Asana Inc. announced today that it’s integrating artificial intelligence into multiple aspects of its work management platform, taking advantage of its Work Graph architecture to maximize the impact, clarity, accountability and scale of various work-related projects.

The company is the creator of a popular freemium work management platform that’s used by thousands of companies to organize tasks across a centralized visual dashboard. The software aims to improve coordination and collaboration among different team members, and comes with more advanced features for premium users.

At its annual Work Innovation Summit today in New York City, Asana cited research conducted by its own Work Innovation Lab, which shows that 71% of company executives believe it’s possible to achieve better outcomes by combining AI with human expertise, as opposed to relying on one or the other alone. To that end, the new features announced today are all about enhancing human skills with AI, to help teams find ways to work more efficiently.

Many of the new AI capabilities are available today and are designed to maximize worker productivity and impact. For instance, there are auto-generated custom fields available today that make it easier for projects to support cross-functional collaboration, the company said.

A new Smart Editor tool makes it simpler to write clearer and more compelling drafts that strike the right tone, while Smart Summaries can help to surface highlights from task descriptions and comments together with key action items. In future it will also be able to do the same for video calls, Asana said.

Also coming soon is a new Smart Workflows capability that will help team leaders to create entire workflows using natural language commands, and Smart Digests, a news feed that tracks recent changes in various projects being performed on Asana.

To boost clarity and accountability, Asana is planning to introduce to help users understand and explain the status of each project. Coming soon, the Smart Status feature will provide a way to create more comprehensive status updates with AI, using work data to identify risks and potential roadblocks.

Smart Answers will provide instant answers to natural language questions about the state of any project, while Smart Goals will make it easier for team leaders to create more effective project goals. In a future release, Asana will also add Smart Planning and Smart Workload features to aid in scenario-based planning and monitoring of projects.

Asana is also planning the imminent launch of a new Smart Search tool that will make it easier for companies to standardize work management on a single and trusted enterprise platform, where AI is used in a transparent way.

In addition to those productivity-focused updates, Asana announced the creation of a new assessment tool for users called the Work Innovation Score. Available to premium subscribers starting today, the Work Innovation Score allows enterprises to benchmark their performance against industry competitors in metrics such as cohesion, or how well employees work together; velocity, or how quickly the work moves forward; resilience, which ranks stability during employee turnover; and capacity, which refers to employee bandwidth.

According to Asana, these are vital metrics that can show how effectively their teams work together. Based on an organization’s Work Innovation Score, Asana can make recommendations and suggestions to improve collaboration, increase the productivity and impact of each team member, and boost competitive advantage.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said enterprises are still trying to work out what it is that makes some teams effective and successful, and others less effective and unable to meet their goals.

“This is still a problem in 2023, even with all of the technology enterprises have at their disposal,” the analyst explained. “Asana’s Work Innovation Score may just help to shed some light on the reasons for team success, so this can be replicated everywhere. It’s a new benchmark that promises to help team leaders shape the future of work, aided by the infusion of AI across Asana’s entire suite of tools.”

Image: Asana