Top 4 Key Challenges Solved by Automated Project Management (2025)

In Deloitte’s latest State of AI in the Enterprise report, 94% of top-performing business leaders report AI as a critical factor in their organization’s productivity. In past reports, business leaders showed far more hesitance on the value and future of AI in business operations management. This change reveals the technological leaps that AI-assisted project management software has made in the years since then.

It also underscores the need for top-performing businesses to invest in project management automation that solves key challenges in their current workflows instead of adding new ones. This article addresses these 4 key challenges facing business leaders:

1. Over-reliance on Email Ecosystems
2. Low Progress Visibility
3. Lost Processing Time
4. Hesitation toward New Workflows

Our goal is to underline how modern professional services automation systems can solve these challenges by refining your business and operations management in 2025 and beyond.

1. Over-reliance on Email Ecosystems

In the last decade, email communication has become outdated. According to a recent Slack study, nearly half of Gen Z workers report a desire for better communication methods. Yet, according to the same study, the average employee still spends around 9 hours on their email server each week.

This time could be better spent managing human resource issues, leading teams, and generating creative insights. Before professional services automation, messaging tasks could not be reliably streamlined – now, modern businesses have the means to evolve past outdated email workflows.

With automated project management tools, employee calendars can be automated to reduce the time that employees need to spend sifting through their email servers and other communication apps like Teams and Slack. Critical dates such as task assignments, deadlines, meetings, and more can be centralized per workflow to give individuals a full view of their responsibilities.

Automated notification systems save employees hours each week by eliminating labor-intensive messaging tasks. This frees up time for more critical tasks while the business phases out its email workflows in favor of modern communication methods.

2. Low Progress Visibility

Low progress visibility impacts workers at all levels of an organization’s project management. Using conventional project management tools, common tasks are allocated to separate spreadsheets, including:

With automated project management software, businesses can automate each factor of their team’s progress tracking through customized dashboards, centralized for each workflow. This allows individuals to view relevant KPIs, analyze data more fluently, and make strategic decisions based on current performance without handling multiple spreadsheets.

This benefit extends to the related challenge of having inadequate or expensive reporting workflows. Process automation allows organizations to compile, process, scan, and analyze their unique performance metrics without adding manual accounting labor. AI-assisted software can now spot industry trends and make strategic recommendations based on more data than human analysts can feasibly process.

3. Lost Processing Time

Losing time is a key challenge for businesses in all industry sectors. One of the primary areas in need of refinement is team-level delegation. For many modern businesses, this involves multi-level approval requests, document retrieval processes, and other administrative tasks.

Professional services automation allows team leaders to delegate responsibilities more effectively, leaving more time for critical tasks. Using modern systems, project leads can set pre-set rules based on skill availability, auto-assign tasks to relevant parties, and approve requests automatically.

Rather than handle individual project documents, team leaders can use standardized templates created by the AI-assisted management platform. Automatically storing, accessing, and implementing these documents saves businesses time and energy at all levels of their HR workflows.

4. Hesitation to New Workflows

Nearly half of upper-level managers have observed fear and hesitation in their teams when integrating AI-assisted project management tools. While the benefits of AI process automation are clear, many managers fear that these tools will eliminate the human touch from their project management strategies.

However, notable studies conducted by HBR demonstrated in 2024 that automated fulfillment systems work more efficiently when human workers add strategies and input to the system’s initial results. These findings will also apply to AI-assisted process automation moving forward. 

As workers learn to work with AI to improve their project management workflows, upper-level management will become less hesitant about integrating advanced tools into their teams.

Takeaways for Business Leaders

AI meets many of the challenges of modern project management through the growing industry of professional services automation. It rises to meet these four key challenges by offering vital benefits to modern businesses, including:

However, its implementation is not always straightforward. Automated business operations management can over-complicate a business’s workflow if left unsupervised. The right balance of human insight and AI-driven analytics ensures that your business stays in tune with its customers and employee objectives while integrating these time-saving technologies.

Schedule a consultation with our experienced team to learn how our centralized AI-assisted performance automation service can impact your workflow. Our team will customize the solution to your project management needs to ensure that AI works for you, not the other way around.