Forward Deployed Episode 105: The New Project Manager (with Shree Shasta Kumar and Milan Kumar Mohapatra)
Sep 18, 2025
Shree Shasta Kumar, a Principal Product Group Manager on the Planner team, and Milan Kumar Mohapatra, Principal PM Manager, join to unveil the Project Manager Agent, an exciting AI integration in Microsoft 365. They discuss how this tool automates status reports and meetings, helping human project managers focus on leadership. The duo explains features like task generation, meeting notes capture, and how they combat AI hallucinations to ensure accuracy. They emphasize leveraging AI to eliminate drudgery and enhance productivity in project management.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Planner Is A Unified Work Platform
- Microsoft Planner unifies To Do, Planner, and Project into a single scalable work management experience.
- Interoperability lets features flow across apps so users get unified task and project capabilities.
PMA Serves As An AI Teammate
- Project Manager Agent (PMA) acts like an AI teammate that generates and adapts project plans and can execute tasks.
- PMA brings agentic coordination to projects, mirroring how org roles collaborate under a leader.
Start Projects By Giving A Clear Goal
- Give the agent a clear goal and let it break the work into starter tasks to overcome the “where to start” problem.
- Use the generated plan as a launchpad and then iterate with your team.