Jeremy has been leaning on Asana’s AI Chat to provide key insights and snapshots into his teams work. The problem, though, is that it wasn’t accurate. Like…ever.
For this exact use case, Jeremy wanted AI Chat to review the Actual Time Rollup field within his Marketing Portfolio and provide a snapshot of hours spent by assignee.
Troubleshooting
The first thing we did was head over to the AI Chat widget within my Sandbox and put it to the test. I began with something simple prompt leveraging the @ function to tag my sample Portfolio.
What I got back was accurate, but was a long-winded, 2-paragraph reply about who was doing what. I realized that I could clarify my ask by specifying what I actually needed, and we had success.
Our next step was to test in Jeremy’s workspace. If there’s one thing AI has taught me, is that just because it works once, it doesn’t mean it’ll work again. It flopped.
The AI Chat was still giving incomplete information, resulting in incorrect reporting. When we took a look at the Portfolio, we realized that there were easily a hundred projects in there. It was extremely likely that this was just too much data for our AI Chat to handle.
We went one step further with our prompting and narrowed our query by Business Unit to further refine the amount of data being processed, and the results were perfect.
The Solve
One of the Best Practices I harp on over and over again is be clear. What I mean by this is to give your prompt as much concise and specific information as possible. It needs the guardrails. Here are the things I always do when prompting with AI Chat:
@ the Project or Portfolio I want AI Chat to focus on.
When narrowing in on custom fields, I always format it like “Based on the ‘Business Unit’ custom field” - Calling out that it is a custom field and writing the name exactly.
Providing the format I need; high-level recap, bulleted list, quick snapshot.
Our final prompt went something like:
Please give me an estimate of total time spent ("Actual Time") by assignee on all projects within @Astrology Partners LLC Portfolio labeled as Marketing under the “Business Unit” custom field. Please provide as a bulleted list of total hours by assignee.
AI Chat is a powerful tool, but it isn’t the perfect replacement for everything. It’s still important to think through which feature makes the most sense for what you are trying to achieve.
Join future Asana AI Office Hours
This open Q&A session is your chance to get live answers and hands-on guidance from our team. Whether you’re fine-tuning a prompt, exploring AI Studio features, or looking for best practices, bring your questions and use cases for a collaborative, real-time learning experience.
If you already know what you’d like to ask, you can submit your question using this form. Not sure yet? Don't sweat it! We will be taking questions on the call.
