Goal
Propose a simple approach here that you can implement in minutes using AI Studio for one or many of your teams’ to use to handle their work intake processes. It provides immediate value and enables them to further improve incrementally at their own pace. You can implement this even if you’re brand new to Asana, AI, or custom workflows.
As a by-product, you’ll gain a working knowledge of Asana’s AI Studio via hands-on experience.
Workflow We’ll Implement
Accept and automate/triage new work requests for a workgroup arriving via a simple Asana form. (This workflow also handles, unchanged, other intake methods too: either homing or multi-homing a task directly via Asana, or sending an email to an alias that’s forwarded to the team’s work intake project.
We make this as easy as possible for the requesters. They can convey their needs in virtually any format they prefer, as written paragraphs, bullet notes, or results of brainstorms none of which need to be perfectly organized, and submitted via text, attachments, or both.
The input will be “normalized” according to the workgroup’s preference to best enable them to understand the request and begin to process it as easily and as quickly as possible, with as little or much automation and workflow as they desire.
One Rule
In our workflow example for a Digital team’s work intake, the only prerequisite for you is to create a Digital Work Requests Asana project with a single “Receive new work request” rule, specified below, and one Effort level single-select custom field with a few values of your choice).
Start by creating the rule with AI Studio:
- Set the “When” box to “Task is added to this project” for “All tasks.”
- Delete the “Check if” box; you don’t need it for this example.
- Add multiple actions to the “Do this” box, all using the “+” variable option and always choosing “Fill by AI” as the variable to specify. Your rule should look like this when you’re done:
Now the fun part: In the “Set up AI” box click “Edit instructions” (see above screenshot). In the “Give AI instructions box” that appears, paste the text you’ll find below (expand to view). Feel free to change and experiment later, but for now, perhaps just change step two to use the names to two Asana users in your organization:
AI instructions you can copy/paste
- Set the Effort Level custom field according to the submission contents.
- Set the Assignee to Alan Wang if low effort and Chris Krutzman if high effort.
- Remove any NSFW content.
- Remove any .sig/signature/footer/boilerplate material.
- Keep the remainder of the description under an “Original Request” heading.
- Add an “Original Request Summary” section and then a “Key Requirements” section at the top of the description.
- Translate the actionable part of the description into actionable subtasks starting with verb so each piece of work is specified discretely.
- Summarize in a few short sentences the generated subtasks under a “Workflow Subtasks Summary” heading at the bottom of the description.
The rest of the “Set up AI” sidebar should roughly look like this:
That’s it! You’re now ready to intake requests. What will happen? Just read the bullet points above to understand (I’ll also summarize further below).
Ok, we’re ready to try it out.
Original Work Request Example
If you want, create a simple form in this project with five fields as shown below. Asana creates the first two of the five fields automatically, so you just have three to add: a short text field for the title, a long text field for the project description, and an attachments field). Here’s an example of the form filled out by a requester:
The project description for this example is a representative request for a minisite to be created; you’ll see what AI Studio does with it in a moment. (How did I come up with such a great, long example? I used perplexity with a simple prompt to generate it for me!)
Example Project description you can copy/paste
The Sunnyvale Community Garden Association is seeking a minisite to promote their upcoming “Green Thumbs for All” initiative. This project aims to encourage urban gardening and provide resources for residents to start their own small-scale vegetable gardens. The minisite should have a clean, nature-inspired design that reflects the organization’s commitment to sustainable living and community engagement[1].
The landing page should feature an eye-catching hero image of a thriving community garden, along with a brief introduction to the “Green Thumbs for All” program. Key information such as the program’s goals, benefits, and how to get involved should be prominently displayed. The page should also include a call-to-action button that directs visitors to the information request form[2].
In addition to the landing page, the minisite should have several sub-pages: “About Us,” which provides background on the Sunnyvale Community Garden Association; “Program Details,” which outlines the specifics of the “Green Thumbs for All” initiative; “Resources,” which offers gardening tips and links to helpful external content; and “Gallery,” which showcases photos of successful community gardens and participant testimonials[4].
The minisite should incorporate a basic form on a dedicated “Contact Us” page, allowing visitors to request further information or express interest in participating. The form should include fields for name, email address, phone number (optional), and a dropdown menu to specify areas of interest (e.g., volunteering, starting a garden, attending workshops). Additionally, there should be a text area for visitors to ask specific questions or provide comments. Upon submission, the form should trigger an automated email response and notify the organization’s staff[1][3].
Your boss is a complete idiot!
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Resulting Request after AI Studio
If you submitted the above form (or otherwise homed a task with that content into the intake requests project), then after a minute or less you’ll see it transformed into something like this:
Note that the Asignee and the Effort level custom field were valued, the signature/footer lines and NSFW content with the snide comment about the boss were removed, the Description was recast in the manner we specified in order to make it easy for us to understand the request, and a proposed workflow was generated as subtasks for us to use or edit as desired.
Next Steps
I’ve included a number of representative example AI transformations in an effort to pave the way for you to flesh out a real, helpful intake workflow for as many teams as you’d like to experiment with by making tweaks, one-by-one. For example, use the custom field example as your model for every other custom field you might need to value by AI. Tweak the Description instructions to accomplish what will work best for your teams. Consider including “boilerplate” start and end subtasks that you always need for your workflow, in addition to the AI-generated ones.
I only spent about 30 minutes implementing this and testing it, so you should certainly take more care in specifying your instructions and testing with representative work requests, perhaps also AI-generated like mine. Remember, AI needs good testing!
My goal was to keep it simple in the hopes of encouraging as many teams as possible to get their feet wet and begin to experiment themselves using this as a first-time, all-purpose model for intake. But I’m certainly interested in any simple improvements you have might.
AI Studio offers the perfect place to start your journey and get value immediately. But don’t stop there. AI expert Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing substack and author of Co-Intelligence recommends getting your feet wet like this, more so than reading about AI, and then staying at it, putting your time in:
Just use AI to do stuff that you do for work or fun, for about 10 hours, and you will figure out a remarkable amount.
Thanks for reading,
Larry Berger, Asana Services Partner, Trilogi Solutions