When I first started managing projects, I thought it would be a breeze. Update a few statuses here, assign team members there—piece of cake, right? But when you're juggling dozens or even hundreds of tasks, those "quick" tasks start to add up fast.
Asana AI offers a handful of AI-powered project management features (called "smart" features) to help take the guesswork and monotony out of managing projects. While there's some overlap between these smart features, the effect is the same: streamlined project workflows.
Here's everything you need to know about how to use Asana AI.
Table of contents:
What is Asana AI?
Asana AI is an AI Assistant integrated into Asana to help you streamline your project management workflows. Here are a few examples of tasks Asana AI can help you with:
Generating status updates
Answering questions about your projects
Creating and filling in project fields
Automating workflows within Asana
Asana AI pricing
Asana AI comes with all paid plans and includes all AI features, but the number of AI actions you can take per month varies based on your plan.
Starter: starts at $10.99/user/month (billed annually) and includes 150 AI actions per month.
Advanced: starts at $24.99/user/month and includes 1,500 AI actions per month.
Enterprise: unlimited AI actions (need to contact Asana's sales team for pricing).
How to use Asana AI to streamline your project management workflows
Asana AI is currently made up of seven AI features (with more to come), all designed to streamline your workflows. Let's look at how to use each one.
Smart status
Asana AI's smart status pulls insights from real-time project data to give you quick updates about your projects and tasks. For example, I use smart status reports to help me identify potential risks, roadblocks, and unanswered questions I may have missed for a given project.
Here's how to use it.
Click the Overview tab of your project.
Under What's the status or from the Set status dropdown, select the appropriate status.
Click Draft with AI, and fill in the following fields:
Status: Set your project's current status.
Date range: Enter the date range for your project update.
Topic(s): Enter what you'd like Asana AI to cover in your update, along with any additional guidance—for example, tone and format.
Click Draft update.
Asana AI will generate a status report covering all the essential points, including a project summary, any blockers that need to be addressed, and next steps.
Review and edit the draft, as needed.
Click Post to share the report in your project's Overview tab.
Smart answers
Let's say you want to know how dependent tasks will be impacted if you were to delay the parent task. You could review all the tasks manually and do a little calendar math to figure this out. Or you can use Asana AI's smart answers to ask questions about your tasks and projects using natural language.
Open your project or task.
Click Ask AI (next to Share above your project board).
Choose from any of the suggested questions or enter your own.
Click Ask.
Once Asana AI generates an answer, you can copy and share the answer with your team, or ask follow-up questions (Asana generates a list of suggested follow-up questions, as well).
While smart answers won't solve all your project management challenges, they will help surface the key information you need to make decisions and move your work forward.
Smart summaries
If you, like me, are constantly juggling multiple detail-heavy tasks across multiple projects, you'll want to use Asana AI's smart summaries. It does two key things:
Summarizes tasks
Creates subtasks
Let's look at each one.
How to summarize tasks with smart summaries
Open a task.
In the rich text toolbar of the comments section (or from the More menu at the top of the task), click the Asana AI icon, which looks like a cluster of stars.
Click Summarize task.
Asana will generate a summary of that task, which you can then edit, copy and share, or discard.
How to create subtasks with smart summaries
Open a task.
In the Subtasks section, click Draft subtasks.
Asana will generate a proposed list of subtasks based on the parent task's content.
Click Add subtasks to add them to your subtasks. If you do, you'll still need to manually enter due dates and assign the tasks.
Smart digests
Asana AI's smart digests make it easy to stay on top of your projects by generating rundowns of each project's most recent activity, including highlights, notable decisions, and next steps. It's worth noting that smart digests are private and visible only to the user who generated them.
Click the Overview tab of your project.
Under Project summary in the right pane, click Show me.
Asana AI will generate your project digest. And if you've turned on the option to Email me automatically, you'll also receive an email notification once it's ready.
To regenerate the summary, click Refresh summary.
Smart fields
Fleshing out the details of a project or task can be time-consuming—not to mention mentally exhausting. With Asana AI's smart fields, you can have the AI suggest custom fields, complete with single- and multi-select options, based on your project's content. And you can take it a step further by having the AI actually fill in the fields.
With a project open, click Customize above the project board.
Click Recommend fields.
Select the fields you want to add, and click Add to add them to your project or task. You can also click Add and fill to have Asana AI add the fields and populate them with relevant data from your tasks.
If you have existing fields that you need to fill in, Asana AI's smart fields can also fill in those values for you.
Click the dropdown next to a field name.
Click Auto-fill field value.
Smart editor
If you need help polishing your writing—whether that's setting the right tone, adjusting the format, or making it more concise—Asana AI's smart editor can help.
Click the Asana AI icon in the rich text toolbar of a task description, comment, or status update.
Choose how you want to edit your text:
Tone: modify the tone to be more Professional, Direct, Friendly, Polite, or Casual.
Length: shorten or lengthen your writing.
Format: Asana AI will automatically format your text so it's easier to read. For example, if you've entered a big block of text, it will break it up into smaller paragraphs with key takeaways in a bulleted list.
After Asana AI has edited your writing, click Replace to update your text, and then click Comment to post it.
Smart rules
Asana AI's smart rules, which are confusingly also labeled as smart workflows in some of Asana's guides, allow you to automate your project management workflows using natural language. Tell Asana AI the high-level details of the rule you want to set up, and it'll take care of the rest.
With a project open, click Customize above the project board.
Click Create a custom rule.
Click Add rule.
Enter your rule using natural language—for example, "When a task is marked complete, move it to the 'Done' section and notify the project lead." You can also choose from Asana AI's list of suggested rules.
Click Create.
Asana AI will generate a preview of your automated workflow. If it looks good, click Add.
When you use Zapier's Asana integration, you can also connect Asana with thousands of other apps—allowing you to automate even more of your workflows across multiple platforms. For example, you can automatically create Google Calendar events based on new Asana tasks. Or send Gmail emails with the details of a new Asana task. Learn more about how to automate Asana, or get started with one of these premade templates.
Create new Asana tasks from new Google Calendar events
Add new Google Calendar appointments to an Asana task list
To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Asana AI: Upcoming features
Asana AI is relatively new, and its features are constantly evolving (hence the inconsistent feature names, in some cases). The team at Asana has also teased more AI features coming our way in the near future:
Smart reporting: Using natural language, you can tell AI what data you want to visualize, and it'll generate charts accordingly. (This is the feature I'm the most excited to test.)
Smart onboarding: Getting new teammates up to speed with a project can be time-consuming. Smart onboarding uses AI to suggest which projects, teams, and goals a new teammate should join based on their role.
Smart projects: This feature allows you to describe your next project to Asana AI, and it'll build one with the right structure for you.
Smart help: The Smart help feature will provide in-product help and expert tips on using Asana. This could be handy when you encounter challenges or want to learn more about specific features. You get the guidance you need without leaving the platform.
How to use Asana AI: FAQs
Here's all the info I didn't cover above—hopefully it answers any questions you somehow still have about Asana AI.
Why can't I see these Asana AI features?
There are two main reasons why you might not have access to Asana AI:
Asana AI is available only on paid plans. If you're on a free Personal plan, you won't have access to any of the smart features.
If you're on a paid plan, your organization or workspace admin may have disabled Asana AI.
Which models power Asana AI?
Asana AI is powered by Asana's own machine learning models, as well as large language models (LLMs) developed by third-party companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The model used depends on the specific Asana AI feature you're using. For example, automated suggestions and project insights are powered by Asana AI, while smart text suggestions and summaries are powered by AI models from external partners.
What languages are currently supported by Asana AI?
Asana currently supports the following languages:
English
Traditional Chinese
Russian
Dutch
Polish
Italian
Swedish
Korean
French
German
Portuguese
Spanish
Japanese
It's worth noting that English is the only language Asana has completed testing on and guaranteed functionality for.
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