Industry 4.0 taught organisations to automate. Industry 5.0 asks a different question: what should machines do, and what should remain human? In a new article in Project Management Journal, my PhD student Ibrahim Dani, my colleague Suhair Al Kilani and I review the early literature on this shift, and propose two concepts for making sense of it.
The idea behind Industry 5.0
Industry 5.0 is usually described through three commitments: human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. It does not reject automation. It argues that automation alone produced blind spots. The article revisits several well-known cases that make the point, including the over-automation of Tesla's Model 3 production line, the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, and an automated trading failure that cost a US firm around US$460 million in 45 minutes. In each case the missing element was human judgement at the right moment.
What the review found
We screened 255 papers and analysed 22 that spoke directly to project management. Artificial intelligence and digital twins are already changing forecasting, risk detection and scheduling. Project selection is starting to weigh social and environmental value alongside financial return. Contracting is moving towards more flexible, outcome-based arrangements. Leadership is becoming more distributed.
But no new project management framework has emerged. Agile methods and integrated project delivery are being stretched to fit, while the dominant standards remain built on assumptions of linearity, predictability and control. The role of the project manager is changing considerably faster than the frameworks are. That gap is what the rest of the article addresses.
Project management 5.0
The most useful thing about this concept is what it is not. It is not another methodology competing with agile, PRINCE2 or the PMBOK Guide. Practitioners already have more frameworks than they can reasonably hold, each with its own vocabulary, certification and implicit claim to be the correct approach. Choosing between them has become a question of allegiance rather than judgement, and deviation from a chosen method gets treated as non-compliance.
Project management 5.0 is not another method. It is a way of reading the ones we already have.
It sits one level above that argument, as an interpretive layer that asks what each framework is actually trying to achieve, so that methods can be selected and combined according to context. Four examples from the article show how this works.
- Stakeholder engagement. Agile treats it as continuous customer collaboration, the PMBOK Guide as a structured plan, integrated project delivery as early contractual involvement. Read through project management 5.0, all three are versions of one principle: inclusion and cocreation. The question shifts from which method is correct to who must be included, and why.
- Risk. Formalised in PRINCE2, adaptive in agile, distributed across parties in integrated project delivery. Project management 5.0 reframes risk as a socioethical process that balances predictive analytics against participatory judgement. Risk is not only what threatens the schedule; it is also what the project imposes on people who did not choose it.
- Planning and scheduling. Critical path methods, iterative sprints and AI forecasting are treated not as rivals but as complementary instruments within a scheduling practice that is continuous and value-oriented rather than fixed at the outset.
- Leadership. Rather than a role attached to a position in a hierarchy, leadership is read as a distributed, trust-based quality that appears in different forms across all of these methods.
The purpose is to lift technical and compliance-driven practice into something broader, without telling anyone their existing method is wrong. For teaching this matters in a practical way: students can be introduced to the range of available tools and the reasoning behind them, rather than being asked to pick a camp and defend it.
Project manager 5.0
The second concept describes the person rather than the process. Five attributes are proposed.
- Networked, trust-based leadership.
- Digital fluency, including the ability to interrogate what an AI tool produces.
- Emotional intelligence and ethical judgement.
- Systems thinking and adaptability.
- Active facilitation of human and machine collaboration, so that technology augments rather than displaces people.
This is not simply a longer list of desirable traits. It describes a change in what the job is. The traditional project manager is a central point of control who enforces compliance with a method. The project manager 5.0 is a facilitator whose task is to build a system that produces sound decisions without every decision passing through one person. Most of these attributes sit outside current competency frameworks and certification criteria, which still centre on scheduling, budgeting and control. That is a direct implication for professional bodies and for universities.
Why the two belong together
The two concepts do not develop in sequence, and neither is a precondition for the other. They evolve concurrently and reinforce each other. AI-based planning is of little use without leaders who can question what a model produces. Distributed leadership fails without systems that make information visible to the people expected to act on it. Most commentary treats technology adoption and leadership development as separate programs of work, usually owned by different parts of an organisation. The article argues they are one problem.
One tension is left deliberately unresolved. Is human-centricity an interpersonal matter, built through trust within teams, or a structural one, achieved by designing systems that hold human interests at the centre? The literature contains both positions and does not reconcile them. A satisfactory account of project management under Industry 5.0 will need to address both levels at once.
What the article does not settle
The evidence base is small and skewed towards construction and engineering, so sectors such as health, education and public administration are barely represented. The review is literature-based, so both concepts remain propositional and untested against practice. The digital tools discussed also assume infrastructure that is not evenly available across regions or industries.
Reference
Dani, I., Ke, Y., & Al Kilani, S. (2026). The future of project management in Industry 5.0: A narrative literature review. Project Management Journal, 57(2), 222–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/87569728251386332