Join me exploring Microsoft Copilot through each letter of the alphabet. This time, T is for tasks. 

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll know that in M is for Meetings I had a big moan about the lack of solution for keeping on top of meeting actions and follow-ups. When I had a meeting and then asked Copilot to help me keep track of all the actions, its best suggestion was an excel spreadsheet, urgh.  

About a day after I posted that blog, (anyone else struggling to keep up?!) I learned about Planner Agent. Planner Agent looks an increasingly promising solution to ‘we had a meeting but the actions went into a loop component to die’, but it still has limitations. 

A quick reminder on what Microsoft Planner is 

Microsoft Planner is like Trello but in Microsoft land. There, I said it. 

It lets you organise tasks across a board view, which might be to track items through a process or just organise them by category. 

The key thing with Planner is that your tasks can have assignees and due dates. They can also have fancy things like checklists and tags and priorities, but for me ultimately with any task you need to know who’s doing it, and when. Microsoft Planner makes that possible. 

Also, when the assignees are colleagues within your organisation, any tasks assigned to them will show up in helpful places like Outlook, so they’ve got no escape from accountability. You can read a bit more about Planner and how it compares to Loop in another of my blogs here: https://lyndsay.blog/2025/07/30/why-i-still-use-microsoft-planner-over-loop-for-process-based-tasks/ 

Ok so back to Planner Agent, and how you can use it to keep on top of tasks, whether they come from meetings or not. 

Using Planner Agent

First you’ll need to find it in the Copilot Agent store (under ‘more agents’ in your left hand nav) – you’ll also need the right licence to use it:

Like the other Copilot agents, the chat interface is really simple:

You can use it to take the transcript from your meeting and create a planner board with all the tasks off the back of what got said.. 

At first I went hunting for the meeting transcript that I wanted to use, but you don’t have to go this extra mile. You can be lazy and just type “using the meeting i had with ben on tuesday can you create a planner board with all the tasks we spoke about “ 

Planner agent will go away and find your meeting, and then give you a preview of the planner board it’s going to create for you: 

It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this obviously only works if you’ve got a meeting transcribed. 

Once you give it the go-ahead, Planner Agent will duly knock up a new Planner Board for you, with pretty much zero heavy lifting from you: 

As you can see it’s even organised this collection of actions under sensible headings based on what was discussed in the meeting. 

Another thing that goes without saying but I’ll say it again is – always check it’s captured everything properly. You don’t want to miss the one follow-up task that was a game changer just because Planner Agent didn’t quite understand the context of the meeting enough to recognise it as a task and include it on the board. 

Sure, I hear you scoff, setting up a Planner board is easy. Can Planner Agent update an existing Planner board though? 

When you start a new chat with Planner Agent, you have the option to ‘focus on’ with a dropdown of your existing Plans. 

I selected one of mine and asked it to check off all Kevin’s actions: (yes Kevin is really a colleague, I’m not using a Minions example here…) 

Lo and behold, the completed tasks are there in the Plan: 

So yes, Planner Agent can also update existing Planner boards. 

The big Gotcha

As I said, Planner Agent is a promising solution, BUT it’s not a total game-changer yet. And that is because it can’t do something pretty fundamental, which is; assign the ruddy tasks!!! 

Yep you heard me, Planner can take all the actions, it knows who’s got what, and can even write that in the task description, but it can’t actually populate the assignee field for you. That’s you doing manual clicking.  

This is a big miss for me, because the assignee field is where the accountability lies. 

The other annoying thing it will do is suggest to you that it can assign the tasks, before admitting that actually it can’t: 

This Microsoft documentation also confirms that Planner Agent can’t do the assignee thing: What can you do with Planner Agent in Copilot? | Microsoft Support  

It’s such a shame because otherwise this is a really useful tool for people like me who are not just managing their own stack of tasks but programmes of stacks of tasks across multiple teams and people. 

Hopefully one day it will catch up, but in the meantime I think it is still a much better solution than leaving tasks in a Loop component to die there. 

For managing your own tasks

If you’re just looking to tackle your own task load, some of the suggested prompts at the bottom are a really good place to start, like: “ Review my meetings, emails, and chats from the past week and help me draft tasks for the most urgent action items I need to complete. “ – Planner Agent did a decent enough job of this for me. 

TLDR

You can use Copilot Planner agent to create new plans off the back of meeting transcripts, and update existing plans without even having to touch them. It can’t assign tasks for you though, so that’s still a job you need to be on top of yourself. It’s still a better solution than leaving tasks stranded in Loop components that nobody is looking at after meetings. 

Have you been using Planner Agent lately? Let me know in the comments.