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KPMG just dropped a number on people in my seat. They surveyed 306 Canadian executives. 39% of them expect AI agents to be leading project management for their teams within 2-3 years. 66% are already moving to a fully integrated AI-human workforce. First time the role-redefinition forecast is in survey data, not in an opinion column.
I run a PM workflow with an agent fleet doing most of the drafting and a lot of the review. So when an executive survey predicts the next two years of my job, I read it as primary source material on what the people who sign my budget are planning to assume.
Two things stood out.
What the executives got right
The direction is correct. The role really is shifting toward direction-and-review instead of artifact authorship. My morning two years ago was inbox plus drafting the day's first brief. My morning today is fleet status, then choosing which of last night's drafts is shippable, which needs another pass, and which got the wrong scope baked in and needs to be killed before it gets routed.
The horizon is also realistic, depending on where you're starting from. If your team has not yet stood up an agent stack alongside engineering work, 24-36 months to "agents leading PM" is plausible. There is a real procurement, instruction-tuning, governance-design, trust-building cycle to go through. None of it is fast on the first lap.
The integrated-workforce framing is the part the dev side will recognize fastest. The pattern is the same one engineering already lives: a PR queue where some commits are human-authored, some are agent-authored, and the human decision surface is mostly review and override. The PM equivalent is here. It looks like a doc queue, a roadmap delta queue, a sprint-scope queue. Same shape, different artifacts.
What the survey didn't ask
Executive surveys ask about role-level shifts. They don't ask the day-level question, which is the one engineers and PMs both actually live in.
The day-level question is: what does the morning look like, what's in the queue, what runs without you, what blocks on a human call, where does the dev-PM interface change shape because the PM is mostly directing instead of authoring?
For the dev side, the change that matters is on the spec-to-ship loop. Specifically, the spec side gets shorter and the review side gets longer. The PM is still naming what to build, but the artifact that lands in your repo as the brief or the scoped doc is increasingly drafted by an agent the PM directed and reviewed. The conversation about the spec moves from "let me write this up and send it Tuesday" to "the agent drafted three variants overnight, here's the one I'd ship, push back if anything looks off." Faster on the spec side. Slower on the review side, because the dev now has to verify that the directed-and-reviewed spec is still coherent before committing to it.
The survey doesn't measure that loop. It measures the hiring intent and the workforce category. Both useful, neither operational.
The 30-day diff
Here's a move that probably translates regardless of role.
Pull up your current todo list. Write down three items something automated is already doing or could plausibly be doing if you set it up. Write down three items only you in your seat can do. Then pull up your todo list from a month ago. Run the same split. How many items moved from "only you" to "automated or could-be"? Even one is a real signal. Three is a trend.
I started doing this around the time I noticed the agent had drafted a brief I'd planned to write. The diff that month was small. Six months in, it was not.
The KPMG number is a 24-month forecast. The 30-day diff is the short-horizon evidence the survey didn't ask for. The forecast is in their hands. The diff is in yours.
The floor, not the ceiling
If you've been running this for two years already, the 39% expecting "agents leading PM" in 24-36 months is the floor of what's coming. The practitioner who started seriously in 2024 is already past where executives expect they'll be in 2028. The interesting question is not "will it happen." It's "what does floor + 1 look like, and who's already there."
The dev side has been at floor + 1 for a while in a few places. The PM side is catching up.
What's the loop look like on your team?
Top comments (1)
honestly the 30-day diff exercise breaks for teams in their first 60 days of agent work, the diff is mostly tooling churn and not real role evolution. underscoped that. probably needs a "wait until your second instruction-set rewrite before measuring" caveat.