Work management platform Asana has announced a new set of AI-based product capabilities designed to accelerate decision-making and improve productivity.
The new capabilities are underpinned by the company’s new AI offering, Asana Intelligence, and come three months after the company added prediction-based AI tools to its platform. The latest host of features combine Asana’s underlying Work Graph data model with large language model (LLM) capabilities offered by OpenAI’s API to help users stay up to speed with ongoing projects.
“[OpenAI’s CEO] Sam Altman was one of the very early investors in Asana and [Asana’s CEO] Dustin Moskovitz has invested in OpenAI, so from the start of LLM technology, we’ve been really plugged in and it’s also helped inform how we built the Work Graph to be able to leverage the technology,” said Alex Hood, chief product officer at Asana.
In order to accelerate decision making, Asana Intelligence monitors team capacity and changing business priorities, surfacing resource recommendations to help teams hit their goals. It can also identify unseen issues and roadblocks that could stop teams progressing toward company objectives.
The new capabilities also aim to boost productivity by creating automated plans based on goals, suggesting and implementing workflow improvements to achieve results faster. Asana Intelligence also provides a writing assistant to improve the clarity and tone of messages and written communications — however, the tool cannot generate content for users, it will simply adjust prewritten content that is plugged into it.
In addition, instant summaries will transcribe and summarize action items and highlights from meetings, tasks, and comment threads.
Users can also ask Asana Intelligence for answers and insights on projects, removing the need to schedule meetings or interrupt someone’s workflow to ask easily answerable questions. Projects will also benefit from the new work organizer which can autogenerate custom fields, smart rules, and suggestions to add structure to projects.
Asana remains skeptical about generative AI
Speaking back in March when Asana announced its predictive AI capabilities, Hood said that there was a danger presented by generative AI, in that content created by artificial intelligence could mean that a company’s official plan of record might not accurately reflect day-to-day operations, noting that the large language models most generative AI tools are trained on sometimes proclaim things as fact when they aren’t actually true.
“When you’ve got 16 applications that are all making it very easy to spam the rest of your team with stuff that might only be like 80% correct, that’s a new challenge,” Hood said at the time.
While the new capabilities Asana have launched today technically fall under the scope of generative AI as they use the underlying technology of LLM, Hood stresses that Asana is not rolling out generative AI as it has…
2023-06-03 20:30:03
Source from www.computerworld.com