Asana launches new work intelligence tools with AI on the way

With all the software tools we have, it’s still hard to figure out how work moves across large organizations, the state of projects and how closely people are tracking against personal, team and company goals. Asana, which is built on top of a work graph, has that knowledge, and the company announced a new set of dashboards today to give managers the data they need to make sure projects are staying on budget and meeting goals.

Alex Hood, chief product officer at Asana, says that the reporting capabilities put a set of information at managers’ fingertips that previously had to be manually pulled from various systems. “We’ve created executive reporting that can live at any altitude of the company. So no matter [your job], you can have your set of dashboards of the things that you care about that come in instantly just by selecting [in Asana] which teams and projects and portfolios that you care about,” Hood told TechCrunch.

In practice, this involves providing a single view of strategic initiatives, team capacity and budgets. Hood says it builds on the graph model that underlies the entire Asana platform, but the company is working to bring artificial intelligence to the process to make it even smarter. “The next step will be using AI to generate the portfolios of the things that you care about instantaneously. So having them become smarter and smarter, but the fact that they can be at any level across an entire organization, that is part of this new launch,” he said.

In addition, the platform now helps people understand the workload for any given skill across the organization to see who has bandwidth and who is overloaded to help companies more evenly distribute workloads, what Asana refers to as “resource intelligence.” “We are shipping the ability to see the workload of anybody across the whole domain or organization… We show [this data] in a very graphical format, so you can see who’s burning out, who’s under capacity, and you can load-balance between them across an organization that doesn’t even share a hierarchy,” he said.

Finally, the company is offering a new tool called workflow bundles which relies on what it refers to as “execution intelligence.” This involves providing workflow templates that a company can use to build its own workflows. “We’ve had workflows in our product for some time, but we’re making workflow bundles super easy to pull off the shelf. So we’re going to have best-practice workflows that are pre-constructed that you just plug your pieces into,” he said.

While none of these tools has AI built into them just yet, Hood says the next iteration of these tools will definitely be built with it. “So we have these three new features that are not AI-driven yet. But they are features that point our nose towards the types of problems that we want to solve with AI, because the next generation that lives on top of them will be AI-driven,” he said.