Website development can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, from gathering information and planning to managing design, writing content, programming, testing, and ongoing maintenance. But AI tools and automation are providing increased project management support and efficiency, even taking routine tasks off project managers’ plates. According to the Project Management Institute, 82% of senior leaders said AI will impact how projects are managed at their organizations over the next five years.

Learning how to use AI when project managing a website can help with nearly every aspect of the development process. AI tools can even speed up your production timeline by reducing manual tasks, streamlining processes, and improving decision-making.

Here’s what businesses need to know about using AI for website project management.

Understanding AI’s role in website project management

Website development involves planning, organizing, and overseeing everything from designing and programming to launching and testing. A project manager must set goals, tasks, and deadlines, manage teams and stakeholders, stay within budget, and, by the end, deliver a website that looks and operates as planned. It’s a lot. 

AI tools can help project managers and their teams meet goals with better accuracy and efficiency. For example, AI-powered search can help project managers easily find important information buried in past or missed conversations. Conversation summaries can provide instant chat, thread, or meeting recaps at the end of each day, complete with action items and suggestions to keep projects on track.

Automating repetitive tasks can be a game-changer for project managers, helping them speed up routine processes like sharing status updates with clients or sending meeting notes to their teams. By integrating AI tools with project management software, managers can keep everything they need in one place — making it easier to stay organized, work more efficiently, and rely on a single source of truth for their data.

How to use AI for website project management

Using AI to manage your website development project can set you up for success. According to Slack research, 80% of professionals using AI at work report improved productivity, which directly benefits project management. AI can boost efficiency, speed up data-driven decisions, cut costs, and free up time for strategic thinking instead of routine tasks.

To get started, it’s important to choose the right tools. Slack’s work operating system, with built-in AI and third-party integrations, makes it easy to incorporate AI into your workflows—whether for project management software, team chats, meetings, data analysis, or task automation.

Here are four steps to help you implement AI in your website project management process:

Step 1: Set clear objectives for AI integration

Why are you choosing AI for website project management, and what do you hope to achieve? Maybe you’re aiming to make data-driven decisions about design and functionality, or perhaps you’re looking to streamline tasks and cut costs. Start by setting clear goals and identifying how AI can support each one.

Your goals may include:

• Using AI data insights to make better decisions
• Automating repetitive tasks to save time
• Using AI for faster access to key information
• Identifying roadblocks or challenges early on to solve problems and avoid delays
• Optimizing resource allocation to maximize costs
• Streamlining communication and collaboration to improve team and stakeholder relationships

Step 2: Select the right AI tools

With so many AI tools available, it’s important to choose ones that fit your website development needs and work seamlessly with the tools your team already uses. For instance, if your team relies on Jira for project management, look for AI tools that integrate smoothly, so you can access relevant data without constantly switching between programs.

Step 3: Provide training and support

AI tools should make your web development team’s job easier, not harder. To help everyone feel comfortable using AI and automation, leaders and managers should kick things off with training sessions, be there to answer questions, and address any concerns. As business goals shift and new tools come into play, it’s also important to keep offering support and guidance along the way. Slack users might consider setting up a support channel to share all resources, training guides, video tutorials, AI usage guidelines, and more in a single location.

Step 4: Monitor AI performance and adjust

Once you implement AI tools, monitoring results is critical. Are the tools accomplishing what you expected? Are you seeing positive results? What challenges are your team members facing? Gathering post-project feedback from the team is essential to understand what worked well and what needs recalibrating so you can adjust for an even more successful web development project next time.

Tips for making website project management more efficient with AI

One of the biggest perks of using AI in your website development plan is the boost in efficiency. Here are some ways AI can help you plan your website project more effectively and get things done faster.

Plan and track progress

AI tools can support your web development planning in many ways, from offering competitor analysis and design recommendations to suggesting ideas for personalizing the user experience. By analyzing patterns from similar projects, AI can also help forecast budgets and identify potential roadblocks, allowing project managers to minimize delays and allocate resources effectively.

Once your website is live, performance tracking is crucial. AI can help monitor and analyze data to ensure you’re meeting your carefully thought-out goals. For Slack users, integrating third-party AI tools like DATA or smartQED allows teams to track key metrics, gaining real-time insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.

Use AI to find answers quickly

Finding the information you need to start working can take time if projects aren’t well organized. In fact, Gartner found that 47% of digital workers struggle to locate the data or information they need to perform their jobs effectively. AI-powered search can make a big difference, helping project managers quickly and efficiently find project details, action items, and creative assets by instantly filtering through channels, files, or meeting notes.

One healthy dessert brand’s remote workforce relies on Slack AI to get more from its collective data and be more productive. For example, when their CEO needs an answer from the VP of operations at 4 p.m. on a Friday, they can quickly use AI search to surface the information.

Automate routine tasks

Want an easy way to remove repetitive tasks from your team’s plate? Try building automated workflows at the start of a website management project. Automation can handle everything from scheduling meetings to recapping notes, sending emails, coding, creating website content, A/B testing, and more. With AI helping to boost productivity and alleviate some of the manual effort, teams may see faster turnarounds with greater accuracy and fewer errors.

When it’s time to update clients and stakeholders, project managers can set up standard prompts to automate tasks like analyzing data, making calculations, and generating reports. With AI, those reports can be prepared or updated in just minutes, freeing up managers from the time-consuming manual work.

Using AI for better decision-making

AI empowers project managers to make better decisions about website development through data analysis, insight generation, and predictive analytics. Let’s look at some examples:

Data analysis

Analyzing large data sets to understand user behavior, audience preferences, competition, and SEO opportunities can be a daunting and time-consuming task when developing a new website. AI analytics tools can process all that data much faster than humans, without errors or fatigue. This not only saves time but also ensures accuracy, helping teams and leaders make better business decisions.

Insight generation

Once your website is live, AI analysis can uncover valuable insights, like trends among users visiting your site. With this data, you can segment users by their behaviors and preferences, then plan personalized content or offers for them. For ecommerce businesses, analyzing customer journeys helps identify common conversion paths, content gaps, emerging trends, and popular topics to focus on.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analysis looks at past project data to identify what worked and what didn’t, offering suggestions to boost efficiency. It helps project managers set more realistic deadlines, predict common delays — like those in web design, programming, and testing — and find ways to manage or avoid them before they become issues. This could mean adjusting the timeline or adding extra resources.

Predictive analytics also helps project managers allocate funds more effectively, and even cut costs to keep the project on track. By modeling different scenarios, they can see how various design choices, timelines, and budgets might impact the project, helping predict profitability. AI tools can also spot trends and forecast events that might affect the website’s launch timing.

Save time and optimize resources with AI tools for website project management

With AI tools, website project managers can delegate many of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks they’ve had to manage in the past. This frees them up to focus more on strategic goals, better support their teams, and build stronger client relationships.

As AI technology advances and provides teams with even more tools for efficiency and productivity, it’s becoming increasingly more important for project managers to understand how to incorporate AI into their project management process. By integrating Slack’s AI-powered work operating system with your existing project management tech stack, you can enhance project management and produce quality products in less time.

Learn more about how Slack AI helps businesses work smarter and faster.