Streamline content creation at scale with AI Studio

Content marketing is a lot like running a relay race where success hinges on perfect handoffs. Writers and editors pass off to creative, creative to design, design back to editorial, and finally editorial to channel owners like social media managers or the web team. 

Each transition is critical to winning audience attention, the ultimate prize in today's highly competitive digital landscape. But what if you could streamline these handoffs, reducing friction and accelerating your team toward the finish line? 

At Asana, we wanted AI to help us take editorial production from a complex relay to a synchronized sprint, where handoffs happen with unprecedented speed and precision. 

Here's how we're using AI Studio, our no-code workflow builder, to do exactly that, while always keeping a human in the loop.

Designing the perfect editorial assistant

As we set out to find ways to use AI Studio, we wanted to anchor on true pain points. We didn't actually have a problem with the creative act of writing. The risk of delays and production stress centered more on the "work of work" or the myriad handoffs that would occur with bigger launches, like a yearly report or unveiling major research results. 

Let’s take the case of research from our colleagues at The Work Innovation Lab, Asana’s future of work research arm. They are incredible writers and researchers and also prolific publishers. This means content marketing at Asana is tasked multiple times per year with promoting a major piece of their research, sometimes based on a core asset that is 20+ pages long. 

In most of these launch scenarios, three or more different writers could be tasked with drafting off the same long-form copy, each creating derivative content such as blog articles, social posts, and more. Without a lot of time-consuming coordination, key takeaways and voice and tone could easily start to vary from asset-to-asset, losing the cohesive feel of a well-coordinated launch. 

AI Studio became our secret weapon by enabling a custom workflow that transforms cornerstone research into consistent, channel-specific messaging. This unified playbook ensures brand consistency across all touchpoints, from email newsletters to Instagram posts.

In practice, our workflow starts with adding source content to a customized project. Within minutes, AI generates tailored outlines for all requested assets simultaneously, following our detailed guidance—including specialized formats like social media carousels. The result: human writers can immediately build on structured outlines without guessing about priorities or formats.

Tweaking, testing, and fine-tuning

The fun yet potentially frustrating part of AI is getting it to work exactly how you want it. It’s often a case of trial and error. To call back to the sports metaphor, a great track and field relay team needs to practice, practice, and practice some more. It helped that we didn't expect perfection out of the gate.

Our first AI-generated content outlines needed serious coaching. We discovered that providing more specific instructions in our prompts—almost like giving better directions to our AI teammate—dramatically improved results. For example, instead of asking for "social copy," we learned to specify "LinkedIn post emphasizing productivity benefits for team leaders" to get exactly what we needed. We also discovered that our Brand guidelines, built for a non-AI age, weren’t always understood by current models and needed to be edited for length and clarity. 

Here’s one example of a basic copy output, drawing from a new AI report, but without the detailed guidance we were able to put into AI Studio:

Now here’s how it looks after the workflow:

• Matches the format we need

• Provides more content to build off of, including headlines and image copy

• Provides caption copy that follows AI guidance

The case for education and certification

We didn’t start the process knowing a ton about AI workflows, so getting some good grounding was incredibly helpful. Both Steph Bui, content strategy lead, and Katie Ryan O'Connor, head of content marketing, got certified on AI Studio while working on this project. Certification might be right for you too, and you can browse all of Asana's certification offerings here.

The certification wasn't solely about learning the technical aspects of AI Studio. It included content that helped understand the fundamentals of prompt design, workflow architecture, and how to thoughtfully integrate AI into existing content processes. This knowledge base proved invaluable when we hit inevitable roadblocks or needed to troubleshoot unexpected outputs.

Tackling a set of new use cases

What else can AI Studio do for busy content marketing teams? Well, we were quickly hooked on our new abilities and began to think of new use cases. 

Our next editorial assistant use case was to have workflows help us build outlines for customer vignettes using submissions from our Work Innovation Awards program. By leveraging our customers' own insights we could create content that felt authentically about them, and do so at scale. 

Currently, this workflow can take one submission from an Asana form and in 1-2 minutes have a customer vignette fully outlined and ready to be handed off to a writer for further discovery, writing and polishing. Again, it's less about wholesale replacement and more about the AI + human connection.

We’re also seeing how the true value multiplier of this approach lies in its integration with Asana's work management platform. Unlike standalone AI tools, AI Studio can access your team's tasks, projects, and goals, providing context that makes its outputs remarkably relevant. It can pull information directly from your existing workflows, meaning you don't have to constantly re-explain your brand voice or strategic objectives.

Recently, we discovered a need to write fairly formulaic, sequenced email copy for a series of emails that get sent from Asana to users after certain triggers. This hits the perfect spot for an AI Studio workflow, where we can provide guidance for the purpose and content for each email in the batch, and have AI Studio produce copy that writers and channel experts can then refine.

Lessons learned

Content creators can be particularly sensitive to the changes that come with greater AI adoption in the workplace. It makes sense, especially given the speed and precision in which generative AI models can now conduct research and write to spec.

At Asana, we believe it’s about human + AI collaboration. 

Our writers now spend less time on repetitive formatting and more time on creative thinking and strategic decisions—the parts of content creation that humans excel at and genuinely enjoy. The handoffs between team members are smoother because everyone starts with a consistent foundation that can be refined rather than created from scratch.

Remember that relay race metaphor? With AI Studio, it's like we've added a track coach who ensures everyone knows exactly when and how to pass the baton. The race is still run by our talented team, but now they can focus on speed and excellence rather than worrying about fumbling the handoff.