The Human Side of AI: Asana's Blueprint for Go-to-Market Transformation

Speaker A: Welcome everybody. This is Ryan Staley and I am back and I have a very special guest with me today. I have Mike Halen. Mike is the GM M of AI Studio over at Asana. Mike's done some amazing things. First of all, he's been in enterprise sales for 20 years prior to this role switch, which I was telling him pre like he looks way younger than he should for being in that space at that time frame, if you will. So congrats to Mike on that. But just recently got shifted over to the GM of AI Studio over at Asana. Love what Asana is doing. Love his background and his experience in integrating go to market with AI usage. And so I thought he would be a great guest to have on the show. Mike, welcome. Happy to have you on the show, man.

Speaker B: Ryan, thanks so much and for the kind words as well. I'll take it.

Speaker A: No problem, no problem. Uh, I mean I looked at your stats and I don't like to have people on that don't make shit happen. You were making shit happen over at Asana that got you on my radar. Then you got like promoted into this new role. So walk us through what you're doing and what you're focused on now because it's like perfect for what my audience is like really laser focused on and that's elevating go to market with AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you know, Asana, as many companies has delved fully into AI. We launched a product back in November called AI Studio that's been just gotten incredible demand and created a ton of excitement and energy amongst our customer bases. Customer base. And so I was fortunate to be tapped to step into this role, uh, really leading go to market for this particular product line. So we are building an AI AI ah studio specialist team that will be experts in Asana AI and our workflow automation, you know, no code workflow automation builder, what we call AI Studio and much uh, like some might be familiar with Salesforce, you know we are launching a overlay or co prime model here where we have you know, account executives, account teams that work directly with customers and they will leverage our team as they would a solution engineering team to offer expertise in this particular, you know, product line for customers to help make sense of all that is uh, you know, around AI how AI Studio fits in the broader landscape of AI generally how to everything like how our uh, credits work and how to take you know, a really complex manual process now and turn it into really automated lean processes. We've seen many, many M customers do already with this product that's definitely the

Speaker A: way to go, ma'.

Speaker B: Am.

Speaker A: So I noticed that you and your organization were prime movers or took a, uh, leadership position. At least that put you on my radar. Like obviously I've been focused on this for over two and a half years and I saw Asana as one of the bigger companies. They took kind of an early adoption approach to integrating AI into what they're doing in the go to market. So can you start with that and would love to hear just like how it kind of came about for you, creating a separate product or a separate almost like business unit specifically focus on, but love to hear how you implemented internally first and then like what kind of results you're getting along the way.

Speaker B: Totally, yeah. And I, we certainly appreciate being seen as a pioneer. We like to think about ourselves that way. We have an incredible CEO who's at the for foresight to, you know, build a product that lends itself really nicely to taking advantage of, you know, this transformation. And we saw that happening internally as there was a, um, you know, hunger for AI adoption. But maybe as is with any transformation, some trepidation about exactly how to do it. As we started to, through a hackathon, build a product that we thought could really deliver value around AI. One of the biggest impediments that our own Think Lab has clearly established to going through any transformation is people's lack of desire for change. And so we wanted to, as we really tried to do in every instance, is take a human centered approach to the way we build products, the way we go through transformation, the way we establish our culture. And in this instance, you know, I think we envisioned a world where human and AI work really collaboratively together. And that was where we started. We saw people exploring problems they wanted to solve with ChatGPT just like everybody else. In fact, a VP from HP, I thought, who's a customer of ours in AI studio specifically put this great where he said this was our experience as well. Whereas it was cool to have a sandbox that was chatgpt where people playing around with different things. But you know, AI Studio has really helped bring the professionalize and operationalize that sandbox into, you know, a, uh, business workflow automation. And that was really what we set out to do and make it really approachable for people along the way. So we surveyed for real problems that people wanted to solve. Uh, we took examples of things that they were already doing through ChatGPT and just uh, embedded AI within our no code workflow builder and started to empower them through education. Materials and uh, sessions that we ran internally on how they could do this themselves without having to lean on it or having to lean on our ENG team to build anything for them. And it really turned a experimentation into, with Claude and ChatGPT into real tangible business impact examples that happened pretty quickly even within my team. You know, I was no different than everybody else to feeling the same way about this transformation. But I had a problem that we had to solve, uh, which was just the amount of time it was taking for us to prep for calls. We, um, you know, I think through the education that I was getting by leaning in and joining a couple of these sessions, uh, and uh, you know, just having a desire to learn, uh, I was able to kind of establish this transformation ourselves. And we uh, in short amount of time launched this POV creator which essentially built a workflow around amalgamating lots of information from within Asana and other systems that we use and integrate with into a single simple template that we built and prompts we use to inform the context for that template for what we wanted to know. So now in any instance, for a first call with a customer to a deeper, more intensive executive business review, uh, AES can tap into this workflow with a click of a button, simply provide, you know, the customer link, uh, to within Salesforce, the account plan within Asana, and get back a really clean depiction, uh, in minutes that would have otherwise taken them many hours to put together.

Speaker A: Nice, man. Love that. How big is the go to market team as a whole?

Speaker B: The sales team, account executives are about 160 worldwide. And then you can imagine all the kind of supporting teams behind that. So we're in the uh, 4 to 500.

Speaker A: Okay, excellent. So big group. So how long would you say it took you initially to have that transformation for the whole team or the whole, like in terms of months, um, where you're like, hey, we've gone from AI experimenters to like fully AI adopted. Right. And this is just on the internal side first. And then I want to get deeper into like what you built as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's definitely a journey. I don't want to paint for people that this thing happens overnight. I mean you work with customers every day and I'm sure see every different flavor of this and there are companies that are more and less mature and in fact, uh, the team that I mentioned, the think tank that we have internally, uh, we call our Innovation Lab work Innovation Lab specifically, they have a really an annual report that we release every year and the most recent one Focused on AI transformation and it showed kind of the scale of where companies are at from one through five or six stages about AI maturity and likely of transformation. And 18 months ago we were right at the beginning of that, which is really where every company starts, is maybe interest, but trepidation, some early adopters, but largely people who were not, uh, leaning into and wanting to use, take advantage of AI applications. And I think over the course of an 18 month period, I think we slowly kind of went through the transformation that I just described. Starting with people, you know, and creating, sharing examples. In fact, you know, someone on my team right now who leads strategy and operations, he came into Asana, uh, three years ago as a bdr and he just really took a uh, deep interest in this. He built bots himself around prospecting and uh, I can, elevated himself into the role that he's in now leading strategy and ops for AI Studio, uh, because he had resources that were accessible to him, education that we were providing, and he took the initiative himself. And so not everybody's there yet. There are still other sides of the spectrum or people who probably haven't deployed a bot themselves or you taken advantage of a workflow within Asana. But you know, we have a good portion, um, of the company now really engaged, having used AI applications, having used and solved, you know, real problems uh, with uh, you know, AI in ways that they were not doing certainly 18 months ago and for many, not even six months ago. And in Q1 of this year, it's really just taken off. I think inevitably, as people, as our account teams get into these conversations with more customers, they get the confidence to start to uh, understand and pitch the value behind this. They themselves start to play with it more, have conversations around it more and you see the momentum build from there. And I think this will only continue to go faster. But it really starts with being willing to, from both the top and bottom, find ways to encourage people to excite them around change, why they should care, ways that they can solve problems of their own, and uh, to show how easy and approachable it can be if they're willing to.

Speaker A: Yep, yeah. And it's like it's, it's, it's a journey. Right? So I agree with you. It's not like, it's not like a bolt of lightning, right. It's more like working out or eating healthy over a long period of time and you get that compounding value. Right. Like to uh, like atomic habits with James Clear where he's like, you know, you get 1% better every day. That's a 37x improvement over the course of a year. And so that's kind of what I think of with this. But, like, what would you say? Because I'm sure you look at this both internally and externally when you're dealing with customers for AI Studio is like, what do you get around? Or, uh, what do you see as the best either belief, breaking pattern, or areas that'll get people to actually change their behavior. Because I'll give you some perspective that I have from working with so many different companies. But, um, would love to hear your take on it and then I'll chime in as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, sounds good. I think as is, this is no different than sales from the dawn of time. Uh, the best way to inspire and help create change is to put it in their terms. And so, you know, when you and I were chatting prior to the start of this and you asked me to, you know, what are outcomes that you deliver? I think you might have noticed the first thing I did was ask you about a problem that you have. Um, cause I could go talk about relatable examples. And certainly we have those, but I think the best way we found is to put it in your terms. And so in our case, that is of course, sharing examples of other similar customers that have solved these problems that they have. But it also means getting a deeper understanding of the way they do a thing today and helping them feel that, uh, there is a better way to do it. And hopefully in a way that feels simple and approachable and not, uh, overwhelming. And so generally, I think the way to do that is through I've encouraged everyone globally on our account teams just to understand one Use case really, really well. Use case for AI Studio specifically, because if they can do that and they can speak confidently to that, you know, a lot of these, the workflows that we help Automate are very similar. It's intake of work, it's, uh, planning for that work, it's execution of that work, and then ultimately reporting on that work. So if you understand one, you can understand many. And that confidence can then carry into the customer that can help them feel, you know, more open and willing to share their problems, to answer questions that you have of them. And now all of a sudden you get to put it on their terms. And I think the next step we need to continue to take is to make that easier and easier for the field to be able to do at scale, to speak directly to the customer Personas that they're working with and then to enable their success through Presentation, demo, storytelling or otherwise. But I think the simple answer is to put it on their turn.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean my perspective. So I think that's good obviously like custom relevancy, customized, specific to them because that's when you, you get people's attention. I think the other thing is, and you know we're ends with Ted Lasso, right, Have the memory of a goldfish which is like what attention span of 7 seconds or I think it's with TikTok it's probably like 3 now that people have. So what I've seen is like there's gotta be some kind of instant or really quick fast short term result that gives them the belief that it's worth continuing to focus on. And I think with that like what I see is like if, if you show them um, something that took them three hours that they could do in you know, 20 minutes, then you start to get people's attention really quick and then it compounds. Right. However on the other side the thing that I'm starting to see is culture. I'm seeing gaps and folks that I work with that have really good leadership culture that don't and there's like night and day differences with adoption and that's, that's pretty wild, right? Like that I've seen. And so that's another thing and like leaders really have to lead and be like walking the walk themselves because otherwise the adoption doesn't happen. So I don't know if you see the same thing on your side, but that's something that's been like hitting me in the face lately with folks.

Speaker B: No, it's, it's spot on. I think uh, you know our research shows that you need it to come from top down and bottoms up. But that the, those that are most likely to delegate work and delegate work really meaning in historically it's been to other people but in this case it's to AI our executives and they're accustomed to that. They almost have a necessity to do it. And I think those that are embracing that, that are leaning in uh, and in fact one great example we have is a large uh, dental manufacturer out in Europe where the CEO had hired a team of subcontractors, was spending a million dollars a year on essentially taking pos that the sales team was delivering and reading through uh, these multi page documents and taking the fields out and inputting them into columns within uh, a view into asana. He's spending $20,000 to do that today and has now been able to shift these subcontractors into more strategic, you know, elevated work than they were. And I think that's an example of the kind of power that this can deliver. But it took the CEO identifying a problem that he had, believing that there was better ways through AI, and in fact, in this case, actually going and testing it out himself.

Speaker A: Excellent, man. Well, I love that example. Mike, we're going to wrap for today because unfortunately, we're up on time. Where can people find you? Where can they find more about Asana AI Studio? And then we'll wrap and have you back for part two.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, Asana is very easily found. You can just Asana. Asana.com will take you right to our website, and we have a litany of resources there for you to learn more about Asana and Asana AI specifically. You can, of course, always download and use the product on your own. And, uh, and for me, I'm on LinkedIn. My dad shares the same name, so he's been getting lots of LinkedIn requests lately. Michael Halen at, uh, Asana. The title is GM of AI Studio.

Speaker A: Excellent, Mike. Well, thanks for being on the show. And next, uh, episode we're going to go through, I want to actually see, like, examples or screenshots of AI Studio. I think it'd be fantastic. So that's what we're going to cover on the next one. Thanks for being on. This was a lot of fun. Uh, we'll see you all on the next episode.

Speaker B: Appreciate you having me, Ryan.