The problem
My editorial calendar lived in Excel: color-coded and formatted as a calendar for people to read at a glance. Useful for sharing, but difficult for production planning. Turning it into an actual project plan meant reading it by hand, and it kept changing, so the plan was always in flux. I also wanted something a non-developer could run to create a plan: an alternative to VS Code and Copilot for teammates who don't live in a code editor.
The approach
When Copilot Cowork came out, I went straight to it for non-dev work. I connected the agent to SharePoint and configured scheduled runs to transform the editorial calendar into a structured Excel project plan, incorporate changes, and send me a morning Teams summary of the day's work. It required no code editor, so I shared the approach with the AI Explorers team as a way for PMs to create a plan.
The result
It showed how a non-developer could turn a readable calendar into a structured plan without a code editor. It needed handholding at the time. Automated runs were unreliable and permissions issues got in the way, but I kept using it. Unlike Power Automate, Cowork gave me no way to inspect the workflow, making problems harder to diagnose. There was also no way to share the finished workflow, so I couldn't hand the tool to teammates to use. It remained a promising but limited use of agentic AI outside coding. Those limitations describe my experience then; the product may have changed since.