Rules are now Automations: meet the new automation builder 🤝

[Nadeen_Saleh]

Hey, Community!

Rules are now Automations! with a redesigned vertical builder that shows your whole workflow from start to finish, and brings project and portfolio automations into one place.

What’s new

One automation, multiple objects
A single automation can now act across tasks, projects, and portfolios.

• Task field changes → update fields, dates, status, or ownership on a project
• Project changes → update its reporting portfolio
• Project change meets a condition → bulk-update filtered tasks in that project (handy for reassigning work when someone leaves the team)

AI Studio goes beyond tasks
AI steps aren’t limited to tasks anymore. You can bring AI into your workflow to read context, make decisions, and take action on your projects and portfolios.

Nothing to migrate
Your existing Automations keep running. No rebuilding, no converting.

Not in this rollout
Sequential multi-step Automations and approval / human-in-the-loop workflows are coming later. Supported object combinations and availability may vary as we roll out.

Try it
Open Automations from a supported project or portfolio → choose your trigger → configure what happens next → review conditions and paths → publish. Need help? Check out our Help Center article.

What process will you automate first?

[Arthur_BEGOU]

Awesome!!

What process will you automate first?

Definitely AI Studio in a portfolio

[lpb]

@Nadeen_Saleh,

Looking forward to this, but . . .

When will this be fully rolled out and what status is it in now? It’s not in the one Phoenix env nor the regular env I just checked.

Thanks,

Larry

[billyadams]

I’m seeing this on my end now. But I’m running into an issue when changing the scope. I’m not able to choose “Project Contents” when trying to set up an action/automation. It’s inactive.

[Katy_Love]

Is there a way to opt into the old view if you want for certain rules? For rules with a lot of initial “else if” branches, the former layout was MUCH easier to navigate (easier to scroll down a bunch of branches than it is to scroll across).

[Isabella_Aullet]

I’ve run into the same issue, if the scope for the trigger card is set to “Project Contents” it won’t allow me to set the scope for the action card to “Project Contents” and viceversa. I’ve tried adjusting the triggers and actions to see if any would allow me to have “Project Contents” set for both but it remains inactive.

[Kelly_Perry4]

Does this allow rules on a project to trigger actions on a Portfolio? Or are we not there yet

[Bobby_Goldstein]

This seems to be working, sort of, in individual projects (by “sort of” I mean that it’s incredibly clunky, it’s unintuitive — ‘check if’ only seems to appear if I select branching logic, and key information, like what the ‘check if’ are, don’t seem viewable from the main view of the rule)

But also, I’m having trouble finding this when building rules in project templates, can you show me how to set it up there?

[Lee_Cretin]

I concur with the feedback on the interface. For automations that have a single trigger, but a number of branches, the horizontal orientation is klunky. A choice of vertical or horizontal orientation would be nice.

[Sara_Lowery1]

Agreed – it took me waaaay too long to figure out how to add a “check if” condition to a rule I wanted to build.

[Tracy_Hopewell1]

I wholeheartedly agree with this one. For easier rules, this new view is fine. But we have rules with A LOT of branches and the new view makes it much more difficult to navigate.

[Kristy_Wieber]

How did you do it? I’m running into the same issue. Finding this new layout very clunky and restrictive.

[Sara_Lowery1]

@Kristy_Wieber - I found it under “flow controls → paths”, but it’s extremely unintuitive imo.

[Shane_Jackson1]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to create an additional action in an existing rule (now automation). I’m still not sure if i did it correctly - I duplicated the last action in the list and revised it to what I needed. Dash kept telling me to click the + at the bottom of the action box but that is not an option in my builder.

[Jeffrey_Marler]

yes, definitely a bit unintuitive. I have looked through all of the gifs, pic, docs, and videos associated with this launch and I am still struggling to teach my team how to use this. Several of the options shown in the walkthroughs are just not available in the product.
It looks cool and will be a great step forward for rules and automation once it is polished and finished!

[Kristin_Murphy]

This new UI change is completely unintuitive. The overall query structure in the UI has changed. I’ve been sitting here for over 45 minutes trying to figure out a way to add a check if condition as I have for dozens of other automations to my project. It’s 7:30 at night. Asana, please fix this. This is not an improvement. How to use Automations should not be a thing we have to delve into. Boo to this change, it is not an improvement at all. Restore the old query builder. I was never able to search most conditions by name and get a result, but at least they were all listed and I could browse the list. This upgrade is screaming MIGRATION.

[RD_Creative]

I’m noticing that on my end too, just as of today.

YES, there should be a “+” sign at the bottom of the action box. I’ve been using this new UI for a couple weeks with no problem. As of today, that plus sign is missing. I keep thinking it’s a bug? That’s why I came on the boards to check.

[lpb]

@Shane_Jackson1

Dash kept telling me to click the + at the bottom of the action box but that is not an option in my builder.

Regarding the above, and maybe some other UI issues others are experiencing, including my initial period of stumbling over this new UI and trying to understand it…

Note below the simple vertical line connecting the two boxes, and the lack of any “affordance” (any button/link/call to action to indicate how you might interact to build the rule):

But if you hover the mouse over the first box, you get this (a + sign):

If you hover the + you get this:

Here’s the part that threw me initially. Unless you very carefully move your cursor down that vertical line a bit and hover there, you’ll never see this:

That’s not the same + as the first one I showed above. This is a second one. You’ll never see them both together, only one at a time, only with hover.

Once I realized that, I was able to build my rule.

But note that something like adding a second action (done by the second +), plops a new action box (“another test” above) on top of the first action, not beneath it as you might expect. If you want the two actions to appear in order, you have to move one:

It’s important to remember that the functionality of the new automation editor is vastly greater, and will become even more so, than the previous rule editor, so some degree of added complexity would be expected in this new UI, in my opinion.

Please don’t take that last statement as a comment on whether this UI is more or less complex than it “should” be, I’m just trying to say that comparing the new and old versions is not apples to apples because one is tackling a more complex set of functionality.

Thanks,

Larry

[Gigawatts]

I completely agree. As an intermediate/advanced user, I find the change from Rules to Automations unnecessarily frustrating. If it’s this confusing for experienced users, I can’t imagine how challenging it will be for regular users. The previous UI was intuitive, streamlined, and worked perfectly. Please bring back the old interface and avoid fixing something that wasn’t broken.

[Richard_Sather]

Hi @Nadeen_Saleh , thanks for updating the Check if boxes so quickly, so they now show the conditions clearly without needing to click into them. I can see this update in several spaces now.

However, for some reason, the + button at the buttom of the action box seems to be missing on hover so I can’t add more than one consecutive action. Perhaps this latest update is the cause of this bug?