Meet Your New Teammate, AI: Asana’s Saket Srivastava

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Hey, listeners. When it comes to AI, it's hard to decipher what's real, what's hype, and what you need to know. To help make sense of it all, we recommend you listen to the TED AI Show. Host, creative technologist, and AI innovator, Bilal Vosadou, sits down with guests for a deep dive into the thrilling world of tech and its effect on business, education, and more. Each episode will leave you more informed with tools to help you navigate the future of tech. Get ahead of the curve and check out the TED AI Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned after today's episode, as Shervin and I talk about the changing role of the CIO.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:49)
How would project management and collaboration be done in the future? Find out on today's episode.

**Saket Srivastava** (0:57)
I'm Saket Srivastava from Asana, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business.
Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:22)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017 Interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to season 10 of Me, Myself, and AI. Today, Sam and I are super happy to be joined by Saket Srivastava, Chief Information Officer at Asana. Saket, welcome to the show. Thank you. Maybe I start by asking you to describe Asana as a company and then your role within that.

**Saket Srivastava** (2:12)
Absolutely. And nice to be here and great to meet you both. Asana is an enterprise work management platform. We help over 150,000 customers globally. 85% of the Fortune 100 companies manage and automate everything from company level goal setting and tracking. All of that work, execution, capacity planning, product launches, all on our platform. We believe that increasingly work is becoming more cross-functional and cross-functional work managing that is hard. Asana works towards bringing greater clarity and accountability on who is going to do what by when. And that really helps with greater predictability and better outcomes for the work.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:01)
And then your role within that as the Chief Information Officer, I've got to believe AI plays a significant role in what you do and what Asana does.

**Saket Srivastava** (3:10)
Yes. The way I think of my role at Asana, there are really two parts to it. One is I lead the internal technology organization at Asana, get to work with some very talented people and teams. AI is a big charter of ours.
At a company level, we have identified a goal which will move AI and the impact of AI for our workforce. I also spend a ton of time with customers, really looking to learn from customers, be an advocate for our platform, and also bring in the needs and the voice of our customers into our product and go-to-market strategy as well.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:49)
Wonderful. AI has been around at some scale at over a decade now, but I would imagine particularly in the last couple of years, with generative AI and all this extra focus and buzz around it, what are you seeing in the marketplace and what is different now versus let's say five years ago?

**Saket Srivastava** (4:09)
Asana started on AI very early on, I'd say closer to eight, ten years back. The fundamentals of our platform, the architecture on which our platform is built on, we call it the work-graph data model, and it shows up as what we call a pyramid of clarity, really lends itself well to benefit from AI and generative AI. Obviously, over the last couple of years, in fact, not even two years, there's just been so much conversation and buzz around generative AI. We felt that with the context that our platform carries around the work that customers manage through our platform, we are really well-placed to leverage the gen AI movement and bring some real good wins for our customers. We thought about it from a principal's first perspective on how does AI coexist with humans and how do humans eventually take accountability for the decisions and think of AI as a teammate, if you will. We're starting to see our customers benefit from the AI launches that we're making in service of them.