Why AI Isn’t Delivering the Productivity Boom Companies Expected

Dan Rogers joins us now, the CEO at Asana, one of the world's most recognized work management platforms anywhere in the game.

Dan, nice to see you here.

Happy Friday.

Very strong quarter, my friend, 11% after earnings, revenue beat margin expansion.

What's driving that momentum?

You know, if you look at the future of work, we see a world where humans and agents are going to be working together.

Like if you just close your eyes and imagine how work is going to be in a couple of years' time, we are going to have agents that are augmenting and operating alongside us.

And Asana is the operating system for human agent teams.

You know, we've been at this for 18 years doing collaboration.

Our collaboration was originally human to human collaboration.

But the same fundamentals apply when it comes to agents and agents operating within the context of an organization.

So that's where the uplift comes from.

You've warned about what you call the great AI gap.

Is artificial intelligence act actually making workers more productive yet?

Yeah, well, you saw studies from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, where they're, they're showing that a lot of that personal productivity gain that we're all seeing, and boy have we had a personal productivity gain, hasn't really translated into the enterprise context yet.

Uh, in many examples, companies say my productivity's gone up 1 or 2 or 3% from AI.

That's not really what we've been promised, which is what we're calling the AI gap.

So the AI layer is not sufficient, you need the operating layer on top of that.

You need a place where humans and agents can collaborate inside real enterprise workflows.

It's those business critical workflows that actually matter.

Think about it, order processing or sales management or quality control.

Yes, personal productivity's helpful, but what you really need is things that cut across the systems, things that automate all of those manual processes.

That's where the real productivity uplift comes from.

What do you see as being the biggest mistake companies are still making using artificial intelligence right now?

Look, I think it's early innings, right, and it's, it's great that we're all producing more documents and that we are producing more stuff because of AI.

But that's not sufficient to actually improving your workflows.

It's where you bring humans and agents together inside that workflow, and when you automate much of that criticality, that's when you see the real productivity uplift.

So you saw some of the progress that we talked about on our earnings on AR Studio.

AR Studio is our product that provides many of those automations, automating things like intake processes, automating things like routing, quality control, translation.

That's where you see real work start to get done by the AI agents plus the operating layer or the operating system on top of that.

And then you saw on the news, we acquired Stack AI.

Stack AI takes that one step further, which is taking all of those automations and expanding them to third party systems.

If you think about a given company, it is a combination of lots of third party systems, databases, CRM systems, order management systems.

Creating all of the automations between those systems is where we think the real unlock of AI comes from.

The stack AI deal $75 million.

I got about 30 seconds left.

How much of Asna's future is really an AI story?

I mean, really, we see ourselves as the platform for human agent collaboration.

So not only are we an AI company, we're an AI infrastructure company.

We're the operating layer that sits on top of those foundational models that brings real productivity to the enterprise.

Dan Rogers, CEO of Asana, nice to see you.