Asana’s Workflow Gallery now offers AI-automated templates — and agents

The shift to AI is leading Asana to come up with innovative ways to present apps that can automate the most annoying chores in a business process.

The Smart workflow gallery, part of the company’s AI Studio, includes AI-automated templates to handle corporate processes that typically require human involvement. It was announced by the company on Tuesday.

Workflows are repeatable processes of very common steps, which could include IT operations, project management, marketing, and people management, said Victoria Chin, senior director of product strategy for AI at Asana. “When we say smart workflow, we’re saying that we now embed AI agents at different stages of the workflow,” she said. “Instead of having a human do the triage and prioritization, in the early intake phase, AI can do that for you.”

The Workflow Gallery has pre-built templates for multiple use cases. All options have AI agents to complete tasks at different levels. 

Chin offered as an example creative production, which includes the planning phase, asset intake and work execution phase to complete a job. It might also include reporting requirements.

The AI tools in a workflow can triage incoming requests, suggest resources, generate emails and translate content into different languages. They can also point to existing assets that can be repurposed.

“There are many other users when you look at a prompt window and you’re not sure what to do. We want to make it easy for people, based on what they’re trying to use or whatever problem they’re trying to solve,” Chin said.

Vendors are pushing AI agents further down business processes to automate work. Asana and its competitors Atlassian, ServiceNow, Salesforce are all offering AI agents to cover various tasks.

Asana’s AI Studio supports top-line models from OpenAI and Anthropic. 

The tools can be integrated into products from Salesforce and ServiceNow, both of which focus heavily on specific sectors that include sales and IT management, while Asana brings in a crossover appeal across processes. “We find that our customers are using Asana for the initiatives that require cross-functional coordination,” Chin said.

Companies of all sizes and verticals are looking at using generative AI (genAI) and agentic AI not just to be more productive, but to redefine work, said Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president for social, communities and collaboration at IDC.

He cited an IDC study that found when it comes to IT’s top 3 priorities, 46% of global companies want to create a developer and general workforce that uses AI assistants, advisors, and agents to boost business success. More than 92% of companies are already using some form of AI in their daily work, according to the IDC Annual Collaboration Study 2024 that looked at the US and Western Europe markets.

“This is surpassed only by creating the needed IT infrastructure,” Kurtzman said.