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 teammateToday’s planning workflows face three major problems:Prone to drift - Unplanned and orphaned work reduce trust in the plan.Disruptive to developers - Constant interruptions for status updates break flow.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 teamsGitLab 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 clarityGitLab 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 intelligentlyWork breakdown - Decompose initiatives into epics, features, and user stories to structure requirementsDependency analysis - Identify blocked work and understand relationships between items to maintain velocityPlanning - Organize sprints, milestones, or quarterly planningStatus reporting - Generate summaries of project progress, risks, and blockers to track deliveryBacklog management - Identify stale issues, duplicates, or items needing refinement to improve data hygieneHere 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: