Autopilot — setting it up
AI project management, configured per project, in five steps.
Autopilot does the project-management work nobody enjoys: turning a brief into a real plan, routing work to whoever actually has capacity, chasing status, and keeping the schedule honest. It runs per project.
Autopilot is configured on the Noot it runs on, and nowhere else. Open the project and use the Autopilot settings button in its header (it reads Plan with Autopilot when it's off), or its Autopilot tab. Anyone looking for it in Settings or Org settings won't find it, because a single switch for every project in a company was never the right shape.
You can configure it if you have the AI configuration permission or you created the Noot. It's on the Business plan and above.
The five steps
| Step | The question | What you set |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Brief | What are we delivering, by when? | The strategic brief, delivery date, budget, project type and methodology. |
| 2. Teams | Who's on it, and what do they bring? | A project-local specialty for each team — what they're doing *here*. |
| 3. Autonomy | How much may Autopilot do alone? | The autonomy level, eleven capability switches and a cadence. |
| 4. Guardrails | What must it never do? | VIPs, stakeholders, communication hours and scheduling limits. |
| 5. Access | What may it reach? | Calendar, GitHub and chat grants. |
1. The brief is the whole game
The screen shows a weak brief and a strong one side by side, and a one-click start from the strong example. A weak brief ("Update the pricing page") produces a weak plan. A strong one names the outcome, the deadline, the constraint and what done means. The delivery date is a real constraint — the plan is compressed to fit inside it.
3. How much it may do on its own
| Level | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Draft & Propose | Builds the board, picks owners, queues invitations — then stops. Nothing applies and nobody is contacted until you approve it, item by item. This is the default. |
| Draft, and apply safe changes | Tasks from explicit meeting action items, priority bumps, check-ins and risk logs apply on their own. Reassignments, date moves and meetings still wait for you. |
| Fully Autonomous | Creates tasks, messages people for updates and shifts timelines by itself. Every change is still listed, and individually reversible, in the activity trail. |
Underneath, eleven independent switches decide what it may do at all — create tasks, assign members, build boards, set due dates, reprioritize, schedule meetings, manage goals, ask owners for status, follow dependencies, log risks to RAID, send recaps. Turning one off genuinely stops the behaviour, it doesn't just hide a button. Two are off by default: *Manage goals* and *Send recaps*.
Cadence is how often it reviews the project by itself: Manual (the default — you run every cycle), Daily or Weekly. Cadence is per project, so a daily Noot and a weekly Noot in the same workspace genuinely behave differently.
4. Guardrails
- VIPs — people Autopilot may never hand heavy work to: a CEO, an external client, anyone whose time isn't yours to book. You set the heaviest task a VIP may be given, in hours; at zero they're never auto-assigned anything. This is enforced when work is assigned, not merely requested of the model.
- Stakeholders — they get a weekly executive summary of the project whether or not they own a single task.
- Communication hours — when Autopilot may put a message in front of a person, read in each recipient's own timezone. Outside the window a message waits rather than being cancelled; it goes out on the next cycle inside the window, and a person can always approve it by hand.
- Scheduling limits — respect working hours, respect time zones, no weekend meetings, and require approval for meetings. That last one beats Fully Autonomous: meetings are always proposed, never auto-booked. There's also a cap on how many tasks a single run may create.
5. Access
Three grants, each unlocking one specific behaviour. Revoke one and that behaviour stops — the data isn't merely hidden, it is never read.
| Grant | Unlocks | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Calendar | Booking kickoffs, reviews and triage, and pushing them to connected calendars. | On |
| GitHub | Reading merged pull requests linked to this project's tasks. | Off |
| Chat | Reading recent messages in conversations pinned to this Noot, for blocker context. | Off |
Noots has no design-tool integration, so a switch offering one would do nothing. The screen says so rather than listing a grant that isn't real.
The Access step reads live connection state, so if you enable a grant with nothing connected it tells you on the spot — for example that nobody has connected a writable calendar yet, so meetings will stay inside Noots.