Asana Doubles Down On AI In Work Management Technology, Announces AI Teammates To Elevate Productivity
Asana stressed the seismic potential of AI in project management technology in its latest earnings call, as the project management technology business doubled down on integrating it across its core platform and services.
In its Q1 FY2025 earnings call, after celebrating its impressive feat of Q1 revenues growing 13 percent year over year, Asana CEO and Cofounder Dustin Moskovitz enthused about AI’s impact to date in enhancing Asana products, especially its recently launched AI-powered Work Graph collaboration solution.
“Now, I want to get to what’s top of mind for me,” Moskovitz said. “AI is a disruptive force that will dramatically reshape all of software.”
A helpful analogy is thinking of Asana and the Work Graph is a form of digital scaffolding(…) We understand the relationships between people, work, and workflows. And that means we direct the AI to consider exactly the right context, not try to decipher what is signal from all the data in your enterprise. With this understanding, AI can begin to provide intelligent assistance, automate tasks, and even act as an agent or teammate, driving work forward.”
In other Asana news this week, the business announced Asana AI teammates, a new artificial intelligence solution to enhance worker productivity and collaboration.
Asana AI teammates are pitched as flexible and customisable collaborators to support teams. They offer advice on priorities, power workflows, and even execute action on tasks. They adapt to the unique working styles of individuals and teams, ensuring that humans remain involved at every step. They also provide complete transparency and control over how AI supports their work.
Zoom CEO Foresees Future of AI Avatars Attending Your Meetings
Zoom CEO and Founder Eric Yuan has shared his vision of AI-powered avatars that can represent and make decisions for their human counterparts, such as attending meetings we’re unable to make ourselves.
In an interview with the technology publication The Verge, Yuan referred to these AI versions of people as “digital twins”, a term already used to describe virtual representations of real-world objects or systems.
Yuan envisages this to not be a singular “twin” but that humans will be able to utilise multiple such digital copies of ourselves, with the potential to simultaneously communicate and make decisions for us on Zoom and elsewhere without us needing to be present.
“Your digital twins, multiple digital twins, are different based on your training,” Yuan said. “One digital twin is really more like a sales expert; another digital twin of yourself is more like an engineering expert.”
Additionally, Yuan also discussed the possibility of introducing an extended reality aspect to Zoom’s communication and collaboration platform to make digital twin engagement more immersive, referring to similar immersive experiences created by the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.
Salesforce Unveils Slack Lists To Boost Project Management
Salesforce has announced Slack Lists, a project and task management tool directly within its renowned collaboration platform.
Salesforce says Slack Lists introduces structure to conversations in Slack, allowing teams to manage projects, inbound requests, and top priorities directly within the platform. This eliminates the need to switch between multiple apps, keeping everything streamlined in one place.
Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, commented:
With lists, you can turn conversations in Slack into actionable tasks that drive work forward. Now those loose next steps shared in a project channel can be tracked across a team. With project management in Slack, teams across organizations will have everything they need to complete projects faster and increase productivity using the full power of Slack.”
Salesforce suggests sales teams can use Slack Lists to stay organised in their daily work, coordinate and collaborate on tasks with the entire account team, and plan customer meetings and engagements. Meanwhile, the business outlines that service teams can track all outstanding issues in a list or provide new agents with a curated onboarding plan.
Slack Lists begins its rollout today and will be available to all Slack users in the coming months. It will be included in all paid plans.
Cisco Live And Its Webex News
It has been another Cisco Live this week, with several pieces of eye-catching news across its networking, security, and, most pertinently, its Webex and collaboration arms.
Cisco announced new AI Assistant for Webex features, including “Ask AI Assistant during meeting recordings”, in which users can ask the AI Assistant about topics covered during a recorded Webex Meeting. The AI Assistant Custom Dictionary enables organisations to introduce common terms and acronyms into AI Assistant training data. Both features will move to Beta in July.
Webex’s new video intelligence feature enhances users’ meeting experience by automatically muting their microphones and disabling their cameras for privacy when they step away from an ongoing meeting. Upon return, the AI Assistant provides a summary of key highlights users have missed, keeping them informed and engaged without interruption. This will be available in June.
Cisco is also launching an all-new Desk Reservation with Cisco Spaces to simplify finding and booking desk spaces and Cisco Collaboration Devices.
