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AI in portfolio management

There isn't a vendor left who doesn't put "AI-powered" on their website. The question isn't whether a tool has AI anymore. The question that actually matters, and that most vendor pages leave conveniently vague, is what happens to what that AI hands back.

Two very different things that both get called "AI"

On one side is AI that suggests something — a summary, a first description, an estimate — that you choose to act on or not. On the other side is AI that records a decision or sets a task in motion on its own, with nobody in between.

Marketing copy rarely draws that line. "AI-driven portfolio management" sounds the same for both, and you usually only find out which side of that line a vendor is on once you're actually using the product.

What Migreat! already does here

For an idea that's still incomplete, Migreat! from Promigion can draft a description, an estimate of cost and duration, and a suggested strategic theme to link it to. That draft appears in a separate, clearly marked block — not straight into the fields themselves. You take over whatever you want, leave the rest, and only then do you save the idea yourself. Two separate steps, neither one a decision.

There's also an AI assessment of an idea's likelihood of success, available where the AI features are switched on, separate from the score the system calculates itself. How the two relate to each other — and why they're deliberately not merged — is covered on the from idea to an approved project page.

What isn't there, and stays that way

There's no screen where you have a conversation with the system: every AI feature works the same way — one question, one answer, no follow-up questions, and no session that remembers what you said earlier. The AI features advise: they decide nothing and act on nothing.

And AI isn't watching by default, either. There's a feature that can recognise messages in a connected Teams channel as a possible action, risk or decision — but it's switched off per project until someone deliberately turns it on. Nothing gets monitored without that being chosen first.

How to weigh a vendor's AI claims

Three questions that get you further, faster, than the vendor's website.

  1. What happens to the AI's output — does it appear as a suggestion you adopt yourself, or does it change something in the system directly?

  2. Is there an AI feature that does act automatically — creating a task, setting a status — and if so, can you turn that off per project or per user?

  3. Can you see an example of what the AI would actually produce for your own situation, or does it stay at a demo with made-up data?

How that same distinction — a system that informs, a person who decides — also applies to a score and a decision is covered in the guide prioritising projects. More on this subject is in the guides. Exactly how that works for messages in a Teams project channel is on the page for the Microsoft Teams integration.