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A team needs to identify which parts of the project they are working on will require AI and which will not. In addition, they need to determine technology and data requirements.
Which method should be used?
PMI-CPMAI describes a very practical early-stage activity: breaking down a solution into components or sub-functions and then deciding which components actually require AI and which do not. This is often referred to as a components-based analysis. The idea is to decompose the overall workflow or product into units such as data ingestion, preprocessing, prediction, rule-based decisioning, user interface, reporting, and integration layers.
For each component, the team asks:
Does this require cognitive capability (learning from data, pattern recognition, probabilistic reasoning)?
Or can it be handled by conventional software, rules, or existing systems?
At the same time, they identify technology and data requirements: data sources, data quality, storage, pipelines, compute needs, and integration points for each AI-relevant component. PMI-CPMAI ties this directly into later tasks such as technical feasibility, architecture design, and MLOps planning.
Detailed data mapping (option A) is useful but focuses mainly on information flows, not necessarily on AI vs non-AI partitioning. Technical feasibility assessment (option B) evaluates whether a proposed AI approach is realistic but presumes that the AI portions are already identified. Only components-based analysis (option C) simultaneously answers ''which parts need AI, which do not, and what are the tech/data needs for each?'', which matches the scenario precisely.