Asanathon 2024: Using Asana AI to Tackle Common Project Challenges
On September 25th, 2024, I had the honor of hosting a session at Asanathon powered by Cirface! In this beginner-friendly session we unpacked Asana's new AI features, walking through common use cases to solve everyday project problems.
Use these timestamps to explore specific AI features in the video session, or click the links to jump directly to those sections in the transcript provided below.
20:26: Asana Smart Summaries
24:08: Asana Smart Status
28:30: Q&A
More Resources:
Watch the full Asanathon 2024 playlist
BLOG: Solving Project Problems with Asana AI Chat: A Free Beginner’s Guide
FREE DOWNLOAD: Asana AI Chat Quick Guide
Video Transcript:
Marquis (Host): All right, so to close out Asanathon 2024, we have Kelly Perry. Kelly is a Project Management Consultant and Asana Service Partner, based in Los Angeles. Kelly has over 10 years of experience specializing in workflow automation and process improvement, helping startups and teams of all sizes unlock new efficiencies.
So today, in this session, we're going to be talking about solving common project problems with Asana AI. Kelly’s going to be breaking down exactly how you can make the most out of using Asana AI features to streamline processes, tackle roadblocks, and bring more clarity to your team's workflows.
As this is our last official session, I encourage you to lean in, take notes, and ask questions. Remember, we have a tally or leaderboard going all day. The most engaged, or top three engaged people, will be winning prizes, including Asana templates and various other service packages.
Make sure you're engaged in the chat, asking questions in the QA. I'll be monitoring and moderating, I should say, as Kelly is speaking. Any questions that come through we’ll make sure you’re either brought on to the stage, or we’re answering them live.
So, I'm not going to take up any more of her time. I’d like to welcome you to the stage, Kelly! And everyone in the chat, if you can give me some cheers and claps, and welcome Kelly to the stage!
Kelly: Awesome. Hi! Can everybody hear me okay? Yes, all good. Awesome, thank you so much, Marquis, for the introduction. Hi, everybody! I know it’s been a really long day, full of information and a lot of engaging topics from a variety of experts, and I’m just grateful that you guys are still here, hanging on for just a little while longer with me.
So, to get started, just a quick intro. Marquis said such nice things—I don’t know how I can compare, but my name is Kelly Perry. I’m a Los Angeles-based freelance project manager and services partner for Asana. I primarily work with users looking to make the most of Asana’s personal, starter, and advanced tiers, helping teams transform their processes and improve their workflows.
While I’m best known for my Asana automations, today we’re going to be digging into how you can leverage some of these Asana AI features that we’ve been talking about all day.
So, today we will be shadowing a fictional company as they leverage several of the AI features to tackle their everyday project problems. Just a look ahead, we’ll be seeing some use cases for things like bulk assigning tasks, updating project timelines, catching up on work from Out Of Office, generating next steps from meeting notes, and then also completing those weekly project summaries.
We’re going to start with a little bit of world-building to figure out who our characters are here. So, welcome to the marketing team at the Big Blender Company! We’ve got a very lean team, as I’m sure most of you are used to, and a lot of work to get done.
We are going to be shadowing Devon, the marketing director at Big Blender Company. While Big Blender Company is established as a business, they still have a lot of startup-like processes. And, as you saw, a very lean team. This means that Devon and the marketing team—they all wear very many hats. They’re often working within crunch timelines to get products to market quickly, and they have to act swiftly when new marketing opportunities arise.
Together, we will see how Devon leverages Asana’s AI features to get work done, starting with AI Chat. Now, I know I previewed this earlier when I was asked what my tool of choice was, so I'm really excited to dig into AI Chat with you all. So, what is AI Chat? In the words of Asana themselves, the AI Chat feature helps you quickly find information, gain insights, and even take action to move work forward.
Looking at who has access to this, unfortunately, it is not available on personal plans yet. But AI Chat is available on all paid tiers for Asana. If you have a paid tier, I would love for you to try and follow along, and play with us a little bit. I know earlier I mentioned that people don’t get enough time to play, so I'd love for you to play alongside me. If you do currently have a personal plan, I hope today’s session inspires you to take advantage of a 30-day trial and just test out some of these features for yourself.
To get started with Asana AI Chat, you have to know where to go. So, you will go to the Stardust icon in the top right corner. Your organization may not have AI features enabled, or you might be on a personal plan if you're not seeing these sparkles in your corner. But I do have a help guide that I'll direct you to at the end of the session. And we can, of course, go over a little bit in the Q&A as well if anybody is struggling to access this feature.
AI Chat also preserves your chat history, so you can always go back and find your queries. You can figure out which ones were working really well, so you can reuse them. Or, if you just don't remember a summary that was populated, you can always go back and re-access those.
A few of the common roadblocks that you might run into when you're just getting started with AI Chat is the dreaded “not enough information” response. As Bastian said earlier in the panel this morning, it's really important not to be too broad with your request. AI will only be able to recall a certain amount of information, so it's important that you're managing expectations with just how much lifting you're expecting out of the feature.
So, let's take a look at some of the small tweaks to our sentence structure that can transform a query from "not enough information" to a successful result. So, you'll see here that the example phrasing provided was "Are there any overdue tasks?" Very broad, very huge. And so when we just tweaked that slightly to "Do I have any recently overdue tasks?", we're then limiting the scope of that query and able to actually get some of the results that we're looking for.
Like most things with AI, there's a little bit of user training that needs to happen. So, a few key tips as you're starting to figure out how to craft your queries:
Be specific. Within AI Chat, you can tag in using the "@" symbol, people, projects, tasks. Being specific will help rein in all of that information that the query is trying to look through.
Using action words is actually really great. So, AI Chat can recall tasks for you, it can browse the Help Center, and can also actually do some lifting for you as well. Using those keywords will really help hone in, and we're going to go through some queries next.
Also, wherever you can, referencing time. So, based on the age of your Asana instance, you might have a ton of projects, a ton of portfolios. So if you can limit your query to "last month," "last week," "last quarter," you're going to be able to, again, not have such a broad instance.
Other things to note: You may have a specific project or task in your query. Like when you're in Asana, you might be within one of those projects, but AI Chat will be actually searching through your entire instance, not just that project. So that's why when we tap in more by tagging in those specific projects, we're able to refine our search more specifically.
All right, now we are going to enter some everyday scenarios where Devon will be incorporating AI Chat into their workflow.
In our first scenario, Devon has been leading all marketing launches for two major product launches. Alex is the new Email Coordinator and has just joined the team and will be taking on many of Devon's email tasks and milestones.
Next, we will watch how Devon will use AI Chat to locate these tasks, summarize work, and reassign them. First, Devon goes to the top right corner to launch the AI Chat widget. Now let's watch how AI Chat responds to Devon's first query: "Assign my Purple Blender milestones to Alex.
The first thing that the AI will do is list out the tasks that you have been prompted with your query. The description can actually be really helpful because you can take this and send that in an email or send it over Slack to the person that you're assigning to. It gives them more context into these tasks that you're going to be sending to them.
Here, we'll see the list of milestones, and at that point, Devon could choose to remove any of the tasks by clicking the X on the left. We're going to watch this one more time. Here you can see it recalling. Here's our summary. You can see here that it's actually linking in the specific tasks and giving that layer of context.
Next is the point where you would take a moment and make sure that these are the correct tasks, right? We do need to have that oversight to make sure that we're not just clicking confirm as quickly as I am in this demo. But you'll see in the left-hand panel, all of those tasks were then reassigned.
So let's talk about why this query works. Devon started out strong with an action prompting AI Chat to assign, they were specific and tagging the Purple Mixer project specifically and then specifying Milestones over tasks. So I don't know if you noticed but when we did that query it pulled in just the Milestones from that project and tagged Alex as the new assignee.
Next Devon needs to delegate some email tasks, so here we're going to use the query “assign all Green Blender emails to Alex.” You'll notice that we actually did not tag the Green Blender project in this query.
Once again AI Chat will scan the workspace for tasks, provide us with the summary. And what we'll notice is that there were actually two tasks that were not within this email calendar project that were caught by AI Chat, so at this point Devon can choose to either send those over as well because it was missed, or remove those from the results and then proceed with reassigning.
So here even though we didn't tag in the Green Blender project, we were still specific in our query by naming the Green Blender emails specifically. This helped us in the end because it was able to locate a few other tasks that we might have missed otherwise, because they weren't multihomed in that calendar.
In our next scenario: the Purple Mixer project has arrived to the warehouse early, so Devon's team now needs to pull up their marketing support to get the product to Market two weeks ahead of schedule. AI Chat will help us update the due dates and notify our assignees of any changes or risks.
In this more advanced query, we're asking AI Chat to do multiple things– so we're pulling up the due date and we're flagging risks, so this one's going to be a little bit more robust. Our query is specifically “move Purple Mixer tasks for Lex in the Creative Requests project two weeks sooner, and flag risks for delivery.”
So first Asana AI will scan Lex's tasks within the creative request project project, and provide a summary for us. This is where we have our human intervention to figure out what's coming up, what are we going to be reassigning here. Next it will list the tasks it found and provide the updated due dates based on our query.
And we're going to pause it here. So here we're going to take a little bit closer of a look, because these are moving really quickly, right? This is why we're doing it in the presentation and not live, because it just moves very quickly.
So you'll see here that in the left, our tasks in the up-next section have been pulled up, but there's also this in-progress task down below that's been picked up as well. So Devon has a few options at this point– they can either confirm all changes and all the dates will be updated, they can remove any tasks they don't want to be moved up, or they can actually customize which dates they want to be changed here. So if they want to pull up certain aspects of the marketing campaign but keep that in-progress one on track, they can just remove that or change the date.
Let's see what happens when we click Confirm. Once we confirm the dates AI Chat will then update the due dates, but you'll see that all of these are now past due. So with our “flag risks for delivery” it is now going to prompt us to submit a comment for all of those tasks– letting Lex know the context around what's going on, and flagging that they’re past due. You also, I think you might have seen you can customize this comment as well, so Devon adds “we'll talk about this in our one-on-one.” So you can now see that all of these tasks are past due, Lex has been notified and now we can move forward with the launch.
So breaking this one down: we asked AI Chat for two actions, both “move the dates up” and “flag the risks.” We were intentional about not only tagging the creative requests project, but also tagging in Lex.
Let's see how some of the other members of the Big Blender Company could be using this query in their day-to-day work. Obviously these are only a couple of examples, you know. Alex can be using this to pull forward a social media campaign, Molly can be using this for the annual calendar, and Lex can be using this to update a creative sprint based on some Out Of Offices coming up.
And our last scenario for AI Chat: Devon is returning from a restful Out Of Office. And unfortunately we're all probably too well aware about returning from Out Of Office to a full day of back-to-back meetings. So Devon needs to get caught up quick, AI Chat will help them summarize their project updates over the last two weeks, flag tasks that have been completed in the last week, and then also flag any new tasks that may have been assigned while they were out.
So the first meeting is All Hands, where they have to catch the business up on all the work that was completed on the two big launches. From the home screen Devon asks AI Chat what work has been completed on the Green Blender and Purple Mixer projects while they've been out. AI Chat generates a summary of completed tasks within the Green Blender and Purple Mixer projects in that time frame, that they can then take and apply those as bullets into their All Hand slide.
Next, they're immediately headed into a meeting with Molly, who is looking for a status update on Creative requests. Devon asks AI Chat what creative requests have been completed this week, which provides them with a summary of all of the creative requests specifically that have been closed out during their Out Of Office. They can now copy and paste this into their updated meeting agenda with Molly.
Lastly, they want to get a sense of what new tasks await them. So they ask AI Chat “what new tasks have been assigned to me this week?” You can see that it's going through the projects, listing them out, providing a summary, and then also linking to the tasks themselves.
So here we had a lot of different things going on in a short period of time. By now you should have a good sense of why this query worked, but let's review. We see that we specifically tagged in the projects where we were trying to query this information. Knowing that this institution probably has a lot of projects going on, we were able to limit that to only the main projects that needed attention for the moment.
We limited that time frame as well, right. So we talked specifically about the “last two weeks” when it came to the summaries, we limited it to just “this week” when it came to creative test completion, we limited to “this week” when we wanted to find out what was new. We also use specific things like “assigned to me” to indicate which tasks we were looking for and tagging in specific projects wherever we could.
These are again just a few of the ways that you can be using AI Chat. It really takes a minute just to really unlock all of the different ways that you can be tapping this feature in to do a lot more heavy lifting for you.
We're going to take a little pause, Marquis I saw you've turned your camera on do you have questions to tackle?
Marquis: There was one question, but if you want to do your pause first we can wait till after.
Kelly: Well because I have a question, is the thing. So I wanted to take this moment because I obviously have a lot of excitement about this feature, but I want to hear from you guys in the chat. What are some ways that you think that you could be using AI Chat in your organization? And Marquis if you could help me select some of these and read them aloud.
Marquis: Absolutely! So feel free to throw in the chat what are some ways that you can use AI Chat in your organization. I will wait. “Status updates” is one. “Being a virtual assistant in Asana” Yeah I see that. “Like being a little project manager”, totally. ”I didn't realize I had to tag in projects, but was able to create a quarterly report earlier this week and it saved me a lot of time” Love that.
“We recently assigned projects to a portfolio, and there are so many unassigned tasks from our project templates going to be finding those tasks and assigning them to specific members.” Yeah. “Moving due dates,” “most of the ways that Kelly already shared,” “after Out Of Office is huge for catchup” yeah. “Project summary,” “PM weekly summaries,” “bi-weekly reports for the team to identify bottlenecks and risks.”
“Rolling out of Asana out for more of the org, the AI Chat will help them catch up and feel more comfortable with the onboarding, I hope” yes it will. And then Carla says “assigning tasks and due dates.”
Kelly: Awesome yeah and there are lots of ways, you know these are just a couple of them so I'm really excited to hear you guys sort of figuring out how it works for your scenario. I think that onboarding is huge, and then also for teams who might not have a dedicated Project Manager on staff this kind of helps you self-Project Manage a little bit. So really happy to hear those! Did we have a question, Marquis?
Marquis: There was one from Jessica “is the move due date functionality able to skip weekends? For instance move the due dates for X tasks for X business days from today?”
Kelly: That is an excellent question. I wonder if we can revisit it after, and I can pull up a live instance and we can give it a shot?
Marquis: Sure, thank you Jessica we will get back to you.
Kelly: Cool all right so we still have two more AI features to go through, and next is going to be the Asana Smart Summaries. So Smart Summaries, for tasks specifically is what we're talking about here, will allow users to basically get highlights from task descriptions.
In this next feature Devon and the Big Blender Company are trying to use this to help sort of limit the manual work that goes into next steps from meetings. So this feature actually lives in the body of the task, rather than as an external widget like the AI chat. So you'll still see that same Stardust icon down within the body of the description.
So for our scenario: Devon leads the weekly marketing meeting but is having trouble keeping track of all the next steps. The Big Blender Company already uses AI call transcription to basically record all of their notes, but they don't actually have time to go through and reread those to identify what their next steps are, especially when the action items are usually very time-sensitive.
So with a Smart Summary Devon can take their meeting notes and turn them into actionable steps– by pasting them right into the description, they can then click the Stardust icon and “draft subtasks” and it will read through and identify action items that were within that call transcript. So you'll see it pull through four of those, you can click the button to confirm, make any edits to those and then assign them out.
This is another one of these steps where AI is really helpful in getting that top layer, but Devon will definitely want to go back and skim the notes again just to make sure nothing was missed. But it will pick out those key actionable items and get them on the radar as soon as possible. We'll watch that one more time.
I'm really excited because there is a powerful new feature coming that will take that same scenario but level it up. So this access will be accessible at the project level rather than within the task. And to access this “import a file” feature you will go to the carrot beside the project, go to import and click any file. This is in beta right now, Alex is the only person at the Big Blender Company with this feature, so don't be jealous if you don't have it yet– it is coming soon.
They can then paste in that transcript and ask to generate tasks under a specific section within this project. You'll see it'll do its thing, it's thinking, it's analyzing the transcript. And here we have a much longer list. Interestingly enough this is the same transcript and a lot more action items were pulled, so that's where it's important for us to be auditing within the feature because you can actually get different results.
Here what we can do is go back through, reassign and edit these as well. The other thing that sets this specific feature apart from the Smart subtasks is the versatility and the depth. So the subtasks that we created with the last example was just the name of the subtask, it didn't have anything in the description. But when we used this feature, it actually pulled out the context for that subtask and added it to the description, and then even, like, quoted what the source was, which was specifically something that Devon had said in the meeting.
Our last feature that we're going to cover today is Smart Status. Smart Status helps save time using Asana AI to generate project updates. So I feel like we've touched on this a lot today, about the different ways that you can be using Asana AI features to really just optimize your time, especially in some of these manual reporting structures.
Smart Status is available on all the paid plans, but an important note is that because starter memberships do not have portfolios there's some limitation there– that this feature is only available at the project level.
In our scenario Devon is responsible for providing a weekly project report to keep the team up to date on the marketing campaigns for the new products that are progressing. We'll be scanning the projects, providing customizable summaries and sending an update to the team members.
So from the overview tab Devon will click the “view summary button” in the right panel under “what's the status.” You'll see that it's starting to generate in the bottom left, it'll let us know that we'll receive an email when the summary is ready. It could take a while if you've never done one before and there's a lot of information within the project.
So now Devon is free to go attend the marketing meeting knowing that their summary will be done and waiting for them. Devon finishes with the weekly marketing meeting and has an email from Asana informing them that their summary is ready. They just have to click the link within that email to be brought to the summary page.
By clicking on “share summary” it can get a little scary because you think you're going to hit share summary and it'll immediately send out, that's not the case– you do have an editable period there. So once you hit “share summary” it will pop open a new window where you
can actually go through, review your summary in depth, make sure that everything in there is accurate. You have all the information that's relevant to the team, customize it, shout people out, drag in anything that was missing, and then review who it's going to be sending to, and hit send.
So here you'll see that it breaks out the sections, it links in the tasks and it tags in the individual contributors within this project. Devon can also revisit the other projects where they usually do these updates, and hit the refresh summary for an updated version.
I actually counted how long this one took, and it's 18 seconds. So if you think about that 30 minutes that we were talking about earlier, that you guys are spending on doing these updates– having a first draft in 18 seconds is huge. Even if you're having to take time to skim through, add in more information, maybe make a couple corrections, starting with a draft in 18 seconds can be really revolutionary.
This feature is great for teams who have those weekend progress reports or have to customize them based at the project level. Again if you do have one of the additional accounts you can do this at the portfolio level, which can be really helpful as well. You can see once you hit “post” it will actually appear as a static report within this “what's the status” column on the right– so the team can actually go back again and find that, they don't have to go rooting through emails.
And wrapping up, so over the last 30 minutes we've learned how to build a specific and actionable query in Asana AI, we've learned how to leverage Smart Summaries to generate next steps, and how to save hours on weekly project updates with Smart Status. So sometimes you just don't have the time to dig through all of your open projects, and some of these AI features alongside your daily typical workflow can really help streamline and bring efficiency to your organization.
There are a few other ways, I know I've kind of sent you guys through a bunch of different options, but there's so many different use cases for these. If some of these didn't resonate, I hope that you'll be able to find and explore some different ones and share them with us, because it's really exciting to see how you guys are all using these features.
Marquis: Hey we're all good, we have lots of questions Kelly, people are loving your session here. “This was great, Kelly.” “Thank you, Kelly.” Yeah so many great comments coming in here but I'm gonna get back to the questions. There was one earlier from Jessica, about you know moving the due dates with AI to skip weekends. I don't know if you wanted to demo that one there's also a question, yeah why don't we do that one first.
Kelly: Cool, am I still sharing my screen, can you see my sandbox here? Okay so we're gonna go in here, we're going to launch the AI Chat. And so what was our example here? It was moving up…
Marquis: Yeah so is the move due date functionality able to skip weekends, for instance move the due dates for X tasks 4 days from today.
Kelly: We're just going to grab a task here, what is today. Oh no, spelled purple wrong.
Marquis: I can't type when people are watching me.
Kelly: Move it up, so it would be four days– Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday– okay, so four business days. We're going to get a bit more specific, my initial query was a little too broad, so “move due date for this task,” I added that in, “out four business days.” So let's see what it'll do.
Marquis: It should play Jeopardy music for us as we wait.
Kelly: It always feels so much longer when you're waiting. Okay, one two three four.. Not quite, not quite. Because we would have wanted that to be Tuesday. So I'm going to actually discard that one, I want to give it one more try.
We're just going to explicitly say “skip weekend”, and see if it can see if it can handle it. It's skipped weekend, so that might be the one to use– is to explicitly say to “skip weekend.”
I know that earlier we had also been talking about, like, logging the things that are working, and making sure that you are able to use those. And that's why I specifically wanted to lay out what the queries are that I've been testing, and seeing what those results are. Another way that you can track these is within your My Task section, you can use the new “notes” feature to create a section as you're, like, playing around with these. And I just made one that was called My Queries, and the ones that were working well for me I just dumped there as like a little placing area to test out. So that's just kind of like another tool in the toolbox.
Marquis: That's a great tip, a place like where to test things. Someone said “I think Marquis just found a solution to his pet peeve in Asana.” Earlier I guess I showed some visible, you know, frustration with the inability to skip weekends with rules.
Kelly: I mean I still struggle with it for rules, I'm waiting for it for rules because it's the bane of my existence.
Marquis: I know. Jessica had another question, because we're kind of on this topic- “can you customize the date range on the project summary?”
Kelly: Ooo that is another good question, let's take a look. So you'll see here it shows our weeks here, “range chosen because you last visited over a week ago.” I haven't seen a way, I'm not sure Marquis if your team uses this a lot and has had any functionality there. Because the thing that's specific about these project summaries is rather than the queries where you can like give it some context, it's really just this “share summary” button.
Marquis: Yeah yeah I was going to say I haven't seen anywhere where you can change those date ranges. And honestly like I turn on the summary for different projects and portfolios, and I forget about it until I get the notification in my inbox. So I just know that oh it's been enough time now, it actually has something to share with me.
Kelly: I think like a workaround could be using AI Chat to generate that custom summary, because as we saw when you ask that, you know, “what's happened the last two weeks” you could give it that date range and have it populate a unique summary, and then use that as your starting point. Because you can just copy and paste that into like your messages section and still kind of like send out. It's just, it's less of the like one-touch button which is really nice, but it does, it gives you a little bit more of that, that customization.
Marquis: Awesome. Have a question here “do you think that chatGPT summarizing the transcript is better than Asana description summary AI, or are they the same? And is there a character limit in the Asana task description feature?”
Kelly: I have not seen a limit in the task description feature, though the limit may exist. I will say also that in my experience having everything be in a self-contained platform is really helpful. So rather than having to go and take things from this place, to this place, to this place... I think that's what's really attractive to me about doing the summaries all within Asana, is it has access within the platform that I'm using the most.
I also find that I hop between different AI tools. Some days I'm using chatGPT and I'm just not getting what I need out of it, and I'm switching to Gemini because it's like formulating what I need in that moment. So for me I don't have like a good answer of which one's better, but in terms of which one might be more efficient, I would say that this is more efficient to me than going off platform to try and do the same thing.
Marquis: Can I add to that Kelly, all right I would 1,000% agree with you. Yeah, outside of the platform if I'm doing stuff like yeah I might use different AI tools– but I think within Asana, I think the question was related to like uploading documents there, right like we said this morning in the panel– Asana is looking, sorry, AI within Asana is looking for contextual matches, right so it's always searching the projects, and the tasks, the portfolios– like but if you were to take the transcript outside there's a lot of context that it misses, right. It's not taking into account the activity that happened in the project, it's not taking into account changes that are happening. And so yeah to Kelly's point keeping it all within one platform I think would be a better way to do it.
Kelly: And I believe that it's the Open AI model also, when you have to go through and enable your AI features one of them is kind of like enabling the Open AI access so correct me if I'm misspeaking here, but.
Marquis: Yeah, you've got Anthropic as one of them, and then you've got Claude as the other. And I believe they're working on the Open AI integration, it might be there I'm not 100% sure. But those other two I know for sure are there. We've got two more questions, you ready Kelly? All right let's see, “Please explain at the portfolio level.” It was an anonymous submission, I'm not sure what the context was, if it was related to portfolio summary maybe?
Kelly: I would imagine probably. I actually can't show the portfolios, because this one does not have, this one's on starter so I actually can't do portfolios here. But it's a similar feature where you can do the same, sort of like summary level, and you have access to being able to post these statuses at the portfolio level rather than directly in the project. I hope that answers the question.
Marquis: Yeah, thank you for that. Megan asks “we have Asana business plan and it looks like I do not have access to what y'all are looking at”, oh Christine jumped in “we had the same problem and we finally fixed it by updating from business plan to the comparable new plan Advanced,” yes “and it suddenly all worked.” So seems like that took care of itself. Thanks so much to the audience. And we've got another question here, “what are the benefits and downsides of using status updates versus a task description for a team to journal reflective insights on a project, and does this choice impact Asana AI's ability to do summaries or statuses?” That’s a good question.
Kelly: It's a good, that's a big one, can we break it down again just a little bit?
Marquis: Yeah let's break it down. So “what are the benefits and downsides of using status updates versus a task description for a team member to journal reflective insights on a project?” That's the first part.
Kelly: I think, if I'm understanding the question correctly. The biggest difference would be if you're doing a status at the project level, that is all information that is being disseminated to everybody who is on that project. Whereas if you're doing that on a task level, like one to one with somebody in your one-on-one project, you'd be able to to have those like reflections be individual rather than within a broader project. Am I understanding the context?
Marquis: I think so, yeah, that's exactly how I would’ve answered it.
Kelly: Okay yeah, and I think I think each kind of thing has a use case for the best kind of approach. But anything that's sort of like individual, I think that AI Chat is really helpful for that, because you, I think I mentioned before, like I think of it as kind of like a co-pilot within the instance. You have somebody that you're kind of, like, having that kind of conversation with, and it's unique to your instance. Versus some like task summaries or project summaries– those will live within the organization and so anybody who has access to that project will have visibility into that.
Marquis: Yeah great, thank you Kelly. All right we've got officially five minutes on the clock, oh we just got another question in. Just want to make sure, does anyone want to come onto the stage and ask a question? Feel free to put up your hand and I'll bring you onto the stage.
We've got another one from Monica here, “was Asana AI offered at all levels at one time? I’m almost certain I played with it once, but the icon's not there.” I know what you're talking about Monica. The same thing happened to me where like the Stardust was there one day, and then it wasn't. Just keep in mind with any of these features being in beta, they're constantly changing and updating them. And so it might have been rolled out for one particular point in time and then pulled back. But there's no way to know for sure. But I don't know, Kelly, if you have any other insight?
Kelly: No, I had a similar issue as well. What turned out for me was I had been, one of my demo accounts had been in Personal and I was doing a free trial of Advanced– and it removed it when I was in the transition period between like onboarding to a full Advanced plan. So there's some things that could happen like that.
I also do on my site have a troubleshoot help guide on some of like these implementation pieces. I was running, I do this every day, and I was running into some roadblocks too. So I went through all the help guides so you don't have to! So if you're having trouble seeing that Stardust or figuring out, you know, if your admin needs to add it, or who a super admin is– on my website I do have like a free resource that you can check out and just kind of troubleshoot those. Because it can be a winding road once you realize, like, “okay I need to enable, okay but I need an admin, oh but it needs to be a super admin and I don't have one of those…” so you know it can get a little frustrating. So let me know if you guys have any questions on enablement as well.
Marquis: It's a great point about enabling it, and it might have been disabled. Yeah all right we've got just two minutes here, and then we'll let Kelly wrap up. But we do have a question, I want to say your name correctly, Hrehan, I'm assuming H is silent?
Hrehan (attendee): Did very well, yeah it’s “Hrehan” well done.
Marquis: thank you all right go ahead and ask your question, and thanks for all your engagement today, it's been awesome.
Hrehan: Oh thank you so much. Kelly, amazing insights. I had a question for you that I asked a bit earlier, and I wanted your insight, about committing and scheduling time. Because I love the idea Marquis says, “having the work all in one place,” and I would like to see
I guess how you could implement in a way– How do you commit and scheduled time in Asana? Potentially in, as for example, like if you're managing like the Milestones I saw you had in that template, it would be cool if people could be like “okay I'm going to block two hours for this particular Milestone” and you could manage the whole team within Asana and I wondered if it's possible or not.
Kelly: That's an excellent question, and not one that I've thought about before. If I have a second to think– my first gut goes to, unfortunately, some like external third-party integrations that you can do to hook up to like a calendar specifically, and you can do some like rules to do time blocking that way. But I'm not sure about directly within the platform off the top of my head. Sorry I don't have a good one for that, you stumped me.
Hrehan: Amazing. But in terms, I'm not sure if you're allowed to but mentioning third-party integrations that would be wonderful, but if not that's fine.
Kelly: Yeah I guess I misspoke when I said third-party. There's still integrations within Asana, in the rule builder there is like an external– I can show you actually, why not just show you instead of telling you. So within the rule builder you'll see here these external actions. So there's, you know Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Calendar, Outlook. There's also a really awesome Outlook for Asana, or Asana for Outlook integration, where you can like click in an email and it can create a task attached to the project, tag people in, which is really powerful. But yeah you're able to use these, they're not they're not technically third-party, so I misspoke there. But you can leverage those external actions, and I think there's some new like more advanced rules coming as well for Outlook specifically, in Microsoft, that I think will be pretty cool.
Hrehan: Very cool, thank you.
Marquis: Awesome, Thanks. All right, Kelly, closing thoughts from you anything else you want to share with the team or with the audience?
Kelly: Just if you have any questions please connect with me on LinkedIn. I love meeting new people and sharing advice on how to do rule building. Visit my website kellyperryconsulting.com, and I've got some resources. And just thank you guys so much! It's been really wonderful, I really appreciate all the engagement and the questions so thanks.
Marquis: And thank you, Kelly, for being here and sharing with us. Loved the presentation, loved how interactive it was, and I love the like live understanding of just how AI works and moves. And really, really helpful. And like I said, there are lots of people that felt the same way in the comments as well, so appreciate your time and for you spending the day with us.