Asana Unveils Agentic Work Management as AI Fuels Retention and ARR Growth

Key Points

• Asana is launching Agentic Work Management, combining its work-management platform with AI Studio and AI Teammates while shifting toward a model based on both seat subscriptions and AI consumption.
• AI adoption is improving enterprise customer retention and growth: large-customer net retention rose to 98%, while AI products contributed 25% of net new ARR in the second quarter, leading Asana to raise its full-year target to 20%.
• Despite continued AI investment and challenges in its sub-$5,000 product-led segment, Asana raised its operating-margin outlook to 10% and plans to expand agentic applications, StackAI orchestration and consumption-based revenue.

Asana NYSE: ASAN is preparing to launch its Agentic Work Management platform, a product and packaging shift that Chief Financial Officer Aziz Megji said is intended to combine the company’s collaborative work-management tools with artificial intelligence capabilities and create new consumption-based growth opportunities.

Speaking at a Piper Sandler conference, Megji said the company’s core premise remains centered on its “Enterprise Work Graph,” which connects the people, tasks, goals and context associated with organizational work. He said that architecture is increasingly relevant as businesses deploy AI agents alongside human workers.

“We have been a company that has really been focused on seats and subscriptions, and now the new Asana is really around both seats and subscriptions and consumption and outcomes,” Megji said.

AI adoption supports retention trends

Megji described Asana’s second quarter as a strong period marked by improving business health. He said all three of the company’s reported net retention rate cohorts improved, including its largest customers, whose four-quarter average net retention rose to 98% from 96%.

The company attributed much of that improvement among large customers to adoption of AI products. According to Megji, 25% of Asana’s customers with annual spending of at least $100,000 now use an AI product, and those customers have shown stronger retention and expansion patterns.

Asana’s Americas business returned to double-digit growth for the first time in two years, Megji said. Current remaining performance obligations, or CRPO, accelerated to 11% growth during the quarter from 7% in the prior quarter, which he characterized as a leading indicator of enterprise and mid-market performance.

However, the company continues to face pressure in its product-led growth, or PLG, business among customers spending less than $5,000. Megji said this segment has shifted toward smaller customers outside Asana’s target industries, a mix that tends to carry higher churn and lower expansion.

Overall net retention was 97%, despite improving for five consecutive quarters, he said. Asana’s customer cohorts spending $5,000 or more and $100,000 or more were trending at or above 100% net retention in the quarter.

Agentic Work Management launch expands product portfolio

Megji said Asana will roll out Agentic Work Management, or AWM, to bring collaborative work management, Asana AI Studio and Asana AI Teammates into a unified core experience. Under the new approach, AI Studio and AI Teammates will no longer be treated as add-ons, he said.

Customers will receive AI Teammates requests and AI Studio credits when they procure Asana, according to Megji. The company also plans to use its Asana Dash “chief of staff” product to suggest relevant AI teammates within users’ work flows.

Megji said the model is particularly important for smaller customers, which may not have the account executives and customer-success support available to larger enterprises. The company expects integrated product recommendations and included credits to reduce friction and speed AI adoption.

Asana also plans to introduce additional agentic applications tailored to specific use cases and buyer groups:

• Command by Asana, aimed at development personas.
• Asana Service Management, focused on IT service-management use cases.
• Asana Client Management, targeted at professional services firms and agencies.

Megji said these products originated from customer behavior already taking place within the platform, rather than from a plan to build entirely separate offerings for unrelated markets. For example, customers have moved tickets and engineering project-management work into Asana to use its existing work context, he said.

The company also acquired StackAI in the prior quarter. Megji said StackAI adds cross-workflow and cross-system orchestration capabilities, enabling third-party agents and systems to connect back into Asana’s Work Graph.

AI products become a growing ARR contributor

Asana initially targeted AI products to account for 15% of net new annual recurring revenue for the year. Megji said the company generated 17% in the first quarter and 25% in the second quarter, prompting management to raise its full-year target to 20%.

He said AI Studio has been especially useful in workflows involving significant data intake and routing across departments, such as marketing campaigns, employee onboarding and vendor onboarding. AI Teammates can perform follow-up, review and task-management activities that otherwise could require human involvement.

Megji also highlighted an example involving a customer in the broader technology, media and telecommunications sector. The customer had lower headcount at renewal and could have represented a roughly $1 million churn event under a seat-only model, he said. After adopting AI Studio and AI Teammates for a marketing workflow that reduced campaign cycle time by 30%, the customer entered into a total contract value deal exceeding $1 million.

“We have a consumption and expansion vector that is not tied to headcount and seat,” Megji said.

Margins rise alongside investment

Megji said Asana has continued to fund AI investments, including StackAI, AI-product seeding and specialized go-to-market teams, while increasing its operating-margin outlook. The company began the year targeting a 9.5% operating margin, raised that target to 9.75% in the first quarter and increased it again to 10%.

He said research and development expense has remained relatively flat even as R&D headcount has increased, helped by a lower cost per employee and expanded use of AI tools. Asana has also shifted hiring toward locations including Warsaw, Poland, and Vancouver, Canada. The share of employees in high-cost locations has fallen to less than 50% from 60% slightly more than a year ago, Megji said.

Internally, the company is using its own products and third-party tools across engineering, sales and finance. Megji said Asana is piloting AI sales-development representatives, using data-enrichment tools to improve sales prospecting, and applying Claude in finance for reconciliations, capitalized software processes and payroll chatbots.

Looking ahead, Megji said the company’s growth priorities include further improving retention and expansion among larger customers, repairing the sub-$5,000 PLG segment, scaling the new agentic applications and StackAI, and building a revenue model that can grow through both user seats and AI consumption.

About Asana (NYSE:ASAN)

Asana, Inc develops cloud-based work management software that helps organizations coordinate projects, tasks and team workflows. Its platform is designed to improve collaboration, planning and visibility across departments, enabling users to assign work, set deadlines, track progress and manage priorities in one system.

Asana's products and features include project and task management, workflow automation, project portfolios, goals and reporting tools, team collaboration capabilities, and integrations with other business applications.

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.