What if you could update 50 tasks across multiple plans… without opening Planner once? I tested Microsoft’s new Planner (Frontier) agent, and the results were both impressive… and frustrating.
In March 2026 we were treated with 2 major updates to Planner. The first was a new UI that looked crisp and which I will feature in another article. The second update was much more than “just visuals”. This second update made the Project Manager Agent much more accessible, and closer to where the users are. In this article I’ll dig into the renamed Project Manager Agent: Planner (Frontier).
Note the (Frontier) here, it refers to early access versions of the M365 Copilot license. More on Frontier agents here.
Where to find the agent?
Just like other agents, I’m able to address my prompts to the Planner (Frontier) agent using a / key and following that with the Planner name.
I can do this either from the browser, by navigating to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ or I can use the Copilot app on my laptop.
If it’s not available by default, your administrator might need to activate the agent first. Here’s what that looks like:
First interaction, amazing!
I have to say, the first prompt I did on the Planner (Frontier) agent went way(!) better than I expected.
I asked the generic M365 Copilot to find an article shared by one of my colleagues. I knew it existed, and I knew I had a associated task to read the article. I wanted to know if Planner could find it as well:
“I have a task related to this article, find it, and mark it as complete. Also, add a description which includes the articles most important content. And share a link to the task in your answer as well.”
The results can be seen below. Just to be clear, I did not go to Planner myself, I did not write any summary or change anything myself. Even though, the AI will alter the task “in my name”.
Let’s try something bulky
My next attempt was to see if I could bulk update tasks without ever going to the Planner interface myself.
My next prompt was to let Planner (Frontier) summarize all tasks that were late. It came up with 5 tasks from different Planner plans. Noteworthy, it found tasks from meetings and private tasks as well.
I then asked it to update all due dates to today. And it did that just right.
Why Should the PMO / planners care? To be blunt, this takes away the time it takes a user to move between plans, find the different tasks and update them individually. That time can now be better spent.
Taking it a step further, can you create a plan?
On to my first roadblock in the Planner Agent (yes, I could call it Planner (Frontier) the whole time, but that would get tiresome, right?).
I wanted the agent to create a basic plan, with 2 tasks. Here’s the prompt and what happened:
“Create a new plan for me, I will be the only member of this private plan, call it “Random tasks from meetings etc”. Add two new tasks in the plan. Call them “task 1” and “task 2″.”
Oke, so the Planner agent can’t create plans (yet). Let’s find out if there are more limitations to be aware of.
Why Should the PMO / planners care? If I could discuss the creation of a plan using this agent, I might be able to “just feed it my business case document”. Now wouldn’t that be amazing? Writing this, reminds me about the previous article, that actually comes close to this feature:
No access to premium plans
You might already be aware of an upcoming unification of all versions of Planner. Currently Planner Premium plans are stored in a different location than basic plans. More on these differences can be seen in a recent video I published on the YT channel:
I asked the agent about this and here’s the response I got:
Why Should the PMO / planners care? On an enterprise level, you need more than the basic planner plans can provide. For one, there are no Gantt charts in basic plans. Nor are there any resource assignments available. If Premium plan features are unlocked in the Planner (Frontier) agent, I’m guessing that a lot of power is unleashed. Prompts like “Assign Dave to all tasks associated with technical implementations, assign him for 100 hours, and extend the durations of these tasks with 2 weeks to give him enough time to actually do the work” become a possibility with premium API access.
No Goals concept
I created a new basic plan and added 4 goals to that, after learning about the limit of not being able to create a plan itself. I wanted to see if I could move tasks between schedules and assign Goals to the tasks as well.
Here’s the plan I created with its goals:
Here’s the response I got from the Planner Agent:
After some fussing, I found out that the agent doesn’t know about the Goals at all, here’s what it does know:
That meant the agent doesn’t have access to the labels, which I wanted to use instead of the goals option. Let’s confirm that, always the optimist:
Why Should the PMO / planners care? Goals and Labels are an excellent way to categorize your planned tasks. They provide an additional layer of knowledge that can be used in reporting. Goals help organizations perform OKR like analysis as well. Having access to these features would help the Planner agent make better tasks available.
No option to move tasks across plans
Granted, this might just be a niche request. But I wanted to find out if I could move my late tasks to this container plan, and have them all centralized.
Multiple attempts later, after receiving multiple confirmations from the agent that “thank you, I now have all information to process your request”. It still wasn’t able to perform the action.
Scheduled tasks seemed to be out of reach for this type of editing, presenting the agent with an “expired” status which I couldn’t find myself.
It would keep sending me “one last thing / one last confirmation”. Before responding with, I can’t do this because of … reasons.
Why Should the PMO / planners care? Currently, each teams meeting with facilitator and planner creates a new basic plan. Besides that, you might have numerous plans scattered around because, like me, you love the Loop tasks feature. If we could quickly move all those tasks to, for instance, a single Container Plan, it would help declutter the Planner experience.
Not allowed to overwrite or add new notes
I have a task, that already contained a note. I asked the agent to create or append the note but it came back with a “not allowed” message.
Why Should the PMO / planners care? There’s no such thing as a single note on any topic. You’d like to get the conversation going! Maybe notes aren’t the right space to do this, but what about adding comments to the newly available conversations section then? Instead of notes, let’s use the Task Chat window:
A cool safety feature
Now I might sound like a grumpy guy with the above limitations, but I am actually positive those limitations will go away soon.
I’m very happy to see a safety feature show up when I attempted to update 50+ tasks on multiple plans as well:
Why Should the PMO / planners care? With a powerfull tool such as Agentic AI, it’s good to be able to stop it in it’s track before it does “too much”. A confirmation on large changes is perfect to help users be fully aware of what they are requesting before the AI takes care of the action.
Great for fast updating multiple tasks across plans
The Planner (Frontier) agent is brilliant at finding (basic plan) tasks and doing updates on the items it is allowed to update.
Here’s an example, where it even found out I had duplicate tasks I wasn’t aware of:
Why Should the PMO / planners care? This ties into my first response. Having a faster way to interact with multiple tasks. In a conversational manner. Makes our work that much easier. I’m looking so much forward to the next iteration of this agent.
Final notes
Planner (Frontier) isn’t complete yet, but it’s already changing the way I’m working with my Basic Planner data.
If Microsoft removes just a few of the limitations I shared in this article, this won’t just be a Copilot… it will become the primary interface for Task Management.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article on the new Agentic AI called Planner (Frontier). I found limited information on the agent apart from my own experiences so far. But you might also like it, here’s a way to try it out: https://marketplace.microsoft.com/nl-nl/product/WA200010270?tab=Overview .
If you’d like to get more, you could also subscribe to my newsletter or even book a meeting for a 1 on 1 to discuss the topic in detail.