What if you could talk to your task list instead of clicking around in Planner?
In this video, I’m joined by Microsoft Senior Cloud Solutions Architect Damien Bird, who walks me through the task-planning agent he built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This agent has no knowledge sources at all – it’s fully focused on doing work for him: creating, listing, and updating tasks in Microsoft Planner.
If you’re experimenting with AI agents, Copilot Studio, and Planner, this is a great example of how to move from “chatbot” to a real assistant that actually gets things done.
👉 Check out Damien’s channel @DamoBird365 for more Power Platform and agent content.
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Video Summary
- Agents are the big trend in 2025 – Instead of manually managing tasks in Planner, Damien built a Copilot Studio agent that lets him talk to his planner and create or update tasks conversationally.
- No knowledge base needed – Unlike most demos, where you start by adding knowledge, this agent works without one because its purpose is purely action-driven: creating, listing, and updating tasks.
- Smart orchestration with language models – The agent doesn’t rely on rigid conditions like Power Automate flows. It uses AI reasoning to match tasks even if you don’t type the exact name (e.g., “wash a car” vs. “wash the car”).
- Voice commands and mobile integration – After publishing the agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Damien showed how you can use dictation on PC or mobile to create tasks by voice—like “Buy Vlad a beer tomorrow”—and it even understood “tomorrow” as a date.
- Extensible beyond Planner – This approach works with any tool that has a connector, like Trello or even email drafting. If the connector supports due dates on creation, it’s even easier. The demo proved how fast and flexible building agents can be.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Transcript
If there’s one thing that is popular in 2025, it’s agents. We all know that we should build them, but sometimes we wonder what kind of cool agent we can create to help make ourselves or our organization more productive. Luckily, today I’m joined by Damien Bird, who used to be an MVP and has now joined Microsoft to help lots of big customers make the most out of the Power Platform. Thank you so much for joining me today.
You’re welcome. Yeah, good to be here,” Damien replied.
So, today you told me you have a really cool agent you want to show me that helps you manage tasks. I’ll let you take it away—tell us what you’ve built, and then I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions as I learn about this as well.
Cool. Cheers, Vlad. First of all, apologies for the croaky voice, but I have my Copilot Studio agent already pre-built. It’s my task planner agent. I have my instructions at the bottom—I can even probably scroll. There you go, instructions at the bottom detailing some of the capabilities of this agent. But as you do with any agent, you can add knowledge. In this case, there is no knowledge because it’s ultimately an agent to create tasks for me on my Planner board.
I think this is the first time I’ve seen an agent with no knowledge. Every time I demo it, you create an agent and add knowledge—that’s always the first step.
Yeah. I built this purely to assist me with my Planner so I don’t have to do things manually using the Planner app. I’d much rather be able to talk to my Planner rather than do it manually. So, absolutely no need for knowledge in this case because I’m not asking it questions about SharePoint or Dataverse. It’s purely to create tasks, etc. I have these three actions already added. It’s just a case of adding them to tools and choosing your actions to add. These are the same actions you will see across the platform.
So you’re really using the connectors, not flows or anything like that?
Yeah, that’s right. In theory, you can pick and choose the ones you’re looking for—create a task, update a task, list buckets, which is quite an unusual one. I’ve added these to my agent. One of the key things to point out is the description, because this explains to the agent how to use that task, although that’s quite an easy description to understand. Then there are inputs, which can either be custom values—in this case, I’ve chosen to make the group ID and the plan ID custom values. That’s my group ID on my Planner and my particular plan ID because my plan is called ‘My Group Plan.’
So, in this specific agent, you hardcoded what plan everything goes into?
Yes. In theory, you don’t have to. If you’re happy to have that conversation with your agent and tell them that you want it to go into a particular plan, then if it can find it, it will do it. You’ll note that on the title, I’ve got customized settings—it’s set as dynamic. Again, description comes into play here. I’ve said the user might provide one or many tasks, identify each task, keep them short, and create a new task. That assists AI in understanding how to behave.
I have a question for you. I see you have here, ‘You do not need to ask them for a title.’ Usually, when it happens to m,e and I have something like that, it’s because it asks me for a title and then I have to specify, ‘No, you don’t need to ask me.’ Is this what happened here?
I’ve told you, yeah. Probably through iteration—when you’re building something, you go through the process of testing and then changing the prompt until you get the desired behaviour. So I’ve gone through a few iterations here and probably had that experience and said, ‘Right, you do not need to ask for the title.’ These inputs—some of them are dynamic. One of them is dynamic, the title. The other two are custom and fixed. I’ve done the same for the other actions as well. So I can create a task, list my tasks, and update a task. The reason I’ve got ‘update a task’ in there is that the particular action allows you to update the due date. When you’re creating these things, you want to look at the capability of the actions to see what they can do. A ‘create task’ action can’t set the due date, but an ‘update task’ can. So you have to combine these to create the experience you’re looking for.
That’s awesome.
In theory, I could have built a flow. I could have had a flow that defined some input parameters for a task that included a due date and combined those two actions in a flow, and then I’d have a purpose-built wrapper of these two actions to do that specific task. But I found that I could get away with it and talk to it. So that’s really all there is to it.
So you added the tools in your description. Did you add the name of the task or just let AI handle it?
If you’re looking for very specific outcomes all the time, then you can be very specific in your instructions. The instructions I’ve got on screen are based on the Copilot wizard experience at the beginning. You have a conversation, set up the agent, and it gives you some set instructions. I said at the beginning, ‘I want you to be a task planner agent,’ and it gave me instructions. Other than that, I haven’t spent hours manually crafting it.
No?
No. The way I look at this agent is I know the capabilities of the actions, I know it’s connected to my plan on Planner, and I’m just going to have a conversation with it and instruct it based on what I’m looking for. Every conversation can be different. Sometimes I might give it three tasks, sometimes one task. I might say, ‘Can you list all my tasks?’ or ‘Can you tell me all my due tasks in the next week?’ Those interactions are pretty much non-deterministic. I haven’t defined them anywhere. I can have that conversational experience, and it will do it. It will choose from those tools to get me that information.
For instance, I could say, ‘Can you list my current tasks?’, and what should happen is that the orchestration will look at my tools. It’s a live demo, so fingers crossed. There you go—it’s listing the tasks currently in my Planner. If I bring up my Planner, you can see I’ve got some tasks already in there. That’s what it’s surfacing.
I could say, ‘Can you update the wash a car task to the 1st of November?’ I’m curious because here you said ‘wash a car,’ but the name is ‘wash the car.’ Is it smart enough to know?
Wow. It did. Let’s see proof. It’s currently the 17th of October. I’ll refresh. Close your eyes for good luck. There we go—it did it. So smart enough to say, ‘Hey, it’s close enough.’ What’s happening is the orchestration activity map initially did a list task to get all the tasks back, then looked at the response data, and using the task ID, it updated that specific task. Even if I didn’t get it quite right, it’s not looking for that exact string like you’d have in traditional deterministic flows with condition statements. It’s using a language model to look for something similar in the output of the list task and say, ‘It must be that one—get the ID.
Copilot Studio shines more than just doing a Power Automate flow because Power Automate is deterministic—it must match, and even case sensitivity is something you hit in flows all the time. This uses a language model, and that’s the power of generative orchestration in Copilot Studio—the fact that you have a language model that can reason over the ask and look for the most likely outcome.
But now if I want to take it to the next level, you see now I’m typing. Can I talk to it?
Wow.
This is where I’ve published it to my Microsoft 365 Copilot. I discovered that yes, you can use dictation or even Windows dictation—the Windows + H key. I could say, ‘Can you create me a task to meet with Vlad on the 29th of October?’ Let’s send that. It didn’t get the date, unfortunately.
Is that because that would technically be two actions—it has to create it and then update it?
Yeah. So again, what I could do—let’s give it another try. Maybe ask it to update the task. ‘Can you please update the task to a due date of the 29th of October?’ We’ll send that across. Behind the scenes, it should look at those three tools, probably do a list of tasks, find the Vlad meeting, get the ID, and keep the context as well, because I didn’t mention which task. There we go—it’s updated. Cool.
That is pretty cool. Technically, you built it with Planner, but you could build this if your company uses Trello and there’s a connector for Trello. You could build the same thing for Trello.
Of course. It might be different depending on what the connector supports—maybe Trello lets you set the due date on creation, which would be easier. But you can do it with whatever task planning tool. 100%. You could even create draft emails or something on the go—anything you can bring a connector in for. You can now talk to it not only on your PC but on your mobile phone. I can fire up Microsoft 365 Copilot, turn on dictation, and just say, ‘Create me a task.’ Let’s try that as well. We won’t have the phone plugged in, but we’ll see in Planner if it works.
Right, I’ll get my phone out. Do you want to try it in your voice?
I can try. Right—‘Create a task to buy Vlad a beer tomorrow.’ Okay, we’re sending it. Come on. Then it’s in your task list. I’m getting an email. I got a beer. Okay. It says it’s being created. Let’s have a look. Yes, it ended up tomorrow—you got a date too.
Wow, that works. Thank you. How cool was that?
I’m going to love the reminder when you forget to delete it tomorrow.
No.
That is pretty cool, and it’s really cool to see how easy it is to build and how smart it can b,e where we said ‘tomorrow,w’ and it did it. That audio is built in—you didn’t have to do anything in Copilot Studio to activate the voice, right?
No. I could come back in here right now and ask, ‘When am I due to buy Vlad a beer?’ It picked up more than it needs. The agent is going to be like, ‘This guy’s weird—why is he talking like that?’ It didn’t find it. I wonder if any responsibility kicks in about buying alcohol—maybe that’s why. I’m surprised it didn’t find it. It happens—it’s a live demo. We’ll figure it out. But I could say, ‘What tasks have I got tomorrow?’ Let’s try that. ‘What tasks have I got due tomorrow?’ Come on—buy Vlad a beer. Yes.
Last day of the conference—I got three beers. Awesome. Delete that task.
No, you don’t have a delete action, do you?
No, I don’t actually. I think you’re stuck with that. But I could change the due date to next year.
Well, this was really awesome.
Cool.
You showed us how to do it in not even 20 minutes. We managed to test it quite extensively with two different accents on two devices. That was really awesome. For everybody who wants to learn more, you have a very popular YouTube channel. What is the name of it? Because I know it’s not your name.
It’s DamoBird365.
We’re going to have a link to it in the comments. If you want to learn more about agents, Power Automate, and the Power Platform—not only agents—make sure to check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time today to show us this. For everybody watching, if you want to see more cool stuff we recorded at the Power Platform Community Conference, check out the video appearing on your screen right now. And of course, make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel. See you soon.
