Asana's AI agents share memory across your company — but not your secrets

Enterprise teams building AI agents keep hitting the same wall: a chatbot that can answer a prompt but can't remember what the last five people asked it, and can't tell you whether last month's version actually worked.In a fireside chat with VentureBeat's Sam Witteveen at VB Transform 2026, Asana's chief product officer, Arnab Bose, unpacked how his team tackled this problem to build a new operating system: Agentic Work Management (AWM). The product treats AI agents as coachable teammates that operate alongside humans rather than as one-to-one assistants.For product builders and developers trying to move beyond basic integrations, Bose provided a look under the hood. He detailed how Asana engineered AWM, offering a blueprint for solving real-world bottlenecks and building agentic systems at scale.The Work Graph: 18 years of company data, repurposedTo build an operating system for human-agent teams, Asana needed a ready-made enterprise context graph. They built AWM on top of their 18-year-old architecture: the Work Graph. This graph-based database organizes information through a structure the company calls the Pyramid of Clarity. The smallest unit of work is a task with an assignee and a due date. Tasks belong to projects, projects roll up into portfolios, and portfolios connect to company-wide goals. The graph can help trace for example how a delayed design task impacts a corporate revenue goal. The Work Graph provides a real-time ledger of who does what, by when, and why. AWM leverages this architecture to create a multiplayer teammate. A standard AI copilot is stateless and tied to a single user's prompt. Because AWM plugs into the Work Graph, the AI can view overarching company goals, update project statuses, and share memory with human colleagues. "Because [the agent] is plugged into the Work Graph, it's not just looking at a particular prompt that you're sending it or looking at a particular individual's markdown file system on their local file,” Bose said. “It's working off of that shared ledger for the whole company."AWM is already in production. Bose said Asana has "several customers live and successful on it," including FedEx, which published its own case study on the shift.Building in guardrails for confidential workShipping AWM to enterprise customers required Asana to solve several technical hurdles. The first was data governance. If an AI teammate acts across a company, it builds a shared memory by learning from workflows and human feedback. Bose highlighted a critical boundary problem: If an executive uses AWM to build workflows for a confidential project, the system must ensure the agent's updated memory does not leak context to an unauthorized employee who interacts with the same agent later. "[I] shouldn't be able to leverage that shared memory when I run the AI teammate if you created that memory using that same teammate on a project that is, let's say, a secret M&A project that I don't have access to," Bose said. Asana engineered a system of access controls to govern what triggers the creation of a memory versus the simple execution of a task.Second, AWM handles dynamic model routing to abstract prompt engineering away from the user. When a user assigns a task to an AI teammate (i.e., drafting a job description for a general manager role), the AI cross-references public job postings, Asana’s internal style guide, and product requirement documents. For a complex task, the system automatically routes the prompt to a heavy frontier model — Bose pointed to Anthropic's Opus and OpenAI's models as examples — while lighter tasks get down-leveled to something faster and cheaper. "We don't want the knowledge worker to have to think through what the best possible prompt, context engineering, and attachments are that they should put into the task," Bose said. "It should feel as if you were assigning the task to a human being."This dyna