Overview
Plane Agent is an AI coworker you can delegate HR and payroll work to, built into Plane and included with your plan. Ask it questions, hand it tasks like adding a reimbursement or offboarding contractors, or give it a whole responsibility, like taking a new hire from offer to onboarding. It handles the chasing, checking, and follow-ups. You keep the key decisions.
You can use Plane Agent inside Plane, and in Slack if you connect it. Plane is the easier place to start, because there's nothing to install or configure.
A few things worth knowing before you dive in:
It's for admins and managers. Other roles won't see it.
Your conversations stay private. Nobody else in your workspace can read them, including other admins, and nothing you ask is used to train AI models.
You choose when it’s on. You turn it on yourself from the Features catalog and can turn it off again whenever you like. Once it's turned on, you can access it through the Agent button in the top right of any page or in the Agent page.
What Plane Agent does
Takes action for you
Plane Agent can do most of what admins and managers can do in the Plane app. Ask it to do the work for you, such as:
Hire and onboard: send an offer letter, start onboarding once it’s accepted, and check back in when a step stalls.
Keep team member records current: update personal details, addresses, emergency contacts, title, department, manager, and work location, and record compensation.
Handle time off and expenses: add time off, and approve or decline time-off requests and expense reports.
Run pay: approve payroll items, add deductions, benefit contributions, and reimbursements, create an off-cycle payroll, and pay a contractor’s payment request.
Handle contracts and documents: create, edit, and send contractor contracts, and rename, share, or delete documents.
Manage 1099s: change a 1099 draft, or mark it not to be filed.
Set up your workspace: add and remove members, add an entity, and update workspace preferences.
Offboard: terminate an employee or contractor.
An administrator decides which of these it may do, and that choice covers everyone in the workspace. By default, it reads and proposes changes for someone to approve, but does not write. See Control what Plane Agent can do.
Answers questions about your data
Look up workers, profiles, compensation, reporting lines, payroll status, blockers, payments, charges, refunds, time off, timesheets, compliance gaps, expenses. It pulls from the same data you'd see in Plane, and it summarizes when a summary is more useful than a list.
The simplest way to start is to just ask "What can you help me with?" The agent will list its capabilities and offer example prompts. It's designed for natural language. Ask the way you'd ask a person. Here are some sample prompts:
"Who's starting in the next 30 days?"
"What's the cash requirement for my next payroll?"
"What is Karen Alpine's compensation history?"
"What's the status of Alex Chen's contractor payment?"
"Which contractors are missing W-8 or W-9 forms?"
It can also go deeper on onboarding and documents:
Onboarding progress — where each person is in onboarding, which tasks are open or overdue, and who needs to act.
Team member documents — what a document actually says, not just whether it exists.
Contracts — contract terms, status, and signatures.
Answers questions about how Plane works
Ask how to do something in Plane and the agent answers from Plane's documentation, with links to the pages it used.
Builds things you can use
Request a document or file from Plane Agent, and it can create it for you, such as:
Spreadsheets — a headcount and turnover report broken down by department, or a list of everyone missing a tax form, with the columns you asked for.
Documents and presentations — a written summary or a deck built from your Plane data.
To do this it writes and runs its own code in a secure, isolated workspace. That's what lets it do real analysis rather than just reading records back to you.
It works the other way too. Give it a file and ask it to do something with it: match a spreadsheet of people from your old system against Plane, or fill out a template using your Plane data.
Sends messages for you
When the answer points to people who need a nudge, like contractors missing a W-9 or new hires who haven't accepted their invitation, you can ask Plane Agent to message them so you don't have to chase everyone one by one.
Worth knowing about these messages:
They arrive in the person's Plane notifications, and as a Slack direct message if your workspace has Slack connected.
The agent can message workers as well as admins and managers, so it reaches people who don't use Plane Agent themselves.
It can only message people you can already see in Plane.
You choose what it says. Read it back before you send to a group.
Shows its work
While it works, Plane Agent shows its reasoning so you can follow along. When it's done, the reasoning collapses beside the answer, where you can open it again. If a reply is heading in the wrong direction, press Stop to halt it.
One-click prompts on records
Team member, payroll, tax form, and project records offer ready-made prompts, such as explaining why a payment was late or short, comparing a payroll item to the last pay period, or summarizing a contract. Click one to start a conversation. You can edit the prompt before you send it.
Turning Plane Agent on and off
Admins can turn on Plane Agent for your workspace in the Features catalog.
Go to the Features catalog (or click the Agent button in the top right of any page in the Plane App, and click the Turn on in Features button).
In the Features catalog, click Plane Agent.
Click Turn on.
Once it's on, every admin and manager in your workspace can use it. Other roles won't see it. Admins can manage its settings under Workspace > Agent in Settings.
If you type a request in the Dashboard's What's next? box while Plane Agent is off, you'll be taken to the Features catalog to turn it on, and your request will be waiting in the message box afterwards.
Any admin can turn it off again from the Features catalog. Turning it off hides Plane Agent for everyone, including existing conversations. Nothing is deleted, and turning it back on restores access to everything.