Asana's new "AI teammates" will do work for you
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Asana, the maker of project management software, is rolling out an initial version of its "AI teammates" — an artificial intelligence-based feature that aims to assist users by doing some of their tasks.
Why it matters: Business software companies are rushing to harness the current boom in generative AI technology and its promise of increasing workplace productivity.
How it works: Users can enable Asana's AI feature, delegate tasks or pieces of a workflow to the assistant, and set up triggers and rules for when and how it gets activated.
- For example, the "teammate" can triage incoming requests from other co-workers, determine if all necessary information has been included, and ask for more details or move the request to the next step in the process.
- It can also gather relevant data from inside the company, generate feedback on a piece of content or even suggest ways to make productivity improvements to the human workers' activities.
- The user can take over at any time or be looped in if a specific step requires human decision-making or input.
Behind the scenes: Asana is using large language models built by OpenAI and Anthropic.
- The company says that it's not using customer data to train a universal AI model; instead, it's only using it to tailor each customer's "teammate" to their unique ways of using Asana's software.
What they're saying: "We expect that AI will help people achieve more and more complex work over time, but the human is ultimately accountable for the work," Paige Costello, Asana's head of AI, told Axios.
Zoom in: Asana has been testing the feature with some of its enterprise customers, such as Palo Alto Networks.
- "Right now people are broadening their adoption [of AI teammates] across more of their workflows, but not yet changing the length of the leash," said Costello.
Bonus bot: The company is also introducing a friendly chatbot interface through which users can ask questions about using Asana, about their own employer and for analysis of their work. They can also ask it to take actions like create a new task or project.
My thought bubble: Few things are more maddening in the workplace than software tools needing more attention and interactions, taking away from the real work.
- But Costello assures me that Asana's AI teammates aim to do the opposite and are in need of little hand-holding — if it's creating more work for me, then I need to change my interactions with the bot.
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