A two-year-long benchmark for USA champions
FEATURED PAPER
By Federico Minelle, Franco Stolfi, Roberto Di Gioacchino
Rome, Italy
Abstract
The benchmarking of increasingly numerous generative AI tools continues, simulating their use as support for the Project Manager (PM) responsible for a public ICT project within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Following periodic evaluations that began approximately two years ago on the quality offered by the most widespread AI tools, an additional USA “champion” has now been included, which has been on the market, presenting itself as a web search tool enhanced with AI: Perplexity. Overall, AI support in the role expected from a Project Manager’s personal assistant is increasingly effective, although still oriented toward offering methodological/didactic support rather than providing punctual and “action-oriented” answers as required by emerging situations. Exactly what a project manager under pressure would be looking for! The general orientation toward greater transparency regarding the sources of provided indications and underlying reasoning is appreciable.
Brief History: AI at work as a Project Manager assistant
We decided to update the experimental evaluation of the quality shown by the main market players (for now those of USA origin) in performing the function of “virtual assistant” to support a project manager responsible for a public ICT project, also comparing it with previous experiences [1, 2].
Some of the most important international “gurus” in the field of project management confirm their belief that generative AI is already revolutionizing the work of project managers, experimenting with and proposing various innovative tools [3, 4]. Currently, the presented benchmark is limited to considering the main players already previously tested (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), to which we now wanted to add an additional web search tool enhanced with AI: Perplexity, available from the very beginning and of USA origin, too. It should be noted that the latter is now offered as a complimentary service to users of an Italian telecom provider (maybe in other countries, too) and has recently also released the agentic browser Comet [1]!
We envisage, in the near future, to extend the evaluation including emerging tools from China and Europe, already partially tested [2].
Benchmark current plan
The previously adopted approach [1, 2] was confirmed, which has now been reapplied to each of the selected tools. In summary, we recall that the quality of each tool was tested by prompting the same series of questions, already posed in previous benchmarks, about the management of the sample project: the one already constructed as an extrapolation (with appropriate simplifications) from an actual ICT project of the Italian Public Administration: “Integration of PA Payment Services” (ISPA).
The simulated situations for posing questions were instanced and focused, as in previous tests, in the following three phases:
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- Phase 1 – Methodological Approach (at project start),
- Phase 2 – Situation/Action (after 1 month from project start),
- Phase 3 – Lessons Learned (1 week before project end).
It should be noted that the performed benchmark is both “cross-sectional” (comparison of quality characteristics among selected tools) and “longitudinal” (comparison between current and previous quality of the same tool, approximately two years from its first evaluation and periodically repeated).
More…
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How to cite this paper: Minelle, F., Stolfi, F., Di Gioacchino, R. (2025). AI to support the Project Manager: a two-year-long benchmark for USA champions; PM World Journal, Vol. XIV, Issue XI, November. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/pmwj158-Nov2025-Minelle-Stolfi-DiGioacchino-AI-to-support-the-project-manager-2.pdf
About the Authors
Federico Minelle
Rome, Italy
Federico Minelle graduated in Physics at “Sapienza” – Rome University, discussing his Master’s degree thesis on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research project. Afterwards, for more than 40 years he consulted in Business Organization, Information Systems and Project Management.
As a partner at Accenture and then as senior partner of the Italian consultancy firm PRS – Planning, Ricerche e Studi, he managed and monitored significant projects in several industries, mainly in Engineering and Construction (manufacturing and nuclear power plants, transportation infrastructures) and in Government (ICT and process innovation).
Federico taught for more than 20 years Business Information Systems in the Computer Science Dept. of “Sapienza” – Rome University, where he also taught Project Management & ICT for the academic master’s degree in ICT Governance and Audit.
He was Editorial Director and then Scientific Director of the Italian journal “Il Project Manager”, developing a fruitful cooperation with the PM World Journal. Just after retiring at mid 2022, he was enrolled in the Scientific Council of the same Italian journal, where he continues to write editorial notes, papers and book reviews.
He is an honorary fellow of ISIPM (Italian Institute for Project Management).
Since 2018 Federico Minelle was an International Editorial Advisor for the PM World Journal (PMWJ), recently appointed as Honorary Industry Advisor of PMWJ&L (Project Management World Journal and Library).
Federico has authored several papers and seminars on Cost/Benefit analysis for ICT Government projects and on PMO functions in ICT organizations.
Federico can be contacted at minelle@di.uniroma1.it.
Franco Stolfi
Rome, Italy
Franco Stolfi graduated in Computer Science at Salerno (Italy) University. For more than 40 years he has been consulting in Business Organization, Information Systems and ICT governance (Project, Security, Service and Quality Management).
Previously as director of an ICT SME company and now as senior partner of P.R.S. Planning, Ricerche e Studi (an Italy based consulting firm on ICT governance, security, monitoring and training), he manages PMO services and monitors large ICT projects on process innovation, digital transformation and ML/Blockchain, for Government Departments and Companies.
He was contract professor on Business Information Systems in the Computer Science Dept of “Sapienza” – Rome University, he also taught Project Management & ICT Governance for the academic master’s degree in ICT Governance and Audit and he held several seminars to Government officials.
Member of the editorial staff of the “Il Project Manager” Italian journal, where he wrote several articles on project management. He also co-authored many papers & studies (e.g.: Quality in the websites of the Italian Public Administration; Quality ICT procurement guidelines issued by the Government Agency for ICT; Project Life Cycle Economics book published by Gower).
He is certified Prince2 V2 practitioner, Lead auditor for IT service management ISO-IEC 20000, ITIL, Lead auditor for quality management systems ISO/9001, Lead auditor for Information Security Management Systems ISO/27001, ICT Project Manager certified by Accredia and ISIPM-Prado© Auditor.
He is board member of ISIPM Professioni (Italian Institute for Project Management – professional Project Manager).
Franco can be contacted at stolfi@prsmonitor.it
Roberto Di Gioacchino
Rome, Italy
Graduated in Electronic Engineering at “Sapienza” – Rome University, presenting a Master’s degree thesis on Project Management.
For more than 30 years he’ has been consulting in Business Organization, Information Systems and Project Management.
He is senior partner and administrative director of P.R.S. Planning, Ricerche e Studi (an Italy based consulting firm on ICT governance, security, monitoring and training), he manages PMO services and monitors large ICT projects on process innovation, digital transformation and ML/Blockchain, for Government Departments and Companies.
Previously member of the Executive Board of ASSINTEL (Italian Association of ICT Companies)
He is certified: ITIL V3, Prince2 Practitioner, ISIPM-Prado© Auditor
Roberto can be contacted at: digioacchino@prsmonitor.it
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/it/comet/gettingstarted?utm_source=student_comet_onboarding
