" Will be some of the feedback you'll be getting from the system, but that's way better than like, "Who, d- well, didn't somebody two weeks ago have this new innovative way? And like, where's the PowerPoint for that? Can somebody send it to me?"

And that's what I used to spend a lot of time on with proposals.

Tim Fisher: It's funny to hear you talk because there's just, there's so many things that we just believe or have accepted are like a rational part of the job that we should be doing, which in reality it's all the things around the edges that just, you know, keep this tiny bit of time t- to do the core bit of work and hopefully, you know, services like yours and AI in general can help with all that.

But yeah, it'll be, it'll be so interesting to look back from the future and laugh at ourselves. So if people want to know more about Projectworks, want to see what this is all about and, and your AI capabilities, where should they go, or what would you like them to do next?

Mark Orttung: Yeah, a couple things. Go to projectworks.com.

Upper right-hand corner, right, is a Book a Demo. And so I just sort of scratched the surface of what we can do. There's a lot of other stuff in the platform, and we'd love to take time and, and really dive in with people. So I'd say come to Projectworks and sign up for a demo. The team and I will walk you through it.

And reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm available, happy to chat, and talk about whatever, whatever's going on.

Tim Fisher: Awesome. You just gave us permission to call you directly. I appreciate that.

Mark Orttung: Yes. Yes.

Tim Fisher: Okay, Mark, that was awesome. Thank you so much. It was all the time we had for today, unfortunately. Thank you for joining us, and have a great day, and we'll see you all at the next Future of AI in Project Management session.

Thanks again, Mark.

Mark Orttung: Thank you.