Operations teams are spending more time managing work than doing it. Here's three ways AI Teammates fixes it.

Every day, an operations team interprets hundreds of updates. Project status notes, deadline risk, intake bottlenecks, capacity decisions. Most of that time isn't spent solving problems. It's spent finding out whether there are any. That gap between coordination work and real work is exactly where organizations are losing capacity. The good news is that the same technology creating this moment of urgency is also the solution. Here's what to do about it.

Go from AI assistant to AI teammate: what's actually changed

Most of us have already used AI to summarize a meeting or draft an email. Those tools are helpful, but they only know what you tell them in the moment. Every conversation starts from scratch.

Agentic AI works differently. Instead of simply responding to prompts, it understands the work happening across your organization and can take action alongside your team. It's what leaders are calling multiplayer AI: a system the whole team can teach, guide, and learn from. Multiple people can shape the same agents, share their outputs, and even have agents work together across functions.

What makes this possible is the Asana Work Graph®: a living map of how your business actually operates, where every person, task, project, goal, and dependency is connected in one place. Your AI Teammates don't start from scratch. They already know what's behind schedule, what's waiting on a decision, and how today's work connects to your broader goals.

"Instead of everyone using AI individually, AI Teammates work alongside your organization to keep work moving."

The shift isn't just technological. It's organizational. Operations teams that were once the bottleneck for coordination become a productivity force multiplier.

Use AI to redesign operations, not replace it

When people hear "AI at work," the first question is usually the wrong one: Will it replace people?

The real opportunity isn't replacing employees. It's eliminating the coordination work that slows them down. As organizations grow, invisible work grows with them: more meetings, more handoffs, more opportunities for things to fall through the cracks. Agentic AI doesn't take jobs. It removes the busywork.

The most successful organizations aren't handing control over to AI. They're creating a partnership where people remain in charge and AI handles the coordination that happens behind the scenes. Operations leaders direct strategy. AI handles execution.

"The goal isn't to replace operations teams. It's to take the coordination work off their plate so they can focus on solving problems and moving the business forward."

Hanebutt Gruppe experienced exactly this shift. By deploying AI Teammates in Asana, the company eliminated four hours per week in status meetings and realized between €148K and €200K in annual value, not by replacing their team, but by freeing them from the work that was getting in the way.

Solve the clarity problem: why status still eats your mornings

If you've ever started your day checking Slack, then your inbox, then your project tool, only to realize you still don't have a clear picture of what's happening, you're not alone.

The challenge isn't a lack of information. It's that the information lives everywhere, and turning it into a coherent story requires constant manual effort. For operations leaders, that means spending more time gathering updates than acting on them.

Multiplayer agentic AI changes that. Instead of chasing status across disconnected tools and teams, AI works alongside your organization to continuously gather context, connect the dots, and build a real-time view of what's happening. It can summarize progress, surface risks and dependencies before they become blockers, and generate tailored updates for everyone from project teams to executives, without anyone having to ask.

"Less time spent asking 'Where are we on this?' and more time making decisions, solving problems, and keeping the business moving forward."

The result is an operations team that's finally one step ahead rather than one step behind. In the next post in this series, we go deeper on two of the places where that shift pays off most: the backlog that never seems to shrink, and the portfolio decisions that keep getting made without full visibility.