Asana CEO bets on organizing AI agent chaos at work as Wall Street fears SaaS disruption
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- AI agents will make work more complex, Asana CEO Dan Rogers tells Business Insider.
- The company is pivoting to a hybrid pricing model, merging seat-based and AI usage charges to drive growth.
- Investors remain cautious as AI's impact on SaaS providers creates uncertainty in software markets.
Asana is confronting one of the biggest existential questions facing the software industry: will generative AI render traditional SaaS tools obsolete?
Investors increasingly think the answer might be yes. Shares of the work-management company are down more than 50% this year, amid broader fears about whether AI agents and chat interfaces could replace software applications like Asana altogether.
Asana CEO Dan Rogers doesn't deny the disruption, but argues it ultimately plays to the company's strengths.
"With AI and AI agents, the coordination problem doesn't go away. It actually expands exponentially," Rogers told me in a recent interview.
"AgentPalooza"
His pitch: As companies deploy more AI agents, the need to coordinate work across humans and machines becomes more complex, not less. Rogers described a potential future of "AgentPalooza," where thousands of AI agents run amok inside organizations. Without a system to manage them, he argues, work becomes more chaotic.
Asana's answer is to reposition itself not as a traditional SaaS application, but as what Rogers calls an "orchestration layer" for humans and AI agents. The company's core "work graph, "a data model mapping tasks, workflows, and responsibilities, is being reframed as infrastructure for this new human-AI hybrid workforce.
Asana Chief Product Officer Arnab Bose said the early impact of AI inside enterprises has actually increased workload complexity, not reduced it.
"People are getting longer, more complicated documents to review," he said, pointing to AI-generated outputs that require more oversight.
Business model challenge
Still, the business model underpinning SaaS is clearly shifting. A RBC Capital Markets note from early March underscores the pressure. The analysts maintained an "underperform" rating on Asana shares, citing slowing growth, intense competition, and uncertainty around AI's impact on the business.
To adjust, Asana is moving away from seat-based pricing toward a hybrid model that includes consumption-based charges tied to AI usage.
Rogers said Asana customers want two things: predictability and, where possible, to pay for the value that is accrued or the outcomes that have been delivered.
"Those two things can be at odds with each other," he added. "But our objective is to meet our customers where they're at on that continuum."
The traditional human-based seat business model, where companies pay per month based on how many employees use a SaaS product, is very predictable — for customers and the provider.
"The not-nice thing is it's a little bit harder to tie that to value delivered," Rogers said. "So, in reality, we'll probably be in a hybrid state of the world for some period of time."
This will incorporate some of the "knowability" of seat-based pricing, combined with new structures that account for customers' AI token usage and the outcomes achieved by new AI-powered software services, the CEO explained.
New products, AI Teammates and AI Studio, are at least partly monetized this way and are growing quickly, with AI offerings expected to contribute roughly 15% of annual recurring revenue in Asana's 2027 fiscal year.
Rogers acknowledged the broader industry implication, though: "Gross margins on AI-native companies tend to be lower," he said, hinting at a structural change that could pressure SaaS profitability.
"Not scary"
At the same time, Asana is taking an open approach to the AI ecosystem. Rather than walling off its platform, the company is encouraging third-party agents, including those from rivals, to integrate into its system.
I asked how much of a risk this is, given that Anthropic's AI offerings for work seem to have scared software investors greatly in recent months.
"Totally not scary," Bose replied.
If customers use Anthropic and its Cowork offering with Asana, that will make Asana's platform more useful over time because it becomes the central system where work is tracked and coordinated — whether that's work by humans or tasks performed by their fellow AI agents.
"It's making Asana stickier, and it's basically making it more ingrained within your workflows going forward," Bose added.
That strategy amounts to a bet that AI won't replace SaaS, but reorganize it.
Convincing investors
For now, investors remain unconvinced. They worry that growth might slow, while some analysts question the size of the market and the company's competitive position.
Rogers argues the market is simply in a "risk-off" phase, as investors struggle to separate AI winners from losers across the software industry.
While the promise of AI models makes the future of software so unclear, investors are likely avoiding the SaaS sector broadly, he added.
"Then I think it's for each company, individually, to describe how AI is a headwind or a tailwind," the CEO added. "And my belief is that, over time, people will understand us as the coordination layer for humans and agents working together, and that will, I hope, help create some clarity."
That message may be beginning to land. On Tuesday, RBC analysts upgraded Asana to "market perform" after meeting with some of the company's executives. "Management emphasized that Asana's positioning as a coordination rail for agents and workflows, whether first-party or third-party, differentiates it," the analysts wrote in a note to investors.
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