Humans & AI: How builders can architect the future of work

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Uh we've got a great session for you all with Asana Day Four. How are we feeling? Good, good energy. Alright. Alright, love it.

Um well, it's been a great week, right? A lot of innovating, learning, connecting and building together. And today we're gonna talk about a smarter way to work with Asana and the power of humans and AI and what that can mean for your organization as well?

My name is Neil Patel. I'm uh on the product marketing team here at Asana and I focus on AI and platform. So the integrations of our platform itself and, you know, for today, we're gonna talk about architecting the future of work and how you can be thinking about that for your organization.

So, like many of you, I remember GPTs being released into the wild in March of this year and how we all sprung to try it out for ourselves. I tried it for writing marketing campaign briefs or creating a Beyonce theme playlist for my fiance's birthday. That's a true story. And what we've seen is there are a lot of those individual productivity use cases that are really powerful. But what we've seen as well is we're at the cusp of a golden age of productivity that's gonna transform when we really start thinking about the applications across your organization for AI. And so that's what we're really gonna talk about today, especially given that there's a lot of builders here and we're seeing that in reports with McKinsey that builders, those product development cycles are gonna speed up twice as fast, if not more over the course of the next few years with AI. But to get there, we know one fundamental truth, data matters, quality work, data matters. And to get those reliable, accurate, trusted outputs from generative AI, you need to get your data in order. And that's one of the first principles we wanted to share with you all is how you can do that for your organization.

But to give you a better perspective of this, I want to take us on a little relatable travel analogy. An analogy we can all relate to most of us doing this. Coming here to this conference, air travel for air travel. There are two key roles that come to mind. You have copilots and you have air traffic control. Both are required to la land every plane safely securely and efficiently. The use cases we see for AI today are more in the copilot side focused on individual productivity. But I want to talk about how you get to having the benefits of both including air traffic control. And so let's break that down. A little bit.

Copilots are focused on local optimization. They're really concerned of how do you get from point A to point B for my specific flight path? A lot of what you can see from the AI use cases today around individual productivity, how to generate content faster, how to write, how to edit, how to improve your overall work as an individual. But for organizations to really be successful with AI, they also need to be thinking about the global optimization, the efficiency of the greater system. And that's where air traffic control comes in and what you can do for your organization by thinking about a strategy for AI that thinks about your entire organization having the right visibility, the right standards that play into having that greater trust in the overall system. And that's the Asana difference. We are focused on being both a copilot for individuals and an air traffic control for your organizations, departments and teams. And with this, it means we can give a greater field of vision for uh customers and organizations to make more informed business decisions and hit their goals faster. This approach gives that macro level visibility.

As you can see here, you're thinking about the greater system and for us, our ability to be both a copilot and air traffic control is because while generative AI is the new exciting thing AI is actually not new to us. Going back to the importance of data, we've been laying our foundation for the past 15 years. And now we see that this is gonna not only help accelerate our customers missions but ours as well of helping humanity thrive.

So now let's shift back to what this has to do with work. Work is also undergoing a big shift in productivity right now. What we've seen in this next age of digital transformation is that we're moving from that personal departmental. It's a company wide productivity that's really gonna help organizations succeed in the next wave. But there's a problem we're all facing. We're all feeling it even here today. And it's that the way we work is actually fundamentally broken. We spend nearly three days a week on busy work things. We can all relate to time spent searching emails for the latest information, having a lot of those unproductive meetings, even though they may be intended to mean well, trying to keep spreadsheets up to date with the latest information of knowing who is doing what by when this approach is not working.

And for us to think about that air traffic control model for our organizations, we need to really think about how do we uplevel this through work management and the why the why behind why this is broken is clear, we've got teams, departments, all working in what we're calling silos. Why? Because they're all using different tools. We have tools for everything nowadays, tools for goal setting, tools for planning, tools for execution. This creates more silos because not everyone is working together again, thinking about that air traffic control with this approach, you have siloed data. And what does that mean for AI? That means you run the risk of the black box problem. This creates that disconnected data that AI cannot surface the right insights or the full picture of information needed to be successful. You can't understand how are they coming up with the decisions? What are the outputs? How can you trust those outputs if you don't know what inputs are going into coming up with those recommendations? And you start asking yourself questions, questions like are these good recommendations? How can I unpack what it's telling me or can I really trust what it's saying? What AI is telling me I should be thinking about next. These are all the right questions to be asking and to solve this, you need to get your data in order and have the right data model for your work, for your organization.

And at Asana, this is our enterprise work management platform. We have over 100 and 39,000 paying customers in finance, media, retail tech customers like Amazon. And we call the data model that powers this platform, the work graph and essentially what it's doing is providing a map of all the work within your organization and across all the teams. And with this, we're able to capture the real time connections, the real time updates. So you can see all those connection points of work across the organization. So let's break this down of what it actually means and what it looks like as you build up the work graph.

So it starts with tasks and projects at the team level. But the magic really happens when you have multiple departments starting to adopt and use our platform as their single source of truth. For work. You start seeing that teams across marketing operations and others start connecting together. And once you reach critical mass of those teams working to achieve goals, that's where executives can see the alignment course correct and really help your teams work towards your ultimate mission with the work graph.

Individuals understand all the work assigned to them. Project managers can share the status and understand where they might have blockers on projects. Portfolio managers can see how all those projects are connected together. And then executives can see, are we on track to actually hit our goals? And if not getting the insights, you need to course correct along the way all in one place.

So what does this mean for all of you? It means a smarter way to work the pain I mentioned at the beginning those three days lost per week, we're seeing our customers get two of those days back with our productivity platform of everything centralized in one place, we're helping companies drive greater clarity and productivity thinking about the goals they set and how are they actually working towards achieving them maximizing impact by automa automating uh handoffs workflows, creating the right systems in place for teams and departments to work together and then scaling with confidence, being able to think about an enterprise ready solution that is meant for organizations. And with this data model, it is the effective approach you should be considering when adopting AI. And why? Because the time to wait is you can't wait.

Now is the time a lot of people are turning to AI trying to figure out how to use it for their businesses. We're seeing that 36% in our own research with the Work Innovation Lab that folks are starting to, knowledge workers are starting to use AI as part of their everyday job. They're optimistic and really excited about what it could mean for them, going back to the productivity of builders and what they're looking to get out of AI. But on the same token, there's concerns, there's a lot around ethics that people are fearful about. How many of you are also concerned about the ethics of AI. Right. Yeah, me too. And what we found in our research is that nine in 10, um, knowledge workers are actually having some concerns about the ethics for AI. And that's why when you're thinking about how to implement AI within your organization, you want to think about solutions that have principles in place and what those principles are for us. At Asana. We have five guiding principles to what we call our human centered approach to AI and I want to walk you through those real quick.

So the first is that AI should help people achieve their goals. We want to help drive outcomes not just generate more outputs. We're going to see a lot of that with AI of generating more content, a lot more of that busy work in some respects. But if you're thinking about AI for driving outcomes hitting those goals, that's where you're really going to be successful.

The second is going back to our human centered approach to AI. We design for human plus AI teams. Humans should always be in the loop, always, they play a big role in how to use AI effectively. And as part of that, people should always still be accountable for their decisions. So while AI might suggest it might surface insights, humans will still always be in the driver's seat to confirm those actions. And that's what we are thinking about with the AI solutions. We've started rolling out to our customers making sure that customers feel in control of the insights that are coming up and whether they want to discard them or keep them.

And then 4th and 5th are true to our platform since it was um first founded, which is our continued commitment to safety in the short and long run, especially around AI and then also building transparency into practice and product. So we will always be clear with our customers of where, how, where and how their data is being used and what are the llm providers we are working with. And that's something you should be thinking about for your organization as well.

So with that approach to AI, um we have Asana Intelligence and how AI is joining the team at Asana powered by our work graft data model. And what this means is that we're able to drive that clarity, impact and scale for our customers with AI meaning that we can help accelerate decision making to hit those goals. We can focus on the right work at the right time really separating that signal from noise and then having the ability to save time by scaling workflows, scaling onboarding processes that matter to global operations. And with Asana Intelligence, you get AI that's constantly improving and optimizing over time to meet your evolving business needs.

So for us, our vision with AI is to be the intelligent navigation system for organization. So going back to that air travel analogy, we really see this in three levels. The first is that we want to be that intelligent copilot for individuals really helping them understand how to create prioritize and move their work forward. The second is we want to be a collaboration radar for teams or, or so thinking about the workflows and the way points by which they create those handoffs across departments and teams. And then finally going back to the air traffic control for organizations so that you have that entire system operating together within one platform.

You know, for us to achieve that vision, it wouldn't be possible without the right partnerships. And for us at Asana, we are laser focused on having the right partnerships in place, partnerships like the one we have with Amazon and AWS earlier this week at re invent, we announced an early preview app fabric for those of you not familiar with appfabric, it's a service that connects sas applications together to enhance security and increase productivity. We're seeing that the average enterprise has over 323 sas applications that they need to keep track of that teams are using every day that is a digital maze and a lot of confusion. But with solutions like appfabric combined with Asana Intelligence, we're able to help um declutter and centralize and connect data from the tools in your tech stack into one centralized place in that case being our platform Asana. And so with solutionss like this, we're able to create experiences for our customers, something where you're calling smart home the ability to get the data from your email from your calendar, from your other tools in your tech stack centralized into one place. In this case, the home view of Asana. And what that means is, it's not just bringing the data into one place with the power of AI. It's also giving you actionable insights of what to do with that data. So maybe you come into Asana to start your day and you see at the top insights from your calendar that says, hey, you have a meeting with your uh product team later today. Here's everything you need to know and how to get up to speed on the key takeaways. You're able to action that work forward all without having to contact switch between all those tools. So over time, this is something we're really thinking about and partnerships will continue to play a big role for us.

So three takeaways from today for you all and how you're thinking about, hey, how can I walk away and apply this to my business? My teams, my work.

The first is get your data in order when you're thinking about AI, right? Going back to data models, thinking about that air traffic control, having your data centralized in one place will be critical for then supercharging it with AI.

The second is really think about how are we putting ourselves our teams at the core of everything we do with AI and so don't let teams be an afterthought to your AI strategy start there and then build into it accordingly.

And then finally think about the outcomes over output. So again AI solutions that really think about how are we not just focus on individuals, but the departments, the executives and how are we bringing that together to hit our goals? So with these three sta strategies, that's how you can really think about architecting the future of work.

That was the session we had for today. So I wanna open up to any live questions we have. I'll also be available after we have members of the Asana team, Asana team. Please raise your hand. If you want to connect with any of them, please find us after.