Ace your planning without the context-switching

Software development teams face a challenging balancing act: dozens of tasks, limited time, and constant pressure to pick the right thing to work on next.

The planning overhead of structuring requirements, managing backlogs, tracking delivery, and writing status updates steals hours from strategic thinking.

The result? Less time for the high-value decisions that actually drive products forward.

That’s why we developed GitLab Duo Planner, an AI agent built on GitLab Duo Agent Platform to support product managers directly within GitLab.

GitLab Duo Planner isn't another generic AI assistant. GitLab's product and engineering teams, who live these challenges daily like many of our customers, purpose-built GitLab Duo Planner to orchestrate planning workflows and reduce overhead while improving alignment and predictability.

Your new planning teammate

Today’s planning workflows face three major problems:

1. Prone to drift - Unplanned and orphaned work reduce trust in the plan.
2. Disruptive to developers - Constant interruptions for status updates break flow.
3. Opaque - Hidden risks surface too late to course-correct.

Transforming the way teams work, GitLab Duo Planner turns manual overhead like vague ideas into structured requirements in minutes. Surface hidden backlog problems before they derail sprints. Apply RICE and MoSCoW frameworks instantly to make confident prioritization decisions. With awareness of GitLab context across the platform, every interaction with GitLab Duo Planner saves time and improves decision quality. This is possible because of the foundational agent architecture, bringing deep domain expertise and context awareness specific to GitLab.

Built for teams

GitLab Duo Planner leverages work items (epics, issues, tasks) and understands the nuances of work breakdown structures, dependency analysis, and effort estimation, making it well positioned to improve visibility, alignment, and confidence in delivery.

• Platform approach - Unlike point solutions, Duo Planner orchestrates across your entire GitLab platform, from planning through development and testing, driving visibility across teams and workflows.

• Embedded in the flow - No more context-switching between tools or diving deep into GitLab to retrieve information. Duo Planner enables contributions, collaboration, and transparency from users across the software development lifecycle.

• Saves time and effort - Use Duo Planner to free your teams from repetitive coordination work, improving delivery predictability, reducing missed commitments while bringing in focus on what actually moves the needle.

From chaos to clarity

GitLab Duo Planner can help at different stages of software planning and delivery while operating within the planning scope, providing a safe, bounded environment with project visibility.

The agent can help with six flows:

• Prioritization - Apply frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, or WSJF to rank work items intelligently

• Work breakdown - Decompose initiatives into epics, features, and user stories to structure requirements

• Dependency analysis - Identify blocked work and understand relationships between items to maintain velocity

• Planning - Organize sprints, milestones, or quarterly planning

• Status reporting - Generate summaries of project progress, risks, and blockers to track delivery

• Backlog management - Identify stale issues, duplicates, or items needing refinement to improve data hygiene

Here is an example how GitLab Duo Planner can check the status of an initiative:

Duo Planner is available as a custom agent in the Duo Chat side panel, with the current page context.

Let’s ask Duo Planner about the status of an initiative by providing the epic link:

We receive a structured summary with an overview, current status of milestones, in-progress items, dependencies, and blockers, along with actionable recommendations.

Next, let’s ask for an executive summary to share with stakeholders: GitLab Duo Planner eliminates hours of manual analysis and reporting effort, helping to make decisions faster and keep all stakeholders updated.

Here are a few more prompts you can try with GitLab Duo Planner:

• “Which of the bugs with a “boards” label should we fix first, considering user impact?”
• “Rank these epics by strategic value for Q1.”
• “Help me prioritize technical debt against new features.”
• “What tasks are needed to implement this user story?”
• “Suggest a phased approach for this project: (insert URL).”

What's next

GitLab Duo Planner focuses intentionally on product managers and engineering managers working in Agile environments. Why? Because specificity drives performance. By training Duo Planner deeply on GitLab's planning workflows and Agile frameworks, we deliver reliable, actionable insights rather than generic suggestions.

As we evolve the platform, we envision a family of specialized agents, each optimized for specific workflows while contributing to a unified intelligence layer. Today's planner for software teams is just the beginning of how AI will transform work prioritization across all teams.

If you’re an existing GitLab customer and would like to try GitLab Duo Planner with a prompt of your own, visit our documentation where we cover prerequisites, use cases, and more.