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Jon Johnson:
No. You, like, started the whole thing.

Mike Haylon:
We did a project.

Jon Johnson:
Like, did I Yeah.

Mike Haylon:
It’s been, like, twenty

Jon Johnson:
years, and you haven’t you haven’t said that to anybody else in the room.

Mike Haylon:
That’s true. That’s true. We did a project back in elementary school together, building bridges. Yeah. That, was supposed to with withhold, some exorbitant amount of weight. I was at Josh’s house. I remember this vividly. Josh doesn’t remember any of it, which I think is is pretty terrible

Jon Johnson:
for for Josh, though. So Who

Mike Haylon:
was who was more dependent on the other for the success or the grade that we were looking for?

Josh Schachter:
Alright. We’re gonna get more into it. That actually, like that’s actually re reducing, kind of, like, our our childhood together. Like, many years That’s true.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Soccer? Wait. There was

Josh Schachter:
something No. I’ve never been

Kristi Faltorusso:
that was presented by UpdateAI.

Josh Schachter:
Chrissy, just go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Was it just the bridge? Welcome to Was it just the bridge? Showroom. When the

Josh Schachter:
episode starts, you can get all the dirt

Kristi Faltorusso:
on me because you’d like relationship. I want it.

Josh Schachter:
Stories you’re talking about. Crushes in the sixth grade, whatever you want.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh Schechter. Mike definitely got the girl,

Josh Schachter:
didn’t he? Christy. Don’t.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mike definitely got the girl, didn’t he?

Josh Schachter:
Alright. Mike. Buddy. This is Josh, cohost of Unshared, and I’m trying to cut off my other cohost, John and Christy. They’re really excitable, these two.

Jon Johnson:
Josh made a mistake, and he told us that he knows Mike personally from his childhood. And now we’re only gonna talk about Josh as a baby.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. This has just become a big therapy session here, a big reveal. Alright, everybody. So welcome to the episode. Welcome to Mike Halen. Mike is the GM of AI at Asana, which is an amazing role, and he came from he was recently anointed that and had come from leadership within the sales org. And I think Mike Wright both were reporting to the CRO, in many ways.

Josh Schachter:
And so we’re we’re gonna get into that whole, that whole backstory, talk about AI at Asana and some of the cool things that they’re doing, and talk about the relationship of sales and customer success. And then the big reveal here yes. Your relationship. Yes. So So Mike and I

Jon Johnson:
are of who who what her name was.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So Mike from you. Yes. Mike Halen and Josh Schachter, we both are from West Hartford, Connecticut. Turns out and we didn’t know this at the time, but turns out there’s been a lot of cool people from West Hartford, but, that have done some cool things. But we went to Braeburn Elementary School, small little elementary school, and we were in, you know, first or kindergarten through fifth grade. And then we went to Sedgwick Middle School together, you know, shared a bunch of teachers and bunch of crushes and friends. And, but, you know, I wanna actually start off.

Josh Schachter:
Do you Christy and John, do you guys remember the, like, the kid from when you were in grade school that was, like, excelled in sports and, like, the girls had the crush on and, like, you know, was was a good student. But then also and also was super cool thus. Right? But also, it was just, like, a nice person as well. They weren’t, like, the douchey jock cool kid.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, was that you?

Josh Schachter:
No. I’m

Kristi Faltorusso:
just kidding. That was definitely Mike.

Josh Schachter:
That was definitely that was definitely Mike.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mike definitely gives me those vibes.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. What vibes do I give you?

Jon Johnson:
The guy who I wanted to be like, hey.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The guy you always be

Jon Johnson:
like, hey. Remember that guy? Gosh. Yeah. I’m pretty cocky.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m pretty confident. You’ve always been a little we’re gonna say

Jon Johnson:
Let’s let’s hear it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow. I wasn’t gonna call him a a pick me.

Mike Haylon:
Pick me the

Kristi Faltorusso:
Of course. I should say kinda like I was gonna say, like, a little bit of a jerk, Josh. So, like, you make it hard to love you. I mean, I love you.

Mike Haylon:
I mean, I was I was nice to guys like Josh because I’m dependent on them

Josh Schachter:
for guys.

Mike Haylon:
My own great success. So Yeah. That’s what that project was all about.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Or

Kristi Faltorusso:
if you’re, like, close enough to Josh, then the girls see you next to him, and they gravitate towards you.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I always wanted him next

Josh Schachter:
to me in the pictures. You know? Yeah. No. But, Yes.

Jon Johnson:
I do, Josh. Mine was Jeremy Valerand. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow. That’s been really on the tip of your tongue. Do you wanna talk about this, Josh?

Jon Johnson:
Just texted me to see if I wanted to come to our twenty five year reunion, high school reunion.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Going?

Jon Johnson:
I mean, there’s, like, nine of us. So it’s just like it’s just like another Tuesday.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wait. Nine because your school was that small or nine because that’s like this is like a last man standing kinda situation?

Jon Johnson:
I think it’s a little bit of both. It was a private Christian school, and, like, half of us don’t have that c word in front of our name anymore. So

Mike Haylon:
we have

Jon Johnson:
different c words. But,

Kristi Faltorusso:
yeah. Yes.

Jon Johnson:
I might go. We’ll see. I’ll let you know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You should go. I went to my twenty three year reunion. We didn’t have a twenty year because of COVID, so they did it, like, three years later. Yeah. It’s good. And so it was, like,

Jon Johnson:
twenty So so so my

Josh Schachter:
last my last my last Mike story, and then we’ll move on. And I said, what the heck did I agree to on this episode here?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, he’s not quite sure.

Josh Schachter:
But, so, you know, blacktop basketball recess every day. And and and I think Mike, you tell me if I’m getting this right or not, if this is revisionist history, but it was always, like, you know, alternating who was the first pick on the blacktop for for basketball. It was you or Jared Jordan. Right? It’s kinda like back and forth, back and forth. The other guy, Jared Jordan, ended up being you know, making it to the NBA. And and Mike was often selected, you know, over the

Mike Haylon:
nowhere close. Yeah. I think his kids go to Braeburn now, actually.

Josh Schachter:
Do they really?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Oh, wow.

Jon Johnson:
Wow. Alright. Josh, you’re, like, really trying to, like

Mike Haylon:
And and his dad’s name is Mike Jordan.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, that’s right. His his Mike Jordan. Yeah.

Mike Haylon:
He was, you know, on that path from early.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah. Alright. Let’s move on. So, what what’s what do you have going on, as the GM of AI at Asana?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. I was gonna say, can you tell us what does that even mean, Mike? Because I Well, it’s

Mike Haylon:
it’s it’s really a bit it’s a little more focused than that. It’s GM of AI AI Studio. I think, you know, we’re building a a go to market practice around, this new, you know, no code workflow builder that we’ve, recently launched, late last year at our marquee event, the work innovation summit. We host in a number of cities, but the marquee one’s in New York in November. And, you know, honestly, even to our surprise, the overwhelming demand, you know, from launch for this product. And so I think we could quickly mobilize a go to market practice around it. So it’s it’s right now, it’s only me and one other person in the on the team, but we’re working closely with different parts of the business to, you know, put our entire go to market strategy around this. And, you know, the demand has continued into lots of closed one business early in the year.

Mike Haylon:
And So now, if you’re familiar with a co prime or an overlay model, you know, this team will essentially partner with the global revenue team, to help them make sense of, you know, this this product, for themselves and also for customers. And we’ll do that either programmatically through, you know, enablement and product launches and, you know, marketing, assets. But, also, you know, our team will, will hire sales engineers and, yeah, account executives in our own right that will not work with customer directly. They will not own the territory, the book, the customers that they work themselves, but they will partner with the global team too as, AI ex experts, AI studio specifically, you know, to help customers adopt and and get the most out of this product.

Josh Schachter:
A lot to unpack there. John, Christy, what do you got? I’ve got questions, but why

Kristi Faltorusso:
don’t you guys ask yours? Can you describe the product? Because I feel like we’re using, like, broad strokes, but I I still don’t know what AI studio is at Asana.

Jon Johnson:
What are the top

Josh Schachter:
three jobs to be done?

Mike Haylon:
Yeah. Really, I think the the best way to understand it is to put workflows behind, work. And, usually, it’s intake of work. So you can imagine on this podcast, for example, if, with all the popularity that it has and all the people really trying to come in and interview on this show, and they’re just inundating you with requests to get onto your show, you’re just a few people with, jobs on the side, and you have to manage that high volume of work and turn it into something. And so we’ve put a a no code workflow builder behind that to allow you to intake this, say, via a form that they filled out, to automatically triage it based on what’s been input into that form. This has all the information or it doesn’t to start asking custom questions back and forth with those people without human having to intervene that early in the process. And, and then you can, of course, build, additional automations and integrations behind it to make, you know, that workflow you’re you’re building that much more powerful. That’s that’s a little bit about what it does.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, I’m listening to this, and I’m saying hearing, like, okay. So he’s running the future of Asana.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I I hear

Josh Schachter:
Like, I don’t mean that with hyperbole. I I literally mean that. Right? Because the future, it might be not all agentic right now. It might start out with some API workflows and stuff, but that’s effectively what what Asana is gonna become, and that’s what you’re at the the ground floor of. Right?

Mike Haylon:
I think that’s yeah. I mean, you know, I I don’t think it’s hyperbolic. I think there is truth to that. I think our our CEO has has, you know, said some version of that on on earnings calls, you know, as recently as as last quarter. You know, I think there’s a belief that we’re obviously, you know, going well into the consumption world away from usage based licenses. And I think even we’ve seen example of this already. People are not having to necessarily log in and input data, which might have consumed a large number of our licenses historically and instead can really use Asana what it would intended to be as a coordination layer for work, that puts people in a position where they can do their most strategic work without having to do all the manual stuff, upfront. And so we’re seeing, I think, this shift away from, you know, our what has taken us to 700,000,000 plus in revenue, you know, away from license and logins to, you know, how how real, I think it’s something that you can quantify a bit more around value.

Mike Haylon:
You’re consuming this much of a product because it is extending, you know, that much value to you. And that over time, that that, I think we will likely see a shift, you know, from, in terms of where our revenue is is allocated as well.

Josh Schachter:
You had mentioned, a couple of models, overlay model and some other model, and it was completely over my head. I don’t know about John and Christy, but tell us a little

Jon Johnson:
bit about it. Yeah. I got it. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, it sounds like my let me sound sound bored here. So it sounds like, you’re in charge of this capability, right, of of helping this capability go to market, which can kind of be laced into different pieces of the overall platform. And so your kind of role is to make sure it gets to market. You’re internally that all the key stakeholders know about it so they can sell against it and all that kind of stuff. So you’re kind of, like, the enablement of this studio within the organization, and so you’re working very closely with all the different go to market pods to make sure that it has the best, distribution and and and people know about it. Is that fair enough? Like, what and and then what is the model within that of how you operate?

Mike Haylon:
Yeah. That’s exactly right. So, Salesforce pioneered this model. They call it a co prime. Their prime product is Salesforce platform. Their co primes are marketing cloud, services cloud. And so they have teams that operate very similarly. They don’t necessarily own the customer.

Mike Haylon:
The core AE owns the customer and works most directly with them, but the co primes will come in when there’s a need for that particular product line. And so they’ll partner with the core accounting team, account executive, to bring the kind of expertise, you know, into that discussion. And so we’re doing that both, as you mentioned, programmatically with, you know, working internally with cross functional teams across Asana, and then, of course, an individual customer, you know, situations where it makes sense. We’re obviously just getting into this, scratching the surface, so we still have to build out coverage models and rules of engagement that sort of clearly establish exactly how we’re used in this context. But, generally, that’s that’s the idea.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So, Mike, just out of curiosity, so right now, this is only additive to folks who are already using Asana, that’s core product. Right? So this isn’t a stand alone?

Mike Haylon:
It’s part of the core product. You can use it for free, as part of the core product to test it out and experiment with workflows that you, want to build. You know, as we mentioned, starting maybe centered around intake.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Mike Haylon:
You can, and we have seen already example of customer. I think that’s the most exciting for a thing for us is buying AI Studio as part of the licenses that they’re buying initially to deploy it before they’ve even started to use the core product. But I’d say, yeah. The most common path right now is I’m already using Asana. I’ve tested out this for free in the core product, and I want to enable, use of AI Studio as part of my license use as well.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Got it.

Josh Schachter:
So so where are you in the journey of this? Because it sounds like this is not a a three month thing. Right? This is this is a long rollout plan for you and setting up. I I can only imagine you’re probably just in even just the the blueprinting phase of it in many ways. Right? Like, how do you go about, setting this whole machine up, and what initial learnings might you have already gleaned?

Mike Haylon:
Oh, this is my first time in a co prime role too. So, you know, I’m learning how I’m building, but, a lot of the things are similar to, you know, my experience in starting an early stage company and then building out a go to market practice. So I can draw both from that and the time at Asana and NetSuite, you know, as an account executive and then leading teams, you know, at a later stage. I think that that that’s put me in a unique position. I think plus the five years that I’ve had already at Asana with the relationships and context for how this works to, you know, be in a position to help us make decisions upfront about how we wanna take this to market. The demand truly has been overwhelming. You know, we’ve been breaking records on lead inbound lead flow, among other things that I think just speak to the excitement and energy around this this product line. But we are very much building while we’re flying now.

Mike Haylon:
Customers are adopting and paying for this already because they’re getting huge return on it, starting with the the free version and, you know, upgrading into, our pro plan, we call it. And, Neil, we’ve already seen examples of, you know, large manufacturing companies that were spending a million dollars to do this with some contractors over the course of, you know, a twelve month period that it’s now costing them $20,000 to be able to execute.

Jon Johnson:
Wow. On that, you’re talking about obviously, your customer experience is gonna be this I know that you are a traditional company. Not traditional, but a tech company. Asana is a known company. You’re not coming out of the woodworks that nobody knows who you are with brand recognition. But this product type isn’t necessarily the most clear. It’s like, you can use this to do anything. Even even when you’re asking what the tool does, like, the traditional mindset is like, but what does it do? It’s like, yes.

Josh Schachter:
Not clear. Not clear. Selling you. Not clear. Defined. Right?

Jon Johnson:
It’s And I don’t mean that. That’s not actually my question. I don’t need you to define it for me. What I’m what I’m kinda getting at is how are you as a GTM leader thinking about go to market when you are actually selling the unknown? Because that is the goal of this, is that we are creating these things, and that’s a hard thing to attain. And then the the flip side of

Josh Schachter:
the I think that was my favorite question you ever asked in this series. I that was a really good question.

Jon Johnson:
Cool. I love it when you’re in the middle of a question. Yep.

Mike Haylon:
Because you. That much.

Jon Johnson:
There you go.

Mike Haylon:
I would say that is all true. And I got an opportunity to sit in front of a bunch of our CIOs executives, last week. We have a customer advisory board where we get input on the future of the product and where we’re headed. And, we spent time with, you know, those in North America as well as those across Europe asking this very question. How do you go about evaluating and buying, you know, AI software, particularly with all the hype, you know, that is out there and marketing and salespeople are probably breathing down your neck to sell this? I think that the thing we heard to a person across that entire group was it’s all about the use case.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Mike Haylon:
You really need to show me, before and after of what this looks like in my world today versus what it would look it looks like after. So I think a lot of our interest and motivation is around driving people into for use of the product to showing and enabling the field team on specific use cases like, campaign management, creative production creative, in intake requests. Got it. You know, product lot new product launches. These are core to our the, you know, ideal customer profiles that that leverage and benefit the most out of Asana, that are the most likely to be coming to us, PMOs that have to intake lots of work, you know, from across, a relatively large company. So we’re empowering the field to, you know, get really knowledgeable and educated about how these use cases work to use them to create inspiration with our core buyers, the people that we’re calling builders that are most like the most likely to have leveraged Asana’s rule ended in already, which has some powerful workflows you can build without AI today about, you know, intaking work and understanding how you wanted to triage and assign out across the organization. And now we really just put that, made that that much more powerful with AI. But to a person, they all said it’s really, don’t bother with a differentiated message.

Mike Haylon:
Don’t reach out to me. Talk to the people on my team, and help them understand how they can make use of it and then, you know, build a a business case around that.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. I’m gonna I’m gonna draw a parallel to a marketplace from, like, fifteen years ago. Do you remember when, like, connected homes came out, this idea, like, you can plug your light in or your, you know, your whatever it is to your phone? And right now, you know, we have Google Home, and they control everything, but there was no, like, centralized hub. Everybody had the hue lamps, and they have these, you know, different things. He had had to have 10 different apps. The way that I’m picturing this is almost the hub for all of these agentic AIs to make these decisions and follow your rules engines. Right? So you think of Asana as almost the Salesforce, right, where it’s, we have great questions. We have a repository.

Jon Johnson:
Right? And you get information from here. I need it to go to my x y z. The best part about agentic AI is the, the the lack of integration needs. Right? It’s just making a decision as a person. Is that is is that the use case that you’re talking about less like, hey. It’s all in one. We’re doing it for you. You buy from us and more.

Jon Johnson:
We’re gonna actually connect all of these dots for you, and this is the market because it is not just what it does, but it is also how it interacts, And that’s where the value comes in. We talk about clean data. We talk about duplication of effort or jobs to be done. And if I have to put the same data in four different databases, what’s the point? Right? So how do you seamlessly and cleanly synthesize that? Is that am I kinda tracing?

Mike Haylon:
Yeah. I think that’s really well articulated. You know, as you rightly stated, I think we are very much of the belief that, at some point, in the not too distant future, that AI agents will become indispensable in the workplace. I think that we just got into a fascinating discussion last week with the CIO with comparing sort of our belief system and when that will happen and what will be required to make it successful versus his. And I think the contrast is is kind of what you’re describing here. There’s a world where you can just index all your data into a single place and let the agents run wild and, you know, help make sense and action things that you need them to. The challenge there is there’s lack of context and structure on what they should do, and so you get a lot of hallucinations.

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Mike Haylon:
And it can be difficult to get your employee base to rely on their value when that is the case. And so Asana approach, and I think we benefit from the infrastructure our cofounder and CEO built when he launched Asana, but it’s our proprietary infrastructure called the work graph.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mhmm.

Mike Haylon:
It’s basically helping you make sense of how an individual task of unit of work that anyone across the company is executing connects to your most strategic, you know, important goals across the company. Mhmm. And I think that puts us in a position to make sense of, to contextualize, to only give the agent what it requires in order to be successful to perform that particular task and thus doesn’t have to scroll an entire database or system in order to define that. And so, in being a bit more pointed, and then we can use the no code workflow builder in a really simple intuitive interface to allow people, to build, you know, things with that, you know, more pointed context in mind. So it gives structure, to the agent. It gives, an intuitive workflow intuitive, interface to the user and a much easier way to get value out of AI at least today. And I think the discussion we got in is at what point in the future will that change? Was there a world there will be a world where you’re able to just let agents run wild. That’s not today.

Mike Haylon:
It’s probably not for the next six months. You know, after that is anybody’s guess.

Jon Johnson:
Alright. We’re talking again in July then. I love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mike, let me ask you. So, obviously, all this sounds wonderful. What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing as you’re leading these conversations with customers?

Mike Haylon:
I think the biggest challenge that that remains that probably doesn’t get talked enough about in the context of this AI transformation is the people, and enabling them to, either embrace this change that is inevitably coming to make sense of and get value out of it and to be willing participants, you know, in that transformation.

Josh Schachter:
You

Mike Haylon:
know, the discussion that I was referencing that we got into last week, I think it was the view of that that person that, you know, people are gonna play a much much smaller role in the not too distant future in this world. I think our belief is that, instead, humans, people, their work will just be elevated, then we’ll be able to remove or eliminate a lot of the administrative work and to put people in a much better position to take advantage of that. And so in our own AI transformation, we really leaned into that. We launched, you know, an internal, app store for people to be able to, take advantage of things that could directly impact their work. One thing we did was, for example, we called it a a point of view generator. And it, integrated our workflow builder in with data that we get from Salesforce and call transcripts and ZoomInfo, publicly available data and said, in this structure, you know, with the click of a button, please, you know, help any new you’re an expert in helping a new account executive prepare for their next call. Here’s the structure we want you to present that information in. And, and so now we have a template that in in fact, we do this now at at scale.

Mike Haylon:
It started with you with one click, enter your account plan from Asana. You’ll link to your opportunity within Salesforce or account link within Salesforce and, you know, generate a a point of view. We got such value out of this that now we’re doing it scalably across the org at the start of the new year as we do book book cutovers where, for a certain set of accounts, it’s just automatically created. It’s attached to the account record, and the AE can access those. So we don’t have to go through all this hand off and back and forth and additional calls and, you know, that’s happening. You can really do the AE can just pull it for themselves.

Jon Johnson:
Mike, I like, I you I’m doing this right now. I I just started this job three week. This is my third week, and we’re such a lightweight team. I mean, we have four people on the

Josh Schachter:
I haven’t told your all your listeners that you started in your job, just so you know. So it’s, like, what you should tell them.

Jon Johnson:
All are surprised as you are, Josh. Hey, guys. We were not this isn’t about me. But what I’m saying is Okay. I just ran the team to this exact this exact workflow of account handoffs because we’re just so tired of these big documents that just live in Google Drive that you update once a year. Right? The context. And we I did that. I just manually went through all of our Fathom recordings for this these accounts, plumbed them into my GPT, built a framework, exported it, built a template, and it’s a new process that we’re implementing.

Jon Johnson:
And I love the way that you’re thinking about this from it shouldn’t just be that I create this document so somebody can read it. It is at the point of need. I want the context to be able to say, I got a new CSM or I got a new AE for whatever reason. What’s what’s going on in the last six months? And then here’s a readout. And getting to that point where you have prepared everything for the human to go in and get the data, that’s what we’re talking about where you’re like the elevation of the human work, right, is my job should not be I have to go collate sixty hours of calls and send, you know, this kind of stuff. What I would rather do is just get really crit like, really strategic on what the outcomes could be and put my work towards that. And the more that we can start thinking about data as this fluid thing because that’s what AI makes it makes it accessible, we’re gonna have that excellence of work that we’re getting from. That it’s so because I just right before we started recording this, I was, like, walking my boss through the town.

Jon Johnson:
I was like, you need to just read out, like, what I did. Like, oh, that would have saved me weeks.

Mike Haylon:
Well, this is this was the the genesis of AI Studio, was we were using ChatCBT or Claude. You know, internally, we’re doing exactly what the process you just described. We’re, copying and pasting data, putting it into, you know, Claude, having it make sense of it, copy and paste it, put it back into this thing, assigning a task to that person. Now you can just build a workflow around it. So I know I need to execute this set of steps. I need you to make sense of this documentation and to create, you know, an analysis of what actions we’re needing you to take. I need you to actually automatically assign that work out to people and have these collaborators. And then the human in the loop is when they review it and, complete you know, approve that work, now maybe we can, you know, go and make that available to the field.

Mike Haylon:
Or as we’re doing now, we’re making this part of QBR. So you can, as part of the workflow, launch a Google Slides and the structure that you provided so that there’s not all this cobbling together of a story or a narrative at a QBR and all the time that takes. Account executives hate it. It’s so time consuming. They think it’s really just for leadership to help them make sense of their business. You know, there’s a lot of value in QBRs, and we’re putting everybody in a position where it becomes less of an information gathering exercise and much more of a strategic look back and look forward as to what needs to be done.

Jon Johnson:
I wanna make a note. I just hit a little button in the little thing that marked that segment because this is the first time anybody’s ever said the words there is a lot of value in QBRs on this podcast. And, I just wanted to make sure that we took a moment for it. I agree with you with a lot of caveats. But just to kinda close this out, like, I I really do like, I went and watched minority report a couple weeks ago just because I’ve been digging so much into this, and that’s what I want. That is the future of CS ing is I want that live data. I want that live synthesis. And it’s just gonna take a lot of tokens to get there.

Josh Schachter:
I I have a take on where I think,

Mike Haylon:
Josh, we

Jon Johnson:
don’t we’re fine. No. That’s just it.

Josh Schachter:
I know you’re fine. I know you’re I know you’re fine, but I’m fine with you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Add some value, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Every once in a while

Kristi Faltorusso:
John, you’re

Josh Schachter:
saying a little bit, you know, that it’s gonna help this AI stuff is gonna help elevate your current role and your current, you know, role, responsibilities. But what I think people don’t talk about as much is how it can help to expand the breadth of what you can do outside of your current role. And I think that that is actually something for customer success for all to go to market for sales too. And that is is really profound that I can now unblock other departments and other groups that I’m waiting on. Oh. You know, like, there’s my customer wants a a mock of this or a prototype of that or but let let me just go and do it myself. I don’t have to wait to put it into the design queue for three weeks.

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Josh Schachter:
You know? And I talk about this example a lot. Our head of data science, he he having some great ideas and but he’s blocked, you know, and not having the design support to have, like, the mock of what he’s thinking done immediately. And now he just uses Claude. He’s coming up with his own prototypes and that we’re going straight to requirements from that. It’s, like, amazing.

Mike Haylon:
Yeah. I think we we just saw another great example of this. I mean, when I started in this role, you know, again, there was a ton of demand that wasn’t necessarily anticipated at least to the degree it came. And, you know, I think a couple weeks into the start of this, my boss, the CRO, was we had a regular weekly forecast call and he said, you know, your waterfall is great. I understand how much you think you’re gonna convert later by the end of this quarter, but I need a bottoms up, you know, view into this. I wanna trust that you know deal by deal what is happening across all of AI Studio, and you have seven days to get there. We built used a workflow. We built this around this within Asana.

Mike Haylon:
We’re pulling data from we use Clarity today. We’ve essentially just replaced that with Asana by pulling all the data from Salesforce automatically. It is using call transcripts. It’s using ZoomInfo. It’s using email dialogue that’s happening back and forth. And then I gave I wrote a prompt that says, if, you know, x number of signals have happened, this deal is in for the quarter. If it looks like y is cutting a line between deals that are called in and out. And now we pull all this into a text field, and, it’s thrown by stage and by revenue amount there.

Mike Haylon:
And I can just look in an instant, and it’s updated every 12 hours. That’s the pace we’ve chosen at, and it’s giving me a justification for why it called this deal in or out. And it’s saying you have your AE has inter interacted with three different people, including the buyer. The last discussion they had was this they had clear next steps. This is why we’re calling it in. I think this has, you know, put us in a position where we can really, to your point, not only put me and our team in a better position where we can get, to John’s earlier point, you know, a much deeper understanding of what’s going on in a faster amount of time. Not only I’m not gonna bother all these teams for the same things. I’ve elevated all of our role because now they trust me to you know, that I’m coming with information.

Mike Haylon:
So we built a workflow that automatically assigned the task out before their forecast call, segmented by, you know, leader. And we’re saying, here’s the justification for why we think your deals for AI Studio are coming are going to close or not. You know, can you take an action either keeping it in corner and validating this? Just complete the task if so. When they complete the task, it’ll if they put a comment in there, it’ll automatically be included in the justification. You know, I think this has just really changed the way that, you know, even just using this example, a team like ours can operate, where I’m not having to bother folks for updates. Instead, I can bring value to them, right off the bat.

Josh Schachter:
So, Boom, you’ve just you’ve bypassed the entire speed bump of BI in in in a a second. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had all this done within the seven days, but now you’ve now you’ve got it all in front of me.

Jon Johnson:
Well and I feel like the value prop here, like, if you’re a CSM listening to this podcast, and you implement these tools, you will never want have to get another Slack from an AE asking for an updated handoff doc ever again. Yeah. Just send them to your AI tool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s right.

Jon Johnson:
No. It just feels like, it like, early two thousands when Google was coming out and ask chiefs. Do you remember ask chiefs? The Oh. Director. It’s like one of my favorite things. Hey. What’s going it was the first, like, conversational search, whatever. It was so cheesy.

Jon Johnson:
But, like, we’ve just we’re just doing permutation and permutation to get back to that point where I just wanna, like, know what’s going on and figure it out. Good work. I’m excited to see where this kinda grows. I know you’re it’s all relatively new, but, like, I know one of the things that Josh and Christie also like looking at the infrastructure of your group, what go to market looks like, what success looks like for your customers, and what those new KPIs are because they’re gonna be different. We had Brett Queener, a a VC on a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about, like, the monthly active users or the weekly like, those metrics that we use for success don’t matter anymore, and and what those new metrics are. Josh, you’ll have to forward him the blog that he wrote from last week. It’s it’s pretty interesting. But I’m really excited to hear the lessons that you learned from that over this next year on on how you track success.

Mike Haylon:
Yeah. Early days for sure. I would say, you know, but what’s clear is the amount of times a person logged in is, you know, could quickly become a thing for the past, and it’s really gonna be a lot more about you know, in our case, we use credits. It’s a a version of tokens. Just making sense of the tokens in our world. That, and, you know, we’re we’re tracking very closely how many credits customers are consuming as they deploy, you know, some of these use cases starting with the free product up through, you know, our pro version, that’s available to customers today. I love that. Awesome.

Josh Schachter:
Christy, I wanna end with a little bit of CS and sales, you know, chatter. So Mike was leading Oh, do you? Enterprise.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Of the AI side of the AI stuff was way more interesting. Jackson doesn’t Alright. Really

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Jackson. Yeah. We’re right. Jackson so appreciate that

Kristi Faltorusso:
question. So everybody just put an update on it. Not. He goes, this is a strong AI episode. Veto. Just leave it alone.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Fine. Vetoed. Alright. Then in that, I’m gonna go on mute, and you close this off, Christy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I I just feel like there there we could have gotten down a customer success rabbit hole, but I think there was so much more value, Mike, in hearing some of the use cases and the stuff that you guys are doing with the AI workflows and things that I I didn’t even wanna inter interject with any customer success stuff because I don’t think that that’s the real value add to this episode in particular. I guess the only thing I would ask, Mike, before we wrap up, though, is as you’re thinking about the the customer base here and Asana as a whole, like, are there any limits here? Are there limits for which customers would get value from this? I mean, like, I mean, is it just is every customer part of the TAM for this product? Are you seeing everyone start to slowly adopt it? Are there concerns where customers aren’t using it?

Mike Haylon:
I think you yes. No. We don’t believe there are limits necessarily. I think we have opened up new TAM here for sure. I think one great example of that is the, sale leader paper customer success leadership has been a difficult, you know, not for us to crack, as obviously as maybe the marketing building campaigns or product launches, you know, or PMO intake work might be. And I think the example that I just gave to you has gotten people really excited. And we saw a customer who was, you know, kinda going back and forth on their decision with Asana, see this, and then, you know, buy it within a week. And I I think it has opened up a ton of possibilities for us.

Mike Haylon:
Obviously, you know, people, leaders are still trying to make sense of this space altogether. There’s, you know, noise you have to cut through to show them that there’s something tangible here, and I think we’re focused on, you know, what are the fastest way we can get this in people’s hands with clarity about its value so that they can get and feel that right off the bat, you know, and that we are gonna need to continue to innovate or die. Like, this is gonna move really, really fast, and we gotta put ourselves in a position to be able to capture those additional, you know, buyers and use cases as this thing grows and help them make sense of it. But I think the thing that’s been most exciting for me, you know, in addition to all that has really been what you hit on the end there, which is, you know, we we see the potential to shift away from, you know, people having to enter data into the system and instead use Asana, what is really what it tended to be, which is to be the place where people can make sense of who’s doing what by when, you know, how and why. And, you know, as we launch more integrations, as we get away from people having to manually enter stuff and to start to leverage this this no code workflow builder. I built the workflow that I was describing. I am for for this thing from someone who historically would have been able to build something this powerful using, you know, software. It typically did require some coding expertise.

Mike Haylon:
I did have some help. We have a long way to go to make it one click and and super easy, but, the fact that I was able to build even one workflow off the back of, you know, you know, some help was, I think is a is a sign of where this thing is going, and it’s really, really exciting. And I think to you know, on the CX and sales example that John hit on, like, we’ve had a really complicated go to market motion with you start in trialing the the platform, and then there’s at some point, you introduce sales and CS, and they’re kind of overlapping with each other’s jobs. And we can help make that clear on who owns what and what context and to give them both, you know, the information they need going into these customer relationships so both can be much more successful together, and that’s also really exciting.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. We’ll leave it at that. Might I guess we won’t. Go ahead. One last. We won’t

Mike Haylon:
leave it

Josh Schachter:
at that.

Jon Johnson:
It’s gonna be a really I’m softball in here, Mike. I feel like we are at the crossroads, and this is a bit of a a like I said, it’s kind of a funny one, so don’t think too hard about this. This agentics, you know, movement is the future. What is going to replace CAPTCHA in order to reduce how we’re using Agentic. Right? You if you remember, I’m not a computer. I find a fire hydrant, pick out all the buses. It’s so hard right now, and it’s just gonna get harder. And I’m gonna have to prove time and time again that I’m I’m more of a human now, and now a computer can recognize a fire hydrant.

Jon Johnson:
I’m just saying. Where is the hope?

Mike Haylon:
I’m just looking at Josh’s face. Like, should I answer this or not? Is this the way we want to end?

Josh Schachter:
Yes. So I just I just wanna

Kristi Faltorusso:
I just wanna rescind my comment. You up, Mike.

Mike Haylon:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I think I set Mike up for a really beautiful close to this episode, and then John went and fucked it up. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. No. I but, actually, you know what? So, John, I just wanted

Kristi Faltorusso:
to editing is for.

Josh Schachter:
I’m sorry. No. No. No. We’re not. No. No.

Jon Johnson:
I’m actually never on any episodes, Mike. I’m the secret member. They just Yeah. Run around me.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. They just I just show up. Don’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I thought you asked great questions. I thought you were a very big value add.

Jon Johnson:
I don’t need this, guys. I’m feeling great.

Josh Schachter:
Like Walk us through your mindset as you were asking Mike that question. Ego. What what made you feel like Mike was the right person to be asking how how AI is gonna be theirs. The CAPTCHA of that?

Jon Johnson:
Number one, I wanted to end on a lighter note.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Jon Johnson:
And I wanted to engage Mike in a personal level that allows me

Kristi Faltorusso:
to show about fire hydrants?

Josh Schachter:
About CAPTCHA.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. About his thought process around the future of AI, and I generally use humor. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. We’re gonna

Jon Johnson:
end the show.
Josh Schachter:
I can see yeah. I can see the cliff of our audience. Mike Mike Allen, GM of AI Studio at Asana, thank you so much for being on the episode. And like John said, we’d love to have you come back in a few months and and let us know where things are.

Jon Johnson:
Not me, but you, Mike.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Not John.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thank you all.

Josh Schachter:
Love for Mike to come back.

Mike Haylon:
Thank you all very much. I had a lot of fun. Appreciate you having me.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thanks. Thanks, Mike.

Josh Schachter:
Alright. Awesome. Thanks a lot for doing this, man.