When the tech industry describes AI’s role in its products, it hardly chooses language at random. Terms such as assistant and copilot reinforce that the human user remains firmly in charge—a comforting notion for anyone stressed over AI’s loose-cannon tendencies or even the prospect of it eventually rendering humans less essential to business processes. And then there’s the name that project-management kingpin Asana picked for its latest wave of AI-infused functionality: “AI teammates.” Calling a piece of software a teammate feels like a promotion, as if it’s earned the right to be considered a peer rather than an underling. (If nothing else, it has a strikingly different vibe than the more mechanistic moniker Asana was originally planning to use: “workbots.”) When I asked Asana cofounder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz about positioning AI as a team member, he emphasized the proactive nature of the new features—especially compared to chatbot-style AI that sits in a window of its own and doesn’t spring into action until called upon. “It’s less about thinking of it as this separate thing on the side and more something that is in the workflow, as if it was another human,” he told me. “In many cases, I do think the outputs are as good as humans. Sometimes they’re superhuman.“ It will be some time before most of Asana’s 150,000 customers can judge the quality of the AI teammates’ handiwork. Currently being beta-tested by select customers, with general availability planned for later this year and pricing TBA, they’re debuting today at Asana’s Work Innovation Summit conference in San Francisco, seven months after the company’s first big wave of generative AI announcements, which included features such as a tone checker.

Full report : Asana unveils “AI teammates”, a new feature in beta for select customers to help manage projects and tasks, ahead of general availability later in 2024.