This paper presents five Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to predict the final duration of a project. A
methodology that involves Monte Carlo simulation, Principal Component Analysis and cross-validation is
proposed and can be applied by academics and practitioners. The performance of the AI methods is assessed
by means of a large and topologically diverse dataset and is benchmarked against the best performing Earned
Value Management/Earned Schedule (EVM/ES) methods. The results show that the AI methods outperform
the EVM/ES methods if the training and test sets are at least similar to one another. Additionally, the AI methods
report excellent early and mid-stage forecasting results. A robustness experiment gradually increases the
discrepancy between the training and test sets and demonstrates the limitations of the newly proposed AI
methods.