How We Accidentally Burned Through 4 Million Asana AI Studio Credits in a Month 🤯 …and how you can avoid doing the same.

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At iDO, we hit the AI Studio usage limit — hard. We reached more than 4 million credits in a month, which disabled our AI rules until the next renewal!

Here’s what happened (and yes, it’s a mix of bad luck and bad processes on our end):

:one: No dashboard = no visibility

We made the beginners mistake of not looking at our AI Studio usage dashboard. We did receive the warning messages but it was too late: we should have been proactive.

:two: A costly My Tasks rule

One teammate had a rule using one of the most expensive AI models.

  1. Sometimes cheap per task, but occasionally very expensive

  2. No conditions to limit when it ran → triggered on every task assigned to them

:three: The “I’m on holiday” automation fail

I wanted to be email-free for 2 weeks, so I:

  1. Forwarded all my emails into Asana

  2. Created tasks automatically

  3. Let AI decide priority & next steps

The problem?

  1. Some of those emails were Asana notifications from another account

  2. They got forwarded, created tasks, triggered more notifications, sent more emails → endless loop

  3. AI ran every. single. time.

I set it up on a Friday, left my laptop behind, and never checked back. My colleague spotted it quickly, killed the rule… but too late.

The takeaway?

:white_check_mark: Monitor your AI Studio usage in the admin console

:white_check_mark: Add specific conditions to your AI rules

:white_check_mark: Test any automation that could loop before you disappear on holiday

:white_check_mark: Don’t go too “AI first” for simple rules.

If something can be handled by a native automation, there’s no need to hand it over to AI.

And if it’s too complex for a standard rule, a Custom Script can be a great alternative.

In short: “AI is sometimes a bazooka to kill a fly.”

We’re actually glad this happened to us as an Asana Solutions Partner — now we know exactly what to warn our clients about.

Bastien, Asana Expert
i.DO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)

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Hey, somebody’s gotta test the limits for the rest of us, right? :joy:

I heard recently that the concert pianist Franz Liszt would demand two grand pianos to be placed on the stage for every concert. He would break so many strings on the first piano that after the intermission, he would play the second piano and break all the strings on that one, too.

I kind of feel like Liszt did a kindness to all the rest of the pianists who came later, because his abuse of pianos undoubtedly prompted Steinway & Sons (and other manufacturers) to figure out ways of making pianos more indestructible. Today, they use steel frames for the strings, which can support a lot more tension.

So - thanks for being our Franz Liszt on this one! LOL

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@Rebekah_Chalkley
Thanks for that comment, so cool to read.

@Bastien_Siebman is definitely a virtuoso in his art :wink:

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Our pleasure :rofl:

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Asana is actively recommending the use of AIStudio.
Like this.

It’s a very good initiative, but I feel like it’s being rushed.

In addition to recommending its use, I would also like them to provide follow-up support to practitioners.

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I wouldn’t say it’s being rushed, but I feel like sometimes Asana is pushing for AI when a clean native automation will do the trick. And I know that Asana doesn’t agree with me, but I usually push for AI to be added on top of a clean and working environment, meaning that you have to master Asana before using AI too much. And I know that Asana wants to use AI as a way to make it easier for people to discover and use Asana.

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