Asana, a work management platform, has unveiled a new set of AI-based offerings meant to hasten decision-making and boost output.
The new features come three months after the firm released prediction-based AI tools to its platform and are supported by the company's new AI service, Asana Intelligence. To assist customers keep up with ongoing projects, the most recent round of improvements combines Asana's Work Graph data structure with large language model capabilities made available by OpenAI's API.
Asana Intelligence tracks team capacity and shifting business priorities to speed up decision-making and surface resource suggestions to support teams in achieving their objectives. Invisible problems and obstacles that could prevent teams from advancing toward organizational goals can also be found.
The updated features also seek to increase productivity by automating the creation of plans based on objectives and by identifying and implementing process enhancements to get work done more quickly. In order to enhance the clarity as well as tone of messages, Asana Intelligence also offers a writing helper. However, the tool is not capable of creating original content; rather, it can only modify previously written material that has been input into it.
Additionally, action items, highlights, and tasks from meetings and comment threads will be summarized and transcribed using instant summaries.
Users no longer need to book meetings or interrupt others' workflows to ask questions that can be answered quickly thanks to Asana Intelligence. The new work organizer, which can automatically produce smart rules, custom fields and tips to add structure to projects, will also be advantageous for projects.
Asana is still dubious of AI
Alex Hood, chief product officer at Asana, warned that generative AI could lead to content that does not accurately reflect the daily operations of a business. He noted that this is because the large language models that most AI tools are programmed on occasionally declare things to be true when they are not. Alex Hood made these remarks in March when Asana revealed its predictive AI capabilities.
Hood emphasizes that Asana is not introducing AI as it has come to be known colloquially since none of the features produce entirely new content for users, even though the new capabilities it has launched today actually fall under the category of generative AI because they use the LLM technology as their foundation.
Given that Asana has not given its users access to tools that will enable them to develop or produce content from scratch, Hood asserted that there will be a world in which there is more work around work.
Their feature sets don't contain anything that will generate new data that users may check later because, as the cost of producing new material decreases, the human cost for all the users who must review that content will skyrocket, he claimed. And they want to make people more effective by summarizing content for them.
Asana outlines AI principles
Asana has described the set of AI principles that directs its research and development efforts in addition to the new capabilities supported by Asana Intelligence.
As a firm, they are dedicated to deploying AI in the service of fostering humanity's development, which includes assuring AI security and transparency in both practice and product. Asana, their customers and partners must meaningfully collaborate to realize this goal for the application of AI, the firm stated in a statement.
The firm explained that Asana's five guiding principles for human-centered AI include the idea that AI should assist people in achieving their goals. Furthermore, Asana has stated that it is now building for teams that include both humans and AI, and it will prioritize its efforts to develop the proper workflows and relationships between people and AI.
While Asana Intelligence will assist and enhance human decision-making, the firm thinks that ultimately people are responsible for their own decisions and will design its product as such. Asana is working under the premise that people are ultimately responsible for their own decisions.
Asana says that safety and security will be prioritized with AI providers and that it would follow the same strategy while building AI solutions as the final principles guiding the development of AI. Asana is also committed to transparency.
Asana's product philosophy is similarly based on transparency, and the business is dedicated to being open and clear about its partnerships, safety, data collection, protection and management practices.
Hood added, they are developing products that allow AI and humans to both unpack their thoughts and assumptions so that they can reinforce their collective thought processes, promote trust, and expand on each other's ideas, rather than building on ideas that may or may not, be incorrect.