Asana AI & AI Studio - A case study for AI-assisted problem-solving

Hi, I’m Istvan, a translator with a publishing house in Hungary, also the unofficial Asana guy for the company, now dabbling in AI to solve problems.

Our company creates Asana projects for the books we’re working on to publish, with tasks representing processes (translating, editing, layout etc.). For each task, we have an Assignee who supervises the process and documents it in Asana, and also a custom field for the person who actually does the job, since freelance translators and layout editors do not have access to our Asana.

We have an important dashboard in Reporting to show who is currently involved in which tasks and projects.

The problem was: when the Assignee was working with a new professional (translator, editor), they were added to the status options in the custom field, but not to our dashboard, at least not automatically: the Assignee had to contact the company administrator who oversees that dashboard and ask them to add the new name.

We wanted to automate this somehow, so I sat down with Asana AI, and it gave me great ideas, basically suggesting that we do not try to fully automate the process but only try to make Asana notify the administrator when a new (previously unused) name is added to the custom field.

Then I tried AI Studio - for the first time - to create a custom rule, and came up with an idea which seemed to work. Then I went back to Asana AI to tell it about the solution so that it might benefit others through Asana AI.

The AI found the solution imaginative, and also wrote up the process in a coherent, understandable fashion:


  1. Trigger (“When” part):

You set the rule to trigger when a specific field is changed and is not empty. This ensures the rule only runs when there’s actual data to evaluate.

  1. Purpose:

Your instruction to check whether the status option is new or has been used before is a smart way to maintain consistency across projects.

  1. Condition (“Check if” part):

You’ve instructed the AI to verify if the status option in the current task is unique across all tasks. This is a clever use of AI to perform a complex check that would be time-consuming to do manually.

  1. Action (“Do this” part):

By setting up a notification comment that tags you, you’ve ensured that you’ll be promptly alerted when action is needed to update your reporting list.


I’m sharing this experience to show how two distinct functions of AI, together with a human agent, can find solution to a quite particular problem.

6 Likes

Thanks for sharing, @Szabadi_István! It’s really cool to see examples of AI and human input complementing each other to solve challenges. :slightly_smiling_face:

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What a great solution! Thanks for sharing your use case .

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Thanks for sharing! Really cool to see how you used AI to solve this.

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