Microsoft Planner Roadmap - AI Agents, API and MCP With Howard Crow, Director of Product, Microsoft

Howard Crow, Director of Product at Microsoft, joins the podcast to discuss the evolution of Microsoft Planner, its deep integration with Microsoft Teams, and the growing role of AI agents in work management.

• Howard shares his nearly 30-year journey at Microsoft, from the founding days of SharePoint to leading the Planner and Project teams

• The genesis of Microsoft Planner and how it democratised project management beyond specialist tools like Microsoft Project

• Microsoft's unification strategy, bringing To Do, Planner, and Project for the Web together under a single Planner brand

• How Planner integrates deeply with Microsoft Teams across meetings, channels, and chats

• The Planner Agent and Microsoft's multi-agent runtime service, the first production multi-agent harness shipped at Microsoft

• How MCP (Model Context Protocol) is becoming the "USB for APIs" and unlocking new integrations for Planner

• The future of work: managing teams of humans and AI agents together, and why a visual planning surface matters for knowledge workers

Thanks to Luware, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud