Inside Asana's AI Studio: transforming teams with smart, automated workflows

Asana AI Studio, launching today, began with a simple Slack conversation. 

Collaborating in the popular workplace communication app, Ethan DeWaal and Joshua Penman began tossing around ideas on how AI could improve the way teams work. The thinking behind the chatting: Every organization can benefit from AI, but they all need something different from it—and AI expertise is unevenly distributed. How could we make it easy for anyone to customize AI to fit their organization’s processes, without needing deep technical knowledge?

Amid that discussion, Ethan threw out an idea that turned out to have far-reaching implications: “I think it could live in Asana.” 

The idea centered around embedding custom AI directly into Asana’s workflow engine—unlocking the potential for every organization to benefit from AI customization tailored to their unique workflows. This had the potential to unlock an infinite number of use cases—and, with AI taking on tasks, free up time for deeper, more strategic work. 

That one insight laid the foundation for AI Studio—an intuitive tool that empowers users to seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows, all within Asana itself. 

Bringing AI Studio to life

Before Asana built AI Studio, Ethan, Asana’s AI GTM Program Manager, had already begun experimenting with chatbots centered around prompting, but ran into limitations. “I got obsessed with building chatbots,” he says. “But I hit a wall. At a certain point, the bots couldn’t integrate with our workflows—there was too much manual work involved, like copying and pasting between systems to ensure the chatbots had enough context to be useful.”

Ethan knew that AI had the potential to boost productivity for employees, but to do so, it needed to be seamlessly integrated into their workflows and have enough context about the work—without requiring hard coding. That’s when Joshua, an Asana software engineer and now the Technical Lead of the team building AI Studio, connected the dots: the AI could be built directly into Asana as a no-code tool. By providing a platform where users can design workflows with AI already embedded, teams could benefit from AI-driven processes without needing to be AI experts.

“It made so much sense to do in Asana,” Ethan adds. “The foundation was already there. Human-in-the-loop is what you need to work around the current limitations of AI, and that’s the basis of the Asana model.”

What’s more, Asana's unique Work Graph® model made it the ideal platform to build AI Studio. Unlike other AI tools that have to sift through disconnected data, the Work Graph connects tasks, projects, workflows, portfolios, and goals—providing AI with the context it needs to take meaningful action. This connection enables AI to work seamlessly alongside people within the same space, ultimately enhancing human collaboration.

With this foundation, Joshua drafted a strategy that outlined how AI Studio could take shape within Asana, and brought together a small team of engineers to develop a proof-of-concept that would ultimately secure executive buy-in.

Encouraging internal experimentation

AI Studio has a singular mission: to make it easier for everyone to delegate the drudgery of work and say goodbye to manual, repetitive tasks in favor of high-impact work. It allows workflow owners, such as program managers, operations, or IT, to design workflows tailored to their unique processes, with AI agents embedded seamlessly—no code required. These Smart workflows, which have AI built into them, can be used where teams are already working. Users can create Smart workflows for any typical business process, such as project intake, product launches, or resource management.

“With AI Studio, AI can be embedded into teams’ existing workflows, so they don’t have to seek out a separate application or tool, like ChatGPT, to interact with it. It’s embedded where the work is already happening. And it works automatically,” says Michelle Kim, Product Manager. 

For Asana’s teams, the real breakthrough came when the beta version demonstrated how AI Studio could tackle the specific pain points they faced every day and free up their time. “People started to see how powerful it was—how it could solve their day-to-day challenges,” says Joshua. “There was a big click for folks as we saw how really useful it was to have AI running as part of our team processes—to manage the scheduling of our assigned tasks, compose changelog updates, send bugs to teams, automatically dedupe user stories, and even celebrate our completed work.”

One standout example came from the Asana research and development team, who leveraged Smart workflows to transform their customer feedback process by developing a workflow that takes the transcripts from their customer calls, pulls out key insights and quotes, and assigns a summary task to the lead researcher for final review and approval. 

Other teams saw impact as well. For Asana's Asia-Pacific partner process, reps previously had to go back and forth with channel partner managers to route leads to the right partners. They needed to gather prospect information, assess needs, calculate pricing, and match each lead with the correct partner—factoring in regional differences and partner discounts. With Smart workflows automating the process—including conducting account research and making lead routing decisions—the timeline is significantly reduced. “The process went from taking up to three days to just two minutes with AI-powered workflows,” says Joshua. 

Co-creating with customers

To ensure AI Studio met the needs of our customers, we knew a non-traditional beta program was the best way to continue refining the product. Rather than building the first iteration and waiting months before releasing it, we brought customers in early—delivering value while continuing to refine the product in real-time. 

“We didn’t want to wait months to get this in customers’ hands,” explains Sofia Dewar, Asana’s Lead AI UX Researcher. “We wanted it to be valuable and intuitive from the start, so we worked closely with a diverse and representative mix of customers early on."

The R&D team began meeting with customers in May 2024, discovering use cases that were a good match for Smart workflows. As we engaged with customers in the beta program, we uncovered common pain points across key workflows, such as project intake, product launches, creative production, and campaign management.

Before AI Studio, many of these processes were time-consuming and prone to errors—like manually gathering information for project intake or struggling with inefficient hand-offs between teams during product launches. With Smart workflows, customers were able to automate these tasks, allowing them to focus on high-impact work. 

Examples of the improvements customers experienced during the beta program include:

• Creative production: Teams moved from spending a lot of time on research and manual translations to instant background research and automated translations.

• Campaign management: Drafting briefs from scratch was replaced with AI-generated content based on best practices.

• Project intake: Teams shifted from manually gathering and categorizing requests to instantly and consistently gathering, triaging, and structuring information.

• Product launches: Inefficient cross-team coordination became seamless, with AI automatically restructuring work and ensuring smooth hand-offs between departments.

As the beta program continues to grow, we've partnered with more customers to gather feedback, test workflows, and ensure AI Studio meets real business needs. “By working closely with our beta customers, we learned what to build, how to build it, and—most importantly—validated why we should build it,” says Michelle.

The future of AI at Asana: Moving real results forward

AI Studio marks a major step forward in how teams can leverage AI to streamline workflows and focus on what matters most. By building AI directly into everyday tasks, Asana isn’t just automating manual processes—it’s working as a teammate to help drive company goals forward. AI Studio lets teams create workflows that fit their needs, balancing automation with human input.

As we continue to develop AI Studio, we’re excited about its potential to reshape how teams work. By freeing teams from repetitive tasks and helping them move faster, AI Studio is paving the way for more strategic, high-impact work. We’re just beginning to explore what’s possible, and we can’t wait to see how our customers unlock new levels of productivity and impact with our AI as their teammate.