Asana unveils new suite of intelligent tools empowering CIOs

Asana, Inc. has announced a suite of new AI-powered capabilities designed to empower IT leaders to drive intelligent transformation with a secure data foundation and robust controls.

Leveraging Asana’s Work Graph® data model, these innovations enable seamless integration of work data with solutions like Microsoft 365, facilitating safe AI deployment and delivering executive-level insights for enhanced return on investment (ROI).

“With the rapid evolution of AI, the role of the CIO and IT executives has fundamentally changed,” says Saket Srivastava, Asana CIO. “Today’s IT leaders are responsible for intelligent transformation – ensuring that data is connected across technology investments, building the right foundation to deploy AI safely and securely.With Asana’s new AI offerings and integrations with solutions like Microsoft 365, enterprise leaders have the data, security, control, and insights to drive greater ROI with AI at every level of their organizations.”

Asana’s latest advancements equip leaders with the ability to:

• Build a Secure Foundation for AI through Robust Data Integration
  • Microsoft 365 Integrations (Q2 2024): Expanding upon a growing ecosystem of over 300 integrations to centralize data, enabling automated workflow creation between Asana and Outlook Calendar for recurring scheduling and facilitating direct project creation and planning within Teams for improved visibility.
  • Smart Goals (Q2 2024): Utilizing AI to draft and standardize goal creation across the organization.
  • Smart Workflows (Q2 2024): Constructing automated workflows and rules with clear, natural language instructions, optimized over time to align with specific goals and best practices.
  • Workflow Console (Q3 2024): Deploy workflows, streamline change management, and accelerate improvements with more robust workflow data to drive operational efficiencies.
• Confident AI Deployment with Safeguards and Transparent Controls
  • Multi-Org Deployment (Now Available): Maintaining security by compartmentalizing data by subsidiary to support AI initiatives, satisfy privacy and compliance standards, meet global data residency requirements, and enable HIPAA compliance.
  • Custom Onboarding (Now Available): Setting employees up for success with a tailored onboarding experience and connections to company-wide resources within Asana.
  • Microsoft Intune MDM Integration (Now Available): Managing security configurations for the Asana iOS app through a central Intune dashboard to safeguard corporate data on mobile devices.
  • Sandboxes (Q2 2024): Testing new features, including AI releases, to assess their functionality with existing workflows and develop well-considered rollout plans to support user adoption.
  • Smart Onboarding (Q2 2024): Assisting individuals and teams in getting up to speed on the relevant Asana projects, teams, and goals to ensure immediate impact.
• Surface Intelligent Insights to Deliver Greater ROI at Every Level
  • Smart Status (Now Available): Creating more comprehensive status updates across portfolios and goals with AI, drawing upon real-time work data to support strategic planning and aid in risk identification across cross-functional workstreams.
  • Smart Answers (Q2 2024): Utilizing natural language to pose questions within Asana across all work – encompassing tasks, projects, portfolios, and goals – and receive timely answers and insights.
  • Executive Summaries (Upcoming): Achieving data-driven decisions and business outcomes faster with effortless access to executive-level status updates encompassing key performance metrics.
  • Smart Reporting (Upcoming): Leveraging AI to generate charts and dashboards using natural language, facilitating real-time visualization of business health across departments and workstreams.
  • Smart Projects (Upcoming): Streamlining project creation by outlining the project to the AI and allowing it to automatically generate the appropriate structured sections and project details.

Asana’s Work Innovation Lab State of the IT Leader Report highlights that a staggering 82% of IT leaders regularly advise on their organization’s AI strategy, with 90% acknowledging that investing in AI technology will be critical to navigating future business challenges. Asana’s new human-centered AI capabilities aim to assist CIOs and IT leaders in addressing their most pressing AI challenges, encompassing building the foundation for effective utilization of generative AI, ensuring appropriate safeguards and best practices, and comprehending how to leverage cross-functional data to drive decisions, outcomes, and strategic prioritization.

“Today’s IT leaders are no longer back office service providers but strategic advisors moving enterprises forward. More than ever, IT executives are accountable for operationalizing company objectives, ensuring security, creating go-to-market strategies, and understanding how to apply AI to increase productivity, collaboration, and business outcomes,” says Praniti Lakhwara, Zscaler CIO. “It’s imperative to have the right tools to work smarter, while delivering results. With Asana, we’re able to centralize our work data in order to surface timely business insights, inform decision-making, and work toward program goals in one safe, secure platform.”

“CIOs around the globe are trying to understand how to best use AI to increase productivity, make cross-functional collaboration more efficient, and drive business outcomes,” says Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research Vice President, Collaboration and Communities. “Meanwhile, they are faced with a mountain of unstructured, disconnected data and security concerns. With this announcement, Asana looks to help CIOs and IT leaders by centralizing work data in a structured platform that connects teams, projects, and company goals. This makes it easier for companies to measure business outcomes and find new efficiencies.”