‘AI provides the perfect opportunity’ for IT & HR to collaborate for the benefit of the business, says Asana
UNLEASH sat down with Asana’s Head of People Anna Binder and CIO Saket Srivastava to talk about their experiences of how HR and IT teams working together creates a highly engaged, productive workforce. Here’s their secrets to success, and how you can emulate it in your company.
Expert Insights
In the modern, tech-enabled world of work, IT and HR ability to cooperate is key to business success.
Asana's CIO and Head of People shared how they are bringing this to life at $150 million-revenue software company.
Want to know how to emulate this in your business? Read on.
“We can no longer separate employee experience from technology,” Saket Srivastava, CIO at $150 million-revenue software company Asana, tells UNLEASH.
The technology that employees use at work is now intrinsically linked with their engagement, happiness and experiences.
The logical extension of this fact is that IT and HR must be in lockstep, especially when it comes to HR technology.
Historically, both departments have seen more as back office roles.
This changed for HR with the pandemic, which pushed the department into the spotlight and demonstrated how vital it is to the successful future of businesses.
“Today, as businesses of all sizes prioritize digital transformation and AI strategies, CIOs and IT teams are becoming strategic advisors for AI and advocating for what organizations should do,” adds Srivastava. This is confirmed by recent research by Asana’s Work Innovation Lab.
To make the most of this incredible AI opportunity, Srivastava is clear that IT’s partnership with HR is essential – “IT leaders must forge close partnerships with key stakeholders to improve employees’ digital experiences”.
This explains why Srivastava and his HR counterpart, Anna Binder, Head of People at Asana, ensure they break through any siloes, and can achieve effectual IT-HR collaboration.
What’s the secret to success at Asana? How can other companies emulate this in their own organizations? UNLEASH put that to Binder and Srivastava in an exclusive conversation.
Anna Binder, Head of People, Asana.
AI is the ‘perfect opportunity’ for IT-HR collaboration
“Siloes exist in every organization. Every team has their own objectives, targets and ways of working, so it’s only natural that truly effective cross-departmental collaboration hasn’t proliferated through every business just yet,” Binder tells UNLEASH.
She continues: “AI has provided the perfect opportunity for businesses to get started on this, and to bring technology and people operations together.”
Back in February 2024, Asana mixed up its employee engagement survey to ask its 2,000 workers about their comfort and engagement level with AI.
“From the beginning, Saket was a champion of ensuring that we meet employees where they were at, and not try to force a timeline on them” – in fact, the engagement survey found that Asana’s employees “fell into two primary mindsets when thinking about AI in their workflows: AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics”, with four in ten in the skeptical camp.
By taking this approach, IT and HR partnered to “build training for various employee cohorts based on experience levels”.
“We created different levels that people could opt into”, ranging from helping those who “didn’t know what LLM even stood for”, and enabling others “that were ready to build their own bots”.
Binder continues: “This enabled us to understand that we needed to present AI adoption as more of an organizational change, rather than a forced individual technology.”
The key in IT and HR partnering here was that Binder “helped to provide perspective on how employees outside the IT sector would perceive new tools”.
Srivastava reminds UNLEASH: “We mustn’t assume that everyone understands technology.
“IT teams need to show case the value of technology to the broader business, and collaborate with other colleagues.”
Ultimately, by working hand in hand, the IT and HR teams at Asana were able to “support employees and tackle the concerns they have over AI”.
In fact, Binder shares that the result was 61% of employees “reporting increased enthusiasm towards AI”.
There’s been a switch from concerns that AI will replace workers to the view that “AI can be just like another teammate, supporting teams to be efficient, productive and collaborative”.
Ultimately, “AI provides companies the opportunity to bring people and technology together over shared outcomes, and can drive meaningful impact that benefits the business and its people”, notes Srivastava.
Asana on the future of the AI IT-HR partnership
“What is clear is that this partnership [between IT and HR] is just coming to the fore in terms of importance,” Binder tells UNLEASH.
This is particularly the case as “many businesses are just starting to comprehend the wide-scale impact AI will have on operations”.
Saket Srivastava, CIO, Asana.
For Srivastava, 2025 is a “pivotal year” for IT leaders to collaborate with HR and really dial into the digital employee experience.
“By leveraging AI-driven tools and automation platforms, companies can empower their teams, reduce stress, and improve productivity – ultimately fostering a more engaged and resilient workforce.”
Asana’s CIO also sees 2025 as the year that “companies focus on deriving tangible value and ROI from AI” – through the use of AI agents, the technology will not just automate tasks, but become a true teammate.
The key to success is security, reliability and data quality – this is top of mind for Asana as it builds out its products, Srivastava adds that “while many players will enter the [AI] space, only those prioritizing high-quality data will realize meaningful benefits”.
