Asana Inc., creator of a popular work management and collaboration software platform, is accelerating its artificial intelligence initiatives with the launch of Asana AI Studio.

It’s a no-code tool companies can use to create AI agents that can be embedded into workflows they design and deploy anywhere in the Asana platform.

The publicly traded company’s work management platform is used by thousands of enterprises to organize work-related tasks within a centralized dashboard. The main benefit is that it improves coordination among teams, so users can collaborate more easily and prioritize their most important tasks.

The software, which integrates with Zoom and other platforms, is free for its most basic features. It also provides advanced capabilities for those who shell out for a subscription to the platform.

The Asana AI Studio is one of those advanced features. Available in early access from today, it is quite unlike traditional AI tools that simply synthesize information to generate content, according to the company.

Instead, it works more like a colleague or a teammate, assisting workers by taking on some of their simpler but mundane tasks. Users can create “smart workflows” for coordinating projects and orchestrating work, with AI Studio leveraging Asana’s Work Graph capabilities to capture critical context and relationships inside their organizations. In this way, it can understand who is doing what work and where, when, how and why they’re doing it.

The launch of Asana AI Studio builds on Asana’s original “AI teammates,” which debuted in July and act as “advisers” to workers, prioritizing the tasks they need to do, creating workflows to complete those tasks and even helping to automate some of them.

Asana co-founder and Chief Executive Dustin Moskovitz said the main advantage of AI Studio is that users can create customized workflows simply by providing instructions in their natural language. “This level of ease and accessibility to building agents is a big step forward for any company that wants to improve the quality of their work while empowering teams to move faster,” he said.

Asana believes there’s a need for this kind of automation. It points to its recent State of Work Innovation report, which found that employees still spend 53% of their time on low-value tasks. Moreover, just 20% of employees believe their teams collaborate effectively using their existing platforms.

The company says the Asana AI Studio can be used to enhance workflows across marketing, operations, information technology, human resources and research and development teams.

For instance, marketing teams can use smart workflows to accelerate tasks such as editorial production, campaign planning, product launches and more, using AI agents to advise and take action through each of the steps necessary to fulfill each campaign.

It will begin by prioritizing project requests, rewriting and restructuring these so that the information is relevant to each team’s area of expertise. Then it will proceed to planning, conducting research to inform the marketing campaign, drafting briefs so that teams are aligned on deliverables and timelines.

During the execution stage, it will assist by drafting content like emails and blog posts, facilitating reviews and approvals, translating that content and ensuring everything meets the brand’s guidelines. Finally, it will aid in the reporting process by categorizing and tagging work so that everything is up to date with consistent and accurate information to aid decision making.

For operations and information technology teams, the Asana AI Studio can improve how they prepare and coordinate strategic planning and resource management, the company said. The AI will help by advising teams and taking action at each stage of their work.

For instance, it will start by reviewing and gathering information about the scope of work required for each project, before triaging this against IT requirements. It will then estimate the time and resources needed to complete each project based on the plan and historical projects, before suggesting the sequence in which tasks are performed to ensure that everything is done by the deadlines given.

Each task within the project will be assigned to the most suitable employee. Finally, it will summarize the key learnings from that project and suggest areas for reflection, the company said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Asana’s AI Studio is a great example of how AI is transforming the way enterprise software is used on the user experience side. “Asana is using AI’s voice and text understanding capabilities to help companies set up and launch entire projects,” he said. “It’s a radical simplification and acceleration of that process that will contribute towards enterprises becoming faster and more agile.”

The financial services and investment organization Morningstar Inc. has been using Asana AI Studio to handle project management and work intake to good effect, Asana said, benefiting from improved operational efficiencies and reduced planning risks. With AI Studio’s smart workflows, Morningstar’s IT teams can automatically evaluate new project requests, assess them against predefined criteria, generate discovery questions and then make recommendations, based on the resources required and the project’s urgency.

Belinda Hardman, Morningstar’s director of program management, said AI Studio has delivered significant efficiency gains while enabling better decision making throughout project planning and execution.

“Previously it took us two weeks to review a request and gather the information needed to proceed,” she said. “Now we can eliminate the time spent on manual back and forth, because Asana AI identifies and captures all of the information we need right off the bat.”

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