{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/project-management-specialists/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Project Management Specialists",
    "soc_code": "13-1082",
    "category": "Business",
    "us_employment": 1066670,
    "median_annual_wage": 102320
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 39,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 9,
    "embodiment": 4,
    "liability_shield": 3,
    "trust_premium": 10,
    "judgment_accountability": 13
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Schedule baselining, resource-levelling, burndown charts and stakeholder status decks are structured data transformations that tools already do end-to-end, but chasing a vendor who missed a deliverable, running a tense change-control board, and reading the room in a steering committee are not — the 9 reflects roughly half the week being keystroke work inside Jira/MS Project and half being negotiation nobody has automated.",
    "embodiment": "A 4 rather than 0 covers the site walks, factory or construction visits, and the physical war-room presence PMs use to verify what a status report claims, but the work is fundamentally laptop, calendar, and video-call.",
    "liability_shield": "PMP, PMI-ACP and PRINCE2 are resume filters demanded by job postings, not licences — no statute reserves project management to a credential-holder, and when a program fails it is the sponsoring executive or the signing contract officer, not the PM, who carries legal or fiduciary exposure.",
    "trust_premium": "Sponsors and functional leads do come to rely on a specific PM's read of which teams are actually on track, but PMs are rotated between programs, replaced at contract boundaries, and staffed from agencies routinely — the relationship is useful, not the product being purchased.",
    "judgment_accountability": "At 13 you sit at the top of real discretion without owning the terminal call: you decide what goes on the risk register as red, which of three slipping workstreams to protect, and when to escalate — but scope cuts, budget reallocations and go/no-go on a $4M program get signed by the sponsor or steering committee."
  },
  "rationale": "The documentation half of this job — status reports, Gantt updates, meeting notes, risk registers, budget variance summaries, RAID logs — is already produced at usable quality by AI wired into Jira, Smartsheet, and MS Project. What survives is the political and human work: getting an unwilling engineering lead to commit to a date, deciding which scope to cut when the budget slips, and being the person leadership holds accountable when a $4M program misses. Median PM spends more hours on the automatable half than the accountable half, and PMP is a hiring preference, not a legal shield.",
  "outlook": "Headcount thins as reporting and tracking collapse into project software, and the role bifurcates into fewer, more senior accountable program owners.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift as the reporting tier is fully absorbed: if AI-generated status reports, RAID logs, EVM variance narratives and schedule updates become the default in Jira/Smartsheet/MS Project, the residual role is negotiation with unwilling resource owners, scope-cut decisions, and stakeholder escalation — genuinely two-tiered work. Watch for job postings dropping 'reporting/documentation' from PM duties and adding 'stakeholder negotiation' and 'portfolio trade-off' language.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Federal acquisition rules that name a personally accountable, certified program manager on the contract. DoD already requires EVMS compliance (DFARS 252.234-7002) and DAWIA-certified program managers, and DOE Order 413.3B requires PMCDP-certified federal project directors on capital projects. If those certification-and-named-individual requirements were extended down to contractor-side PMs on major civil/IIJA-funded programs, or if GAO/OMB required a signed human attestation on schedule and cost baselines submitted to Congress, an AI could not hold the slot.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "State licensure capture of construction scheduling: several state PE board opinions already treat CPM schedule and means-and-methods analysis in public works as engineering practice. If a state board issued a rule that baseline and delay-claim schedules submitted on public projects must be sealed by a licensed PE or licensed general contractor's qualifying individual, the schedule-forensics slice of PM work gains a signature requirement.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Named-individual accountability regimes migrating into program governance: if bank or insurer regulators extend senior-manager-accountability style rules (UK SMCR, and the FRB/OCC's use of named accountable executives in consent orders) to require a named human owner for each material change program, and if EU AI Act Article 14 human-oversight duties are read to require a named person accountable for AI-assisted project decisions, the ambiguity-ownership function becomes formally non-delegable.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Narrow route only: owner's-representative and independent-verification work on large capital projects, where lenders and sureties contractually require a named human PM as a condition of draw approval or performance bonding. If surety underwriting guidelines start naming individual PM experience as a bonding condition, that slice becomes human-specified. This does not extend to internal corporate PMO roles, where no buyer pays for humanness.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Realistic ceiling is modest — roughly the mid-50s. The occupation is enormous and mostly internal-corporate, where there is no license, no external buyer, and no statutory signature; the regulatory levers above touch only federal-contract, capital-project, and regulated-financial subsets, maybe a fifth of the million workers. For the median PM in a software or marketing PMO, no plausible institutional change applies and the task-mix shift also shrinks headcount even as it raises the score of the surviving jobs."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 743860,
        "wage": 94500
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 843910,
        "wage": 95370
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 947630,
        "wage": 98580
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 1006160,
        "wage": 100750
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 1066670,
        "wage": 102320
      }
    ],
    "from": 2021,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 43.4,
    "comparable_from": 2021,
    "spans_soc_revision": false
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}