Asana was hard hit by the AI boom — now betting its future on humans and AI agents working together

(SeaPRwire) –   Workplace management firm Asana has lost approximately half of its market value since the AI boom got underway. Now, the company is working to regain its footing by betting on a future where AI agents are fully integrated into everyday workplaces.

On Thursday, Asana announced it had acquired Stack AI, a no-code AI agent development platform, for $75 million—marking its first acquisition in 18 years. The announcement was timed alongside a better-than-expected first-quarter earnings report that pushed the company’s share price up more than 13%.

The acquisition is intended to reposition Asana as a platform for managing AI agents alongside human workers, at a time when the company’s core business model faces intense pressure to adapt to the AI age. Asana has been impacted by broad market anxiety over the future of seat-based SaaS models in the era of agentic AI. AI can increasingly complete the work that SaaS tools like Asana were originally built to handle, sparking investor concerns about long-term demand for these services. Companies like Asana have also historically grown by charging per employee seat, where larger headcount translated directly to higher revenue. AI agents, which can handle work that once required multiple human users, completely upend this business model.

Fears of a potential “SaaSpocalypse” wiped out more than $1 trillion in SaaS market capitalization in February alone, as investors began pricing in a structural contraction across the entire sector. Over a turbulent 12-month period, Asana’s stock has fallen from a 52-week high of $19 to a low of $5.38. Thursday’s acquisition was partly designed to answer the question of what role Asana actually fills in a world where AI does much of the work work-management software was built for.

Asana CEO Dan Rogers, who has held the role for less than a year following co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s departure, frames Asana’s future as the coordination layer that makes human-agent collaboration work effectively at enterprise scale. He told that as AI agents grow more widespread across enterprises, the problem of coordinating work only becomes harder. In two or three years, he says, most workers will have AI agents augmenting and supercharging their work processes, making the question of how humans and agents stay aligned far more urgent.

“The coordination and collaboration challenge is shifting from human-to-human to human-to-agent,” he said. “Asana is becoming the operating system for human-agent teams.”

The Stack AI acquisition is meant to speed up the company’s shift to managing these enterprise AI agents. Built as a no-code platform for deploying agents across enterprise systems, the startup enables AI agents to complete complex end-to-end workflows across multiple tools—such as employee onboarding, or processing marketing content, running quality control checks, and publishing it via CMS software. Rogers noted that this was also the long-term plan for Asana’s own AI products, and the acquisition is a way to speed up that development.

“If you compare the roadmap of what they were building to the roadmap of what we were planning to build, it’s a perfect overlap,” he said, adding that he expects full integration within two to three months.

Stack AI’s co-founders, Toni Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno, will join Asana along with the startup’s full team of roughly 55 people. Prior to the acquisition, Stack AI had raised just under $20 million in total funding, including a $16 million Series A from investors including Gradient, Epakon Capital, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.

Asana also released its quarterly earnings results on Thursday. First-quarter revenue came in at $205.1 million, up 9.5% year over year and above the high end of the company’s guidance range. The company remains net loss-making, but according to Rogers, new AI products including AI Studio and AI Teammates, both launched within the past year, now account for more than 17% of new annual recurring revenue (ARR), and the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually on AI Studio nearly doubled during the quarter.

While Asana’s AI tools have proven popular with users, the same cross-system agent orchestration capability that Stack AI brings is also being developed by companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow. Rogers argues that Asana’s broad horizontal presence within large enterprises—where it is already embedded across marketing, IT, operations, and planning departments—gives it a natural coordination role that larger rivals cannot easily replicate. Even so, Asana’s path to recovery will not be without stiff competition.