By Aman Kidwai
Workplaces Editor
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Arnab Bose sat down with Newsweek to discuss his recent move to Asana chief product officer and the future of AI agents, including the recent launch of Asana’s Teammates, a platform for developing agents across the workforce.
Previously the chief product officer at Okta, an access-management software company, Bose shared that he was a user of Asana before joining it. “We used Asana internally at Okta for strategic project management purposes, [tracking] things that were company-level priorities,” he told Newsweek.
Bose said he was compelled by the opportunity to join Asana because of its progress in adding genAI and large-language model (LLM) capabilities to the product and the growth of non-human entities seeking access through Okta.
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“We were noticing that the rate at which non-human identities were growing within enterprises vastly exceeded the rate at which human identities were growing,” he said. “It was clear to me that in terms of what is going to drive the next level of change within the knowledge-worker industry, it's going to come from companies being able to harness the power of these non-human entities, AI agents.”
He added that he sees the agentic model as one that makes AI easier to use, and points to Asana’s Work Graph and Strategy Maps features as valuable data “scaffolding” to support useful agentic sidekicks. Asana also allows customization of agents using natural language prompts.
“Arnab thinks beyond features to building a multi-product platform that serves users across the enterprise and unlocks new industries. His experience building enterprise products during major technology waves—from on-premises to cloud, desktop to mobile, and now AI—gives him the right perspective and skills to help us achieve our goals,” Dan Rogers, CEO of Asana, said in a September statement announcing Bose's hire.
Before Okta, Bose held product leadership roles at Microsoft and Salesforce, where he worked on Microsoft Office applications and the CRM company’s collaboration and automation features, respectively. He holds over 15 patents and during his time at Okta led the vision for the core product while expanding new offerings, taking an Identity Governance platform from launch to over $100 million annual recurring revenue and leading multiple acquisitions.
“I started out working on productivity applications, one of the first versions of OneNote, productivity applications for phones and tablets…ran the process automation stack at Salesforce for a few years as well,” he said.
Asana announced AI Teammates in London at the end of September. The Teammates are designed to understand the context of a team, department or company’s workflows and proactively automate steps to speed up the process. It also includes a studio where users can create low-code or no-code automations.
“AI Teammates combines the power of [LLMs and AI agents] in a way where human beings, especially multiple human beings on different teams, can use them effectively and at scale,” Bose said.
This proactive approach to identifying process automations is meant to help teams save time across the organization and keep collaboration smooth, no matter what time zones or office bases team members are in.
“Those repeated processes don't have to be hard-coded, deterministic workflows,” Bose said. “They can be AI-powered workflows where LLMs can go in and do the hard work of going from step A to step B, but without you having to figure out all of the [programming].”
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