Planera has launched Manny, an AI scheduling assistant built directly into its CPM platform. It lets anyone on a project, not just the credentialed scheduler, ask plain-English questions about the schedule, run “what-if” scenarios on things like delayed concrete pours, and surface choke points in seconds. The promise is faster decisions and broader access to scheduling logic, without throwing out the rigor of critical path method.
Scheduling on a construction project has always had a strange political problem. The schedule is the heartbeat of the job, but only a handful of people on any given site actually know how to read it, edit it, or stress-test it. Everyone else, including superintendents, project managers, trade partners, owners, ends up asking questions and waiting for the scheduler to come back with answers a few days later.
That gap is what Planera is going after with Manny, its new AI scheduling assistant. The CEO, Nitin Bhandari, came on Bricks & Bytes to walk through what it actually does on a jobsite, how teams interact with it, and why he thinks it changes who gets to use scheduling intelligence on a project.
This is not another AI bolt-on that lives outside the tool you already use. Manny lives inside the schedule, with full access to logic ties, float, and predecessors. So when you ask it something, the answer comes back grounded in your actual project, not a generic LLM guess.
An AI assistant that understands CPM logic, sits inside the scheduling tool, and lets non-schedulers run real analysis. Less waiting on one specialist. More people pressure-testing the plan before the field hits a wall.
The bottleneck Planera is trying to break
Scheduling has always been gated by tool literacy
Anyone who has worked around a P6 schedule knows the drill. The scheduler builds the plan, the field tries to execute against it, and questions go through a queue. Want to know what happens if the steel deck slips two weeks? Wait for the scheduler to model it. Want to see your top three choke points? Same answer.
Bhandari put it directly on the podcast: senior schedulers know how to drive the software but often do not know how the job should actually be built, while the people on site who do know the job cannot use the software. That mismatch has been the structural feature of construction planning for decades, and it is the thing Planera has been chipping at since day one.
Manny is an extension of that thesis. Instead of training more people in P6, the assistant lets the people who already understand the work ask the schedule questions in plain English and get answers tied to actual activity IDs, durations, and dependencies.
What Manny actually does on a project
Three jobs: query, scenario, quality
From the conversation with Bhandari, Manny does three concrete things on a live job, and each one matters to a different person on the team.
- Answers questions in context. Ask “where are my top three schedule choke points” and Manny returns hyperlinked activities. Click any of them and you land directly in the schedule, with predecessor, successor, labor, and equipment ties visible.
- Runs scenario analysis. Ask “what if I cannot pour concrete on Saturday, what if it moves to next Thursday” and Manny spins out a new schedule version with full CPM rigor applied, then brings the analysis back for comparison.
- Catches logic and constructability errors. Traditional quality checks flag missing predecessors or unrealistic durations. Manny goes further by reading the sequence as a builder would, for example flagging when curing time has not been built in between two activities.
The Engineering News-Record coverage notes that the AI was trained for years during Planera’s beta to understand construction concepts like the critical path, which is why the answers come back grounded in logic rather than surface-level pattern matching.
How you actually talk to it
The interface is familiar. There is a chat panel anchored to the bottom right of the project, with prompts your organization has saved or your own ad-hoc questions. The smarter trick is the right-click. On any activity or milestone in the schedule, the context menu includes a Manny button. Open it and the assistant already knows which activity you are asking about, so you skip the back-and-forth of explaining context.
The name, by the way, is not a CPM joke. Bhandari said he and his co-founder named it after the cartoon Handy Manny their daughters watched, the handyman who fixes things for you. Read into that what you want.
Why this lands now
Margins, labor, and the cost of bad planning
This is not a tool launching into a calm market. US contractors are working at 2-3% average margins, navigating tariff exposure, and reporting the tightest labor pool in years. Planning errors that used to get absorbed by float and overtime now come straight out of profit.
That is the practical reason a tool like Manny matters. As we covered in our analysis of the scheduling market fragmenting, the old idea that one tool would replace Primavera is dead. Five distinct players are now occupying five distinct niches, and the mid-market between $20M and $100M projects is the biggest unsolved opportunity. Planera’s bet is that the win comes from giving more people on a project the ability to interrogate the schedule, not from replacing the scheduler.
It is also part of a wider AI shift in construction software. DPR Construction has now scaled its ConstructivIQ platform across more than 120 projects, McKinsey and ALICE are pushing generative scheduling into megaprojects, and AI document review tools are catching commercial risk earlier in the workflow. Scheduling was overdue for a similar treatment.
CPM scheduling is the heartbeat of a project, but traditional tools move too slowly for the modern jobsite.Nitin Bhandari, CEO and co-founder, Planera
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Join 2500+ ReadersWhat “democratizing scheduling” looks like in practice
The user shifts from one scheduler to the whole team
The phrase democratizing scheduling gets thrown around a lot. The honest version of it, based on what Bhandari described, is that the people who interact with the schedule changes. A superintendent can right-click an activity, ask why it is on the critical path, and get an answer they can act on without queuing up a request. A VDC team can pressure-test sequencing. A project manager can model a recovery plan in minutes.
Asa McMains, scheduling manager at Balfour Beatty, has said publicly that Manny gives stakeholders the ability to analyze the schedule at depth regardless of their software training. That is the meaningful change. It is not that AI replaces the scheduler. It is that the scheduler stops being the only person who can answer questions about the plan.
For founders watching this space, the broader signal matches what we wrote in our piece on how AI is automating construction document review: the wins in ConTech AI are coming from targeted, context-aware tools that catch problems earlier in the workflow, not from generic LLMs sprinkled on top of legacy software.
The honest limits
What Manny does not do
Worth being clear on what this is not. Manny is not an autonomous agent that builds your schedule from scratch or commits changes without permission. The Planera help docs note explicitly that Manny can act on your behalf only with your permission. It is also not magic. If your underlying schedule is bad, the answers will reflect that. AI on top of bad logic still gives you bad logic, just faster.
And the broader question of whether AI changes the role of the scheduler is still open. Bhandari is careful on this. The pitch is augmentation, not replacement. A senior scheduler still owns the integrity of the plan. Manny just makes the rest of the team useful contributors to it.
| Capability | Traditional CPM tools | Generic AI chatbots | Planera Manny |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads CPM logic ties | Yes | No | Yes |
| Plain-English queries | No | Yes | Yes |
| What-if scenario versions | Manual, slow | No | Automated, in-platform |
| Constructability quality checks | Surface-level | No | Logic and sequence aware |
| Accessible to non-schedulers | No | N/A | Yes |
| Acts only with permission | N/A | Varies | Yes |
Frequently asked questions
Manny is an AI scheduling assistant built into Planera’s CPM platform. It lets users query, analyze, and stress-test their construction schedule using natural language, with answers grounded in the actual project data and CPM logic. More on Planera’s Manny page.
Planera officially launched Manny on April 15, 2026. The launch was covered by Engineering News-Record, Commercial Observer, and other industry outlets. Read the ENR coverage.
No. Bhandari has been clear that Manny augments scheduler expertise rather than replacing it. The assistant makes scheduling intelligence accessible to non-schedulers but the senior scheduler still owns plan integrity. Coverage in Commercial Observer.
Only with explicit permission from the user. Manny can suggest changes and generate scenario versions, but committing updates requires approval. See Planera’s getting started docs.
Manny is embedded in the platform and reads logic ties, calculates float, and understands activity relationships natively. A general LLM working on an exported file does not have that structural awareness, which is what makes the difference between surface analysis and CPM-grade output. Planera’s product page.
Planera customers include Balfour Beatty, Barton Malow, Big-D Construction, HITT Contracting, Ryan Companies, Skanska, and Zachry Construction. The company is backed by Sierra Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Brick & Mortar Ventures, Prudence, and Firebolt. Customer list via Informed Infrastructure.
Planera press release: Launching Manny
Engineering News-Record: Planera releases AI schedule assistant
Commercial Observer: ContTech firm Planera meets Manny
Planera Help Center: Getting started with Manny
Informed Infrastructure: Planera launches Manny
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