In this BSA series – “Why AI?” – enterprise software leaders explain in their own words how artificial intelligence (AI) is having a positive impact on individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. In this submission, Asana’s General Counsel and Corporate Secretary Eleanor Lacey writes about how Asana Intelligence, one of Asana’s new AI products, provides a significant productivity boost and yields higher quality outcomes across the workforce.
1. Why AI?
At Asana, our mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly, and AI moves us closer than ever to this goal. By combining the best of AI and people, teams can work together more effectively by understanding their organization’s most critical priorities, connections are fostered across the globe with access to project updates in real-time, individuals feel more empowered as they understand how they’re contributing to organizational goals, and victories are ignited and celebrated. We see a future where AI drives efficiencies across every aspect of work. Achieving this vision requires meaningful co-creation between us, our customers, and our partners, and it is imperative to balance speed of development with responsibility.
We are dedicated to shaping the future through a human-centric approach to AI. That means that while AI is critical to helping organizations deliver on their goals faster, humans must be at the center of decision-making and accountable to outcomes. Humans are also responsible for setting the pace of AI innovation, balancing speed with safety and security around AI providers, partnerships, security, data collection, data protection, and management practices. We are committed to ensuring that AI remains aligned with human values and objectives at Asana.
2. Can you give an example?
Asana is focused on bringing AI and human innovation together to help leaders understand how work gets done within their organizations in real time, continuously finding ways to collaborate more efficiently, save time, and increase productivity.
We run our business on Asana, and as you would expect, we are constantly testing our latest innovations. As part of this, we’ve been quickly adopting our own AI features, and the insights are remarkable. The space is advancing quickly, and LLMs and AI generally will only get better from here. We are already seeing real value now.
In fact, we’re in the throes of company-wide 360-degree performance reviews for all Asanas, enhanced by our own AI capabilities. I’ve personally been amazed by how helpful AI has been in analyzing all of the deeply interconnected tasks, projects, and portfolios. AI features like smart answers and smart status were able to analyze my team’s work across the entire business, how their work contributed to the outcome of our initiatives, and how quickly and effectively we achieved goals at various levels.
I found that some of the heavy lifting of the performance review was handled by AI. Of course, I was able to make adjustments directly and was in the loop every step of the way, but the speed and quality of Asana Intelligence was very impressive.
Feedback from across the company has been very positive. Executives and managers love the visibility into the work and the insights they can derive with AI. This has proven to not only be a significant productivity boost, it’s also yielding higher quality outcomes.
3. Where can we learn more?
Asana is committed to using AI in service of helping humanity thrive. For more information on Asana’s human-centric approach to AI and guiding principles, please visit here. For more information on Asana Intelligence, Asana’s approach to AI which helps drive greater clarity, impact, and scale for executives, departments, and entire organizations, and how it can help your organization work smarter, please visit here. For leaders looking to navigate and thoughtfully plan AI adoption efforts, Asana’s State of AI at Work provides valuable insights into how executives, teams, and organizations can embrace AI at work.
About the author:
Eleanor Lacey is General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Asana. She oversees Asana’s global legal department, including all areas of public company reporting, corporate, equity, commercial, product, and legal operations. Prior to joining Asana, Eleanor served as Chief Legal Officer for the global cybersecurity software company Sophos.
