Asana CIO on How AI Enhances Workflow Management and Automation

Asana has built a robust business helping firms stay organized and up-to-date on their projects through its work management platform. It is now going full bore into leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for itself and its clients.

Asana CIO Saket Srivastava told PYMNTS that the company’s AI Studio — where users can build smart workflows with AI agents — is reinventing work management for its 150,000 customers, which includes 80% of Fortune 100 companies.

“Asana is an enterprise collaborative work management platform,” Srivastava said. “The way I think of this is as a coordination layer. Increasingly, work has become more cross-functional. Work is not managed through hierarchy or a chain of command. It goes across teams, and it’s hard to be on top of this work when you’re not just working through your hierarchy.”

The company’s AI push comes at a time when businesses are looking to invest in the technology and starting to see returns on those investments, according to PYMNTS Intelligence data.

In fact, a staggering 90% of chief financial officers surveyed said they saw “very positive” ROI on GenAI tech investments. The data was based on a survey of 60 CFOs at U.S. firms that made at least $1 billion in revenue last year conducted from Dec. 5 to Dec. 13.

Structured Data to Organize Work Flow

At the heart of Asana’s AI capabilities is what Srivastava calls the “work graph” or “pyramid of clarity” — a structured data model that captures how work is organized from the foundational task level up to company-level goals. This model provides context for AI systems, which significantly reduces hallucinations and improves response quality.

“The structured way in which data is captured within Asana, from the most foundational level of a task all the way up to projects, portfolios and goals at a company level, allows you to pass better context to LLMs, and you get better quality responses,” Srivastava said.

This work graph structure has become increasingly important as organizations seek to bring together strategy, execution and culture. “As leaders, it’s just so important for us to be able to create a workforce that gets a good understanding of how their work matters, how their work ladders up to the company-level goals,” Srivastava said.

Asana’s focus on AI comes as its co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz said he will be guiding the company’s AI efforts as chairman. Moskovitz, who also co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, announced after the bell on Monday (Mar. 10) that he was leaving his CEO position. Shares fell 24% the next day during normal trading hours amid a wider market selloff.

Read more: AI’s Impact on B2B Marketing Spotlights Value of Workflow Automation

Orchestrating Human-AI Workflows

Asana’s recently launched AI Studio is an orchestration platform that enables the creation of business processes combining human and AI capabilities. While many companies initially focused on chatbots and summarization functions, Asana has moved beyond these applications to create more sophisticated workflows, Srivastava said.

For example, financial services firm Morningstar has implemented Asana’s AI Studio to revolutionize its project intake process. When departments such as finance, sales or marketing submit project requests, AI now handles the initial interactions, gathering necessary information without requiring human intervention.

“They’re able to eliminate all of that back and forth by leveraging AI, which knows what good looks like, compares that with the input, and then is able to go back and ask questions to get a more robust intake request,” Srivastava said.

By streamlining workflows and scaling efficiencies, Morningstar saved 1,972 work days annually, which translates to an estimated $758,600 in cost savings.

Another use case comes from Clear Channel, known for its billboard advertising. The company used Asana’s AI Studio to streamline its intake process. According to Srivastava, the company has “created workflows wherein they’re able to sort of shorten that process and increase their productivity by material numbers.”

Even within Asana itself, the platform is transforming how teams work. Sales representatives now use an AI-powered workflow that generates comprehensive summaries of accounts in advance of a client call.

“We’ve created a workflow leveraging Asana AI Studio which, before the call, allows the account executive to generate a point of view on that account — a holistic view which factors in information from the web, from Asana usage, or from our CRM systems,” Srivastava said. “This could be hours worth of work shortened to five minutes of just reading through and being prepared.”

See also: This Week in B2B: Embracing Complexity Is Transforming Back Offices

Advice for Business Leaders

Despite the rapid advancements in AI capabilities, Srivastava noted that it is still in an early stage. “It’s just been a little over two years since this conversation around generative AI started, and it is so transformative. The pace of innovation is just so fast that keeping up to date with it is not easy.”

His advice for business leaders: “Don’t wait for perfection. Don’t wait for all of this to play out and then jump into the game — you become obsolete at that point. You want to make sure that you are experimenting, but you also want to make sure that you’re not just recklessly and randomly making bets.”

As AI continues to reshape work processes, Srivastava believes the key is finding the right balance between human and machine capabilities.

“The mundane, the repetitive, the things that require a higher level of computation — these are things that AI can do better than humans,” he said. “How do we then make sure that we do what we do best, which is maybe more strategy, more collaboration, more communication, empathy and emotion?”

For organizations looking to build high-performing teams in this new era, Srivastava recommends thinking about the ecosystem of tools as having three components: communication tools (like Slack and Teams), content tools (like Microsoft, Google and Box) and coordination platforms like Asana.

“When you’re able to coordinate and thread all of your work through a platform, you get greater accountability, greater clarity and better outcomes,” he said. “Add to that the power of AI to create workflows in a low-code manner, and you enable business users to improve processes that were previously done manually or through more complex technology.”