How AI Studio streamlines buying at Asana

In the complex world of corporate procurement, success hinges on more than just buying and selling. 

It's about strategic navigation—balancing vendor relationships, financial management, and organizational risk. At Asana, this complexity reaches new heights. 

"Our most intricate agreements can involve up to seven cross-functional teams, with countless hand-offs," explains Jennifer Liu, Asana's Procurement Operations Lead.

This complexity has made procurement a prime candidate for AI innovation. A 2025 survey by Icertis reveals that 90 percent of senior procurement leaders are already embracing or exploring AI to drive efficiency.

Recognizing this opportunity, Asana's team approached AI integration strategically through AI Studio, their no-code builder. Their focus? Three critical challenges:

• Efficiently triaging high-volume tasks

• Helping stakeholders quickly find relevant information

• Uncovering insights from historical contract and decision records

Crucially, the team didn't seek wholesale transformation. Instead, they focused on enhancing existing workflows and removing friction points—an approach that has improved both stakeholder buy-in and procurement control compliance.

This is an opportunity to make a lot of people's lives easier.”

Here’s more on each challenge and the AI-driven solutions.

Challenge #1: Triaging a high-volume of tasks 

The first and most straightforward opportunity for the team was to use Asana AI Studio to automate the assignment of tasks to appropriate representatives. 

“In FY25, there were 1,137 submissions in our purchasing project, each consisting of three separate component tasks that require assignment to cross-functional representatives. This amounts to approximately 300 assignments per month.” 

By parsing the region and department information from the intake form, AI now automatically routes tasks to the correct team members across procurement, finance, and legal departments. 

This happens before any manual intervention, ensuring faster processing times and reducing administrative overhead.

Challenge #2: Finding relevant information efficiently

Finance and budget reviewers have to wade through lengthy task descriptions in Asana containing vital information for multiple teams. It’s a lot to process.

"Because there are so many cross-functional teams involved, there's quite a lot of questions in the intake form," Liu says. But now with AI integration, teams such as FP&A can  get summaries that contain only the information they need from a budget perspective.

Whereas before cross-functional partners had to comb through irrelevant data they now can more efficiently extract the information they need thanks to AI Studio. 

Challenge #3: Parsing historical decisions that might impact current work

The team's most innovative workflow is using AI plus Asana's API to search for relevant historical tasks across titles, descriptions, and comments, and to do this regardless of multiple variations of a vendor name. So, for example, it can identify content that’s about "Acme Corporation" whether it's written as "Acme," "Acme Corp.," or "Acme.com, Inc.” 

Here’s more detail:

The “script actions” feature in the native Asana rule builder has the ability to call the Asana API using JavaScript. The team deploys four rules that work in sequence, some of which are AI rules, and some of which are script actions rules.

• Step 1: AI generates suggested search terms.

• Step 2: Script actions calls the Asana API to search for exact matches to these search terms among task names, descriptions, and comments in a given project. The  script action also organizes the names and descriptions of matching tasks in a single comment.

• Step 3: AI reviews the comment to confirm the matches are not false positives, and comments a brief summary of only those tasks that seem to be purchases from the same vendor.

• Step 4: Script actions copy this AI summary to the original task (steps 1-3 occur in a separate reference task).

The smart work continues, providing a clean summary with links to relevant historical tasks. 

This workflow is particularly valuable for legal reviewers as it cuts down on time spent digging through contract databases. This alone will likely save 5-10 minutes per task, multiplied across 1,000 tasks per year, and resulting in roughly 125 attorney hours saved per year.

“This makes it so much quicker and easier to track down the latest versions of documents,” says Bianca Lopez, Commercial Counsel, Procurement at Asana. “It makes us more consistent with these ‘look back’ checks.”

Wrapping up impact and benefits

AI Studio is delivering key benefits for the Asana procurement team:

• Improved efficiency. By automating manual steps in the workflow, team members can focus on more strategic tasks rather than administrative routing and searching. 

• Reduced friction. Automated triaging and targeted summaries help streamline the process for both requesters and reviewers, leading to increases in efficiency or increases in volume of requests that the team can now handle because the process is so much more efficient.

• Enhanced compliance. The historical task search feature helps the procurement team locate relevant agreements with ease. "We're able to make sure that our new contracts are informed by prior agreements," Liu explains.

What’s next

Liu envisions even more sophisticated applications of AI in the procurement process on the horizon, such as using historical task data to pre-populate information for renewal purchases, reducing redundant data entry and streamlining the process further for both requesters and reviewers.

“The way we’re looking at AI opportunities today is that AI isn't about replacing human expertise—it's about amplifying our capabilities,” Liu says. “We're transforming procurement from a process-heavy function to a strategic partner that can move faster, think smarter, and deliver more value to the entire organization."