Eugene Mymrin/Moment via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Asana's new AI agents can access organizations' Asana workflows. They're available now in public beta. Many tech companies are building agents, hoping to commercialize AI. More AI agents have arrived! This time, they're coming to project management platform Asana: a suite of helpers the company says are designed to collaborate with human workers. Also: Your coworkers are sick of your AI workslop The AI Teammates, which the company released Thursday, are able to tap into an organization's Asana Work Graph (a kind of matrix of organization-wide project-management data), which gives them an overview of various teams' objectives and progress. "Work isn't done in isolation -- it's collaborative and highly nuanced," company CEO Dan Rogers said in a statement. "Agents need access to the operational framework and workflows that underpin how teams actually work." The new agents can adapt to the specific needs of the teams they're collaborating with, according to Asana. They could support a team of marketers, for example, by drafting campaign briefs or comparing finalized marketing materials with brand guidelines. Software engineers, on the other hand, might deploy the agents to assess reports of buggy code. Credit: Asana Like many other companies, Asana positioned the agents as providing a measure of automated support within organizations, rather than being meant to fully replace teams themselves. A recent study conducted by researchers from Stanford University found that many working professionals are open to collaborating with AI agents, provided that those systems are only deployed to handle routine, low-stakes tasks. Bigger responsibility - and dangers Agents can execute complex, multistep tasks with little human oversight, giving them more autonomy than conventional chatbots. In some cases, they can also collaborate with other AI agents and access external apps or digital tools to achieve their goals. Zoom, for example, announced in July that its AI Companion had been upgraded with the agentic ability to pull data from 16 third-party apps, including Salesforce and Google Drive. Also: This is why your company is transforming into an autonomous machine The technology has become a central focus for many tech developers as they try to commercialize generative AI, marketing agents to businesses as productivity boosters and time savers. Their nascent stage can also make them a liability, however. They can behave unexpectedly and create security breaches for organizations or even delete entire codebases. Research has also shown that they can even lie to or threaten human users when their goals are jeopardized. Asana aims to mitigate the security risks posed by agents by baking transparency into their new AI Teammates. Like some reasoning models, AI Teammates clearly display their step-by-step problem-solving process. "Workers always know what AI Teammates are doing, why they're doing it, and can easily course-correct when needed," Asana wrote in a press release. They also come with governance controls enabling organizations to modify and keep a close eye on which internal data the agents are accessing and how those are being used. How to try AI Teammates AI Teammates are available now in public beta through Asana's AI Studio platform, with a general public launch expected in the first quarter of 2027, according to Asana.