Artificial Intelligence in Megaprojects: The Next Frontier.

Megaprojects are continuing to capture worldwide attention from India’s Smart Cities, to the $4.75 billion Hadron Collider at CERN, to the US $150 billion International Space Station, and Europe’s largest railway infrastructure project, Crossrail in London. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates global investment needs of $6.3 trillion per year from 2016-2030 (Mirabile, et al. 2017). To meet this growing demand, there has been a recent call, within the megaproject scholarship, for a better understanding of “what goes on in megaprojects – how they are managed and organized, from within, by the managers who are tasked with bringing them to fruition.” (Söderlund, et al. 2017). Studies about megaprojects have generally concentrated on the cost conflicts between the stakeholders and cost overrun issues (Adam et al., 2014; Flyvbjerg, 2017), however these have been superseded by more important issues in recent years such as project security, protecting the health and safety of its workers, project sustainability and value creation, and managing the impact of climate change and presently a global pandemic. All of these require a more agile approach to project management and a more sophisticated intelligence that can be generated through Algorithms that are used to generate artificially intelligent systems. Through an analysis of the AI and Project Management literature, ethnographic studies, and semi-structured interviews with project management professionals, this paper explores the growing use of Artificial Intelligence to manage megaprojects including the obligations of private industry, and the government as the guardian of the public interest, while at the same time exploring the technical, managerial and ethical considerations in the deployment of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]