What Is an AI Task Manager and How Can It Automate Your Workflow?

As distributed work increasingly becomes the standard, organizations and their employees are consistently looking for ways to better manage project tasks and collaborate more effectively across countries and time zones.

As AI permeates the workplace, more organizations are finding benefits in AI productivity tools. Our 2025 Currents report found that 26% of respondents were using AI to improve internal processes and operational efficiency. These tools help automate mundane tasks while freeing employees to concentrate on high-impact work instead of managing email backlogs and coordinating calendars.

One option to organize team assignments, assign tasks automatically, and prevent missed deadlines is through AI task managers.

This article digs into how AI task managers work, what they can and can’t do, and highlights specific tools worth testing as part of your remote work toolkit.

What is an AI task manager?

AI task managers are applications that use AI to help you schedule meetings, generate to-do lists, gather analytics about task completion times, and rearrange tasks and projects as your schedule changes on a daily or weekly basis.

They use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand user input and then identify tasks, meetings, or projects to generate reminders about. These tools will also integrate with other productivity applications, such as calendars, project management software, email systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

There are several types of AI task managers:

• Scheduling and calendar management

• Task and project management

• Communication and email

• Team support

• Decision-support and analytics assistants

AI task managers vs. traditional task managers

The big differentiator between AI task managers and traditional task managers is the amount of manual upkeep that each requires. Traditional task managers require you to provide regular input for each task, project deadline, project update, and any relevant information or notes. With AI task managers, these tools can learn from your regular behavior, adapt workflows, and provide recommendations that reduce the amount of required manual input.

For example, with a traditional task manager, you might need to draft a weekly task reminder and send it to your team regularly or manually manage your calendar to integrate focus time. With specific AI task manager tools, you can have it identify weekly tasks, send out automatic reminders, and analyze your calendar to find and block out space for deep work.

It can be tough to discern which task managers are AI-first or simply have AI add-ons or specific features. Spend time looking at the specific tooling documentation to figure out how deeply AI is integrated into the core functionality versus just being a marketing buzzword.

Benefits

Organizations implement AI task managers to help their teams automate workflows, reduce overall mental load, and find ways to optimize what they’re working on. Here are some of the benefits you’ll see from using AI task managers:

• Automated task allocation: These tools can help send email reminders, create reports, schedule recurring meetings, and manage email. This means that you can spend more time on projects and tasks that help bring value to the business, instead of writing up the same weekly reports or regularly sorting through your email inbox.

• Provided data for continuous improvement: AI is excellent at analyzing large sets of data and finding patterns. This means AI task managers can look at your project management and time tracking tools and see what you spend the most of your time on. They can then provide potential feedback on what tasks it can automate, or you can manually reassess the importance of these tasks.

• Increased productivity: Using AI to automate tasks, speed up decision-making, and manage large amounts of information (such as your calendar or email inbox) increases overall productivity and reduces the amount of time required for manual task management.

Challenges

Of course, even with the benefits of AI task managers, there are still limitations and considerations to keep in mind. They include:

• Algorithm and data biases: AI relies on constant training and regular new data to stay informed and make its decisions. However, it is only as effective as the available data. Without regular feedback or human input, it is possible for these AI task managers to incorrectly assign tasks based on gender, race, or other biases in the data sets. This can affect team performance and overall productivity, so make sure that you provide regular feedback on AI task manager performance.

• Data privacy: Letting AI task managers have access to company documents, project plans, emails, and calendars raises concerns about data privacy and who has access to what information. These software programs may be susceptible to hacking, and connecting them to other tools only increases the number of potential attack points. This means you should ensure your organization and team implement data encryption, access controls, and follow security best practices.

• Product integration: AI requires a lot of data and a variety of permissions to effectively help with task management. This means that you should evaluate whether or not the applications you want to use with the AI task manager are the right version to support such an integration, or address any potential compatibility issues before you implement an AI task manager. Integration issues will only create more work for you and your team and decrease overall productivity.

• Limits of AI: AI task managers simply aren’t as sophisticated as human beings. This means that you should educate your team on how AI task managers can help (task automation, pattern recognition, schedule management) and where they have limitations (organization-specific context, time-sensitive updates, understanding complex human language) that might require human intervention.

7 AI task managers to get you started in 2025

With AI task managers, many are designed to do one or two tasks specifically very well. This means that you might use a variety of task managers to fully automate a variety of tasks or just use one to complete a few things. Here’s a look at some available AI task managers and their features.

1. ClickUp

Best for: Project management and task management

ClickUp is a comprehensive project management and workflow customization tool. Its AI function, called ClickUp Brain, is a collection of conversational, contextual, and role-based features available across the platform. You can set up Autopilot Agents to answer questions, get real-time project summaries, and draft project plans. It also allows you to generate team updates from standup meetings, project tasks, and documents, and take notes during meetings.

Top features:

• Summarize content and get an overview of documents, task comments, your ClickUp Inbox, and task updates and project statuses.

• Create AI-generated subtasks based on a parent task name.

• Add AI Cards content to highlight accomplishments, key next steps, and project challenges.

• Use AI Standup to get an overview of your recent activity or team updates over a selected time period.

Pricing:

• Free: $0

• Unlimited: $7/month per user

• Business: $12/month per user

Note: Adding on ClickUp Brain starts at $9 per month

2. Motion

Best for: Task prioritization and automatic scheduling

Motion is ideal for calendar and task management. It uses AI to automatically adjust task lists based on your calendar availability and urgency. This feature will automatically update your calendar based on when you complete tasks, and readjust as needed if you do miss specific tasks. It also includes features for deadline tracking, task prioritization, meeting consolidation, and AI scheduling so that your calendar reflects a realistic workload and organizes itself so it works for you.

Top features:

• Automated project management with prioritization and optimization; once tasks are completed, every related task will move accordingly to the right team member or workflow.

• A Task Manager that auto-schedules your day based on deadlines, priorities, and dependencies, with the ability to mark your top priorities of the hour and create task time windows.

• Document Assistant to summarize and draft content, as well as extract tasks and schedule priorities to team members.

• AI Meeting Notetaker to transcribe, summarize, and record meetings and then generate team action items.

Pricing:

Prices shift depending on the number of members. For 5 seats at annual billing:

• Pro AI $19/month per user

• Business AI: $29/month per user

3. Reclaim.ai

Best for: Calendar and task management

Reclaim, developed by Dropbox, is designed for AI-based calendaring and task management. It has features that allow you to block out focus time, share meeting availability, automatically build in buffer time between meetings, track time for specific tasks, plan out your day, and identify regular tasks and habits in your schedule. Its Task feature allows you to automatically block out time on your calendar to complete tasks before their due date and integrates with project management software to add to-do lists to your calendar. With Focus, you can set a goal for focus time, and Reclaim can find time to add Focus blocks to your calendar and adapt as your schedule changes over the week.

Top features:

• Focus Time helps you block out time automatically on your calendar throughout the week. You can either have it stay the same every week or have it update depending on your weekly or daily schedule.

• Habits allow you to add events you want to build into part of your routine, allow you to set preferences for when they can occur, and Reclaim will update your calendar as your schedule changes.

• Stats show how your time is being spent across all the different projects in Reclaim, such as focus time, habits, meetings, and tasks.

• Scheduling Links make it so you can send your calendar availability and have built-in prioritization controls, so Reclaim can automatically shuffle lower-priority events and highlight higher-priority meetings to schedule.

Pricing:

• Free: $0 for one user

• Starter: $8/month per user

• Business: $12/month per user

• Enterprise: $18/month per user

4. Taskade

Best for: AI agents and real-time collaboration

Taskade, originally a project management tool, has evolved into an AI-based collaboration application. Its capabilities let you create AI agents to complete specific project management tasks and offer a library of templates to quickly start tasks or build out project plans. If you don’t want to build an AI agent yourself, its library is available to help with marketing, coding, project management, visual workflow, translation, and social media projects. It also offers productivity features for task generation, mind map generation, to-do list prioritization, context-aware project templates, and time task estimation.

Top Features:

• Document Chat allows you to upload documents and content, and ask Taskade’s AI to provide information about the document, provide content summaries, and share with your teammates.

• Automations helps you create standardized workflows, set up “If This Then That” actions to create new tasks once certain tasks are completed, and integrate with your preferred productivity tools (like Slack, GDrive, and WordPress).

• AI Agent Generator helps you create agents that are designed for a specific task, project, or action. You can provide a name, its main purpose, what prompts will make the agent appear, and what languages it can communicate with.

• Use the AI Agent to write, create, edit, rewrite, summarize, and brainstorm your short-form and long-form content across the platform with one-word commands, such as /edit, /rewrite, /summarize, and more.

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month

• Pro: $10/month

• Team $50/month

5. Trevor

Best for: Task management and schedule creation

Trevor will create an actionable schedule out of your to-do lists based on your availability and predictions of how long it might take to complete each task. You can have it integrate with personal and professional to-do lists and plan out your entire day, then customize as needed. Its “Plan My Day” feature can create an optimal day and can adapt over time as it recognizes patterns or repeated tasks in your schedule. It also has Focus Mode to eliminate distractions, generate a task breakdown with AI, and create notes as you progress with your task.

Top features:

• Predicted task duration that assigns a general timeframe for your tasks to give you an idea of completion time.

• In-schedule suggestions that highlight the best time to complete or focus on certain tasks.

• The “Ask Trevor” chat allows you to ask about planning guidance, product features, or completing tasks in bulk.

• Personal AI model that adapts after each planning session to improve overall accuracy and optimize your schedule over time.

Pricing:

• Free: $0/month

• Pro: $6/month

6. Todoist

Best for: Task prioritization and productivity tracking

Todoist is suited for productivity, time management, and habit formation. Its AI assistant can help you break down goals and provide quick-start templates for projects, generate task lists for specific goals, make tasks more actionable with project suggestions, and break down complex tasks into smaller ones. It also provides basic tracking of productivity metrics, so you can get an idea of how long specific tasks will take to complete and organize your workload accordingly.

Top features:

• Task suggestions to help you figure out where to start on a specific project or goal.

• Get tips on how to complete a specific task, and the AI Assistant will generate a list of actionable items.

• Rewrite tasks to become more actionable and get a better understanding of how to start working on them.

• Automatically break down large parent tasks into subtasks with the “break task down” prompt.

Pricing:

• Beginner: $0/month

• Pro: $4/month per user

• Business: $7/month per user

7. Wrike

Best for: Project management and real-time collaboration

Wrike provides a high level of customization and is suited for enterprise-grade project and task management. Its Work Intelligence AI creates and edits AI content for project and task notes, along with summaries of project comments and attached notes. You can also use it to generate action item summaries and create relevant parent and subtasks so your team can quickly access action items from meeting notes or transcripts. For more workflow-centric tasks, its automation features can help provide feedback on how to improve workflows.

Top features:

• Create, edit, and rework content for your organization, such as project details, content summaries, webinar descriptions, and briefs.

• Figure out potential project blockers with AI risk prediction and proactively address delays and optimize resources.

• Identify action items within notes, meeting transcripts, or project plans and automatically generate tasks.

• Enhance workflows with suggestions from Wrike to eliminate repetitive tasks or overlaps across your teams.

Pricing:

• Free: $0

• Team: $10/month per user

• Business: $25/month per user

Resources

• Build Real-Time AI Agents with GenAI and Serverless Functions

• How To Setup Task Automation with Grunt and Node.js on a VPS

• RAG, AI Agents, and Agentic RAG: An In-Depth Review and Comparative Analysis

AI task manager FAQ

What is an AI task manager?

An AI task manager is a productivity tool that uses AI and NLP to automate task generation, meeting scheduling, and project reminders.

How is an AI task manager different from a regular one?

AI task managers use NLP algorithms to understand your regular tasks, emails, work calendar, and project management tools to suggest improvements, auto-generate tasks, and optimize your workflow. A traditional task manager requires 100% manual input and upkeep from you to keep track of everything and ensure all the information is up-to-date.

Are AI task managers secure?

Security will differ between programs, and you should assume that some data will be sent to help train the AI models. To understand how secure AI task managers are, you will need to read the individual product documentation and feature options.

Who should use an AI task manager?

Anyone can use an AI task manager. It can be especially helpful if you deal with a busy calendar, have lots of ongoing projects to manage, or want to automate some of the more mundane office tasks in your daily workflow.

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