Asana wants every enterprise to have an AI ‘chief of staff’

Asana has unveiled a series of new features aimed at streamlining collaboration between human workers and agents as it looks to “solve the AI productivity gap” for enterprises.

Among these is Asana Dash, a new AI “chief of staff” designed to support employees and keep projects on track.

According to the firm, the tool helps users stay up-to-date with project goals and progress, compiling and summarizing relevant information such as email correspondence, messages between team members, and progress reports.

The new tool forms a key component within Asana’s new Agentic Work Management platform, unveiled at the company’s Work Innovation Summit in London this week.

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This platform acts as an underlying “operating system” combining core products with the goal of consolidating workflows within a single domain.

Elsewhere, updates to Asana’s AI Teammates feature complement Dash, according to the firm. New integrations for Gmail, Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, Figma, and Canva were announced at the London summit along with a Skills library for “repeatable work”.

These two features are intended to work in-tandem, helping support project work, according to Asana. Dash can even assign actions to human workers or AI Teammates.

“It captures follow-ups from meetings, Slack threads, and email, turns them into structured work in the Work Graph, and connects users to the right AI Teammates for specific tasks and projects to move work forward,” the company said.

Tackling the “AI productivity gap”

The new features launched by Asana aim to tackle a common recurring pain point for enterprises using AI tools: mismatched productivity gains.

Research conducted by the firm shows that while 75% of knowledge workers now use AI in daily tasks, only 5% of companies report “meaningful” productivity improvements.

The company attributes this problem to four key areas. First and foremost, this includes an inability to select the “right agents” for specific individual needs and tasks.

Notably, the company said “agents aren’t team players,” adding that teams often use them in a fragmented manner spanning multiple domains and workflows. Context also matters, according to the firm, and agents typically aren’t fed with relevant data or information on how to support teams.

“Most agents aren’t onboarded with the context of how their teams operate, prior decisions, or what their priorities are,” Asana noted.

Finally, concerns over governance and safety are also hampering progress with agents. IT leaders are growing increasingly worried about agents “operating with unchecked data access” and little cost oversight.

According to Asana, this combination of issues means organizations “need an operating layer on top” of AI tools and associated software - “a place where humans and agents run critical workflows together”.

Asana CEO Dan Rogers said development of this operating layer builds on the firm’s Enterprise Work Graph, launched in 2021. This gave users “shared memory, multiplayer coordination, and governance”.

Rogers noted this is “precisely what the agentic era requires”.

“Asana’s OS is how AI moves from helping individuals work faster to supercharging entire organizations," he added.

The agentic operating system

The move by Asana bears similarities to Salesforce’s “agentic OS” announcement in October last year. As ITPro reported at the time, the CRM giant identified a similar problem when rolling out its Agentforce service.

In a similar vein, teams were often found working with disparate agents and datasets, which hampers cross-functional collaboration and broader productivity gains.

Salesforce rebranded Slack as an agentic OS with the aim of providing a single point of reference for business data and agents. That move saw CRM data from Salesforce made directly accessible within Slack.

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