GitLab 18.5: GitLab Duo Planner supports Product Managers with AI

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With 57 new features, GitLab 18.5 has been released. The development platform offers, among other things, the AI agent GitLab Duo Planner as a beta version – to support product managers with their planning using artificial intelligence. Beta releases of the GitLab Security Analyst and the Maven Virtual Registry UI, as well as a new personal homepage for GitLab users, are also included.

AI Conference for Product Owners

The Product Owner AI Day from iX and dpunkt.verlag on November 6, 2025, shows you how you, as a Product Owner, Product Manager, or with your team, can concretely integrate AI into your work – from discovery to rollout.

Product Planning with AI Support

The GitLab Duo Planner is a specialized AI agent that allows Product Managers to collaborate with GitLab, according to GitLab's announcement, in the sense of a “proactive team member.” This means product managers no longer have to manually perform some tasks, such as prioritizing work or summarizing planning data. Among other things, the Planner can help analyze backlogs and apply prioritization frameworks such as RICE (reach, impact, confidence, effort) or MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, won't have).

The GitLab Duo Planner is currently in beta and is available on GitLab.com in all paid GitLab editions. The limitations of the beta states that the planner can only access data read-only, cannot perform cross-project dependency analysis, and may not understand custom workflows.

AI Takes Over Routine Tasks for Security

Another AI agent in beta status, the GitLab Security Analyst, is available on GitLab.com – but only for users of the Duo Core, Duo Pro, and Duo Enterprise editions, as well as Ultimate with the GitLab Duo add-on. Among other things, the security tool can list all security vulnerabilities in a project, provide detailed information about them, update the severity levels of security vulnerabilities, or create issues for security vulnerabilities.

According to the GitLab team, this allows tedious, repetitive security workflows to be implemented through AI-powered automation and intelligent analysis, while developers can focus on specific security threats.

Overview of Your Activities

Highlights in GitLab 18.5 also include a personal homepage for all GitLab users. This is intended to serve as a central overview of to-do items, assigned issues, merge and review requests, and recently viewed content:

Further details on all major new features in version 18.5 is offered by the GitLab blog.

(mai)