Asana adds new AI smarts to simplify project management

Today, enterprise work management platform Asana strengthened its offering with a slew of AI smarts aimed at helping organizations improve how they work and deliver business outcomes.

Leveraging the company’s proprietary Work Graph, which captures the relationship between the work a team does, the information about that work and the people doing the work, the features allow executives to tap AI to save time and resources and drive greater levels of clarity, accountability and impact to meet their goals.

“Asana brings AI and human innovation together to help leaders understand how work gets done within their organizations in real-time and find ways to work more efficiently,”  Dustin Moskovitz, the CEO of the company, said in a statement.

The features come nearly four months after the company promised to incorporate AI into its platform with a focus on ensuring safety and transparency, right from practice to the actual product. It also gives a strong push to the company against growing competition in the work management space.

What are the new Asana AI features?

To help teams maximize impact, Asana is adding three productivity-centered generative AI features right away: smart fields, smart editor and smart summaries.

Smart fields will auto-generate custom fields to help teams better organize their projects for cross-functional collaboration. The smart editor will generate draft notes in appropriate tones. Finally, the smart summary feature will produce highlights from task descriptions and comments, along with key action items to work on. 

Asana says that the latter will also be able to generate summaries and action items from video call transcripts, enabling teams to get to work quickly.

Once these features are out, it will expand the solutions with smart workflows, a dedicated tool to create auto-optimizing workflows with natural language inputs, and a ‘smart digest’ feed to track project updates and changes over time.

Better accountability and clarity

Along with the productivity-centered features, the work management leader also plans to add AI smarts to boost the accountability of teams. This will begin with the launch of a new smart status tool that will use real-time work data to create comprehensive status updates for ongoing projects. It will highlight potential roadblocks, open questions and more, allowing teams to hit their goals with complete transparency.

Next, using the same technology that powers smart status, Asana will provide smart answers to natural language questions about specific projects. This capability could be used to quickly gain insights into projects, identify blockers and determine the next steps.

It will be paired with a broader ‘smart search’ feature that will allow users to search the entire Work Graph in natural language to pull relevant about different projects. 

For instance, one could ask Asana to show tasks assigned in the last month or tasks completed during the same period and get a detailed overview of the projects.

Finally, the company also said it will launch AI-driven tools to generate goals for teams, plan for different scenarios and monitor and adjust team resourcing – all based on different parameters.

A new era in work management

While most of these features are slated to debut later this year or sometime in Summer 2024, the move from Asana sure highlights the company’s increased focus on AI – a trend witnessed in almost all enterprise technologies. However, it is not the only one looking at the potential of AI to simplify work management.

Monday.com, one of the biggest competitors of Asana today, has already started releasing Monday AI apps targeting use cases such as generating project plans, composing emails and summarizing complex topics. 

Notably, Slack, which offers its own native AI smarts, has also ventured into the work management space with its newly launched ‘Lists’ features. It can easily expand those features into ‘Lists’ to drive work productivity.