You likely have a lot to manage these days, and it’s hard to keep up. Goals, priorities, and those last-minute items that come up that no one can deal with but you. Well, what if you had your own AI Chief of Staff that can surface exactly what needs your attention now?
Welcome to One Amazing About Asana with Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer and he will be sharing one amazing thing about Asana Dash with us today.
Watch the Demo
About The Guest
Arnab Bose is the Chief Product Officer of Asana, where he leads the company’s product strategy and innovation with a focus on advancing AI capabilities and expanding the platform’s enterprise functionality. Arnab has extensive experience driving product vision, strategy, and development, most recently serving as Chief Product Officer for the Okta Platform.
Prior to that, Arnab was a Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce, where he led several efforts from integrating Quip into the Salesforce Platform, to Process Automation and Chatter. Before Salesforce, he was a Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft. Arnab holds a BS in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University. When he’s not at work, Arnab enjoys cooking, bicycling, and track days at Sonoma Raceway.
Arnab Bose on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abosesf/
Resources
Asana: https://www.asana.com/ai
The One Amazing Thing with Greg Kihlström website: https://agilebrandguide.com/the-agile-brand-podcasts/one-amazing-thing-about-with-greg-kihlstrom/
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From the creators and host of the award-winning The Agile Brand™ with Greg Kihlström podcast, comes One Amazing Thing About… with Greg Kihlström, a show that puts the spotlight on the latest and greatest MarTech products and platforms by showcasing one feature that makes them… amazing.
Transcript
Greg Kihlström (00:00)
AI has made getting some of our work done incredibly fast, mostly when it’s just a single person working on a single task, though. But what if there’s a way to have a multiplayer collaboration with both humans and AI agents to move seamlessly between tasks, to-dos, and getting the work done?
Welcome to One Amazing Thing About Asana with Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer. He’s going to be sharing one amazing thing about their Asana Dash with us today. Arnab, welcome to show.
Arnab Bose (00:42)
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Greg Kihlström (00:44)
Yeah, looking forward to seeing this in action in a in a minute here. Before we do though, why don’t you give a little background on you and your role at Asana?
Arnab Bose (00:51)
I’m Arnab, I’m the head of product at Asana. I’ve been here for a little over a year and I’ve been leading Asana’s charge into becoming the product that helps build human agent teams for the enterprise. So super excited to show you what we’ve been up to.
Greg Kihlström (01:08)
Nice, nice. Yeah. So before we before we take a look, maybe talk talk us through it a little bit. what did you choose to showcase today? Who’s the audience and and why is it important to them?
Arnab Bose (01:17)
So Asana has been an amazing tool to get human beings to collaborate and align on a specific set of goals, knowing exactly who knows what by when and how for over 17 years. We’ve built up over 180,000 customers based on that promise. And now in this agenc that substrate that we call the Asana Workcraft that actually tracks company-level mission and goals down to portfolios, projects, and tasks.
Is an amazing substrate that allows agents to complete work at higher quality and also collaborate with human beings in real time. So I’m going to show you Asana Dash, which is your amazing personal productivity agent for the enterprise that helps you get work done and how it connects into the workcraft to leverage tools like tasks and projects or Asana pages, Asana meetings, Asana records.
build out this full multiplayer experience that builds true human agent teams. So humans and agents working on the same page, getting better with every run, and getting actual end-to-end long horizon workflows completed.
Greg Kihlström (02:28)
Nice, nice, love it. Well yeah, let’s let’s take a look. Why don’t you share your screen?
Arnab Bose (02:32)
Yeah, sounds good. So I’m gonna hit share. let me bring up my my demo window. All right. And
Okay, great. So some context is for people who are familiar with Asana, I’m sure they know how tasks and projects and Kanban boards and reports and dashboards work. But over the last three months, the workcraft has gotten way richer. We now support a capability of doing meeting recordings with summarization, but more interestingly, it’s not just a meeting summary, it’s an ability to infer.
Action items and follow-ups that are connected back to your projects and tasks. We have a capability called Asana Pages, which are collaborative documents that can be generated by AI agents, but also be used to generate follow-ups, tasks, and action items that can be handed off to AI agents. And then Asana Tables, which is a full-blown database functionality within Asana.
So there’s a bunch of interesting things like under the surface of Asana Dash and the AI agents that I’ll demonstrate that are now powering the workcraft in this demo that I’ll walk you through Greg and and team, we’re gonna follow a creative operations manager through one week and a campaign that they’re running.
with agent tech work management. Agentic work management is the new name for Asana Score product. We believe in this day and age it’s no longer just collaborative work management. It’s agent work management because it helps human beings and agents work well together.
Okay, so without further ado,
let’s dive a bit deeper into Sarah Ban Bennett. It’s the persona I’m playing. She’s a campaign operations manager.
And here’s how she gets work done. So she’s in a team, her company’s got goals, they’ve got projects and portfolios, and now they’ve got AI agents like the campaign analyst, which is a pre-built Asana AI teammate, or capacity planner that’s a pre-built AI teammate that’s working side by side with her and her human team members to get work done. So the way this is gets triggered is
The product marketing and the campaign marketing team have a Slack channel called Creative Requests, which can be used to do intake. So Michael has said, hey team, for Q4 launch, he needs a social graphic kit for Instagram and TikTok, and he needs it by this Thursday. So what happens over here is Asana has an amazing Slack agent, it’s plugged in directly into Slack, and that has taken this like very brief intake.
And use Asana’s AI component tree on the background to go ahead and fully create out a task and a project to actually get this campaign up and running. So the Asana agent has already responded and has asked Michael a follow-up question based on a rule that’s run in the background. What that looks like inside Asana is there’s a fully fleshed out set of creative requests, and this particular creative request is
About this Q4 launch visual for European paid social media campaigns. And there’s a specific thing that the campaign operations manager has to go figure out, which is resolving EMIR rights clearance for the visual assets that they’ve plan to use. So over here, what we’ll see is this Horizon Instagram TikTok cut downs has a rights window, and there’s an asset library that
again, it is now available through the databases or Asana tables product. When you dig into this as Sarah, instead of having to go like set shoot off a bunch of emails and figure out how to draft a campaign using approved assets, she simply asks Dash to go ahead and draft that campaign. And that draft gets created, and this is a multiplayer substrate. So she can loop in other people like Daniel.
who can say, hey, let’s hop on a call about the EMIA visual assets. So again, what you’ve seen over there is intake goes to fully fleshed out project. The AI runs the background and highlights a specific thing around assets for EMIA. When the person, the human being, wants help from the system, they can take that existing sort of data in the Sana Workgraph and create a document automatically to then align the human team around the outcome.
Now, if the human team needs a live meeting to go ahead and get going, they can use their meeting vendor of choice. Like in this case, I’m showcasing Zoom. Asana integrates directly with Zoom and can record the Zoom meeting. Again, there’s lots of meeting recording tools out there, but the secret sauce is the fact that once the meeting notes come into Asana, there is AI-powered suggested tasks that connect back up to that creative request project.
And AI suggests whether certain follow-up tasks can be assigned to an AI agent or to a human being. So again, like we are moving the work forward automatically and we are you doing it with human beings and AI agents working together on the same piece of data. So in this case, the campaign coordinator just picked that up. And what we’re gonna see next is if I dig a bit deeper into how that again, this program for
Horizon Instagram TikTok cut down should work. That rights window has now been figured out. It’s cleared. And the team is moving forward. Again, this is a talk track, so we should probably cut that out. It’s just there in the Figma to indicate that the legal team is going to now review this. And when we go to the next section, what we’ll see is the work is now assigned to Priya, who’s going to do a legal review.
And if I want to find out how things are going across all of these work streams, I can simply ask Dash how we are tracking across all five channels. And not only will it tell me that there’s something that is off schedule and something has slipped by a week because it’s assigned to Priya and the due data is is later on, it suggests ways in which you could remediate this issue. So if I if I go ahead and click allow, it’s gonna go ahead and remediate that issue and then move the work forward.
So I’ll take a pause here and I’ll stop sharing. What you’re seeing through this entire process is how do you go ahead and avoid what our CEO likes to call it as our work cyclones? You know, you might have somebody senior who comes into your Slack channel and they’re like, look, we’ve got an amazing opportunity that’s very tightly time-bound. I believe we have to go ahead and launch this product in EMEA and do that same TikTok and social campaign. Let’s go creative team. It may not be as easy to turn it around because you’ve got
get legal approval, maybe the assets are not ready, you’re trying to coordinate a bunch of human beings on the same page. Our thesis at Asana is individual tasks have gotten really, really fast with AI. Like if you want to go create like a an amazing campaign brief document from a meeting recording, any of the Frontier Lab tools can go ahead and do that. What gets tricky and far more complicated is if you have to stitch together these things across multiple people.
And multiple agents while keeping agent output and human output aligned and on the same page. So what you saw in that demo was unstructured input to full structured project, projects and tasks assigned to people and human beings. A human being can use their personal dash agent to figure out the next best action, create a document to get aligned, have a live meeting with other people for taste judgment, use the output from that live meeting to create follow-up actions.
And when something goes off track, there’s reporting built in because all of the updates, whether from human beings or AI agents, is coming into the single place that is the work graph. So I’ll pause
Greg Kihlström (10:34)
Yeah, yeah.
Arnab Bose (10:35)
over there. Let me know if how that landed.
Greg Kihlström (10:38)
Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it definitely it it feels seamless. you know, as as someone who does a lot of switching between applications and coordinating of of teams and and all that, I definitely agree. Like AI has incredibly sped up individual
tasks, but yeah, it it tends to almost have the same bottlenecks as you know human-to-human stuff has when when you have to switch between things and context switch and all that stuff. So yeah, this feels very
like the interface is there when you need it, but it’s also, you know, I mean we just we saw Slack, we saw Zoom. I assume it integrates with other tools as well, just so you can get
Arnab Bose (11:17)
Correct, yeah.
Greg Kihlström (11:18)
your work done where you actually need to get your work done too, right?
Arnab Bose (11:21)
Yeah, we’re
Greg Kihlström (11:26)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, this it was great to see and I’m sure there’s much much more to see, but great great to see this in action here. For those that want to learn a little bit more, where should they go?
Wonderful. Well again I’d like to thank Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer at Asana for joining the show. You can learn more about Arnab and Asana by following the links in the show notes.
