MPUG Editorial · September 18, 2026 · ~4 min read · Category: PM Platforms

From mid-September, Asana AI Teammates and the Dash assistant are included in the company’s paid Agentic Work Management tiers at no change to tier pricing — for new and existing customers alike. CFO Aziz Megji described the change on Asana’s fiscal 2027 second-quarter earnings call, and it matters to project managers for a reason that has little to do with the feature list: it moves the cost of AI from a purchase your finance team approves to a meter that runs while your team works.

What changed, precisely

According to CFO Dive’s report on the earnings call, published 4 September 2026, Asana will “include a base level of AI tools such as AI Teammates and Dash in its Agentic Work Management tiers without changing tier pricing.” Agentic Work Management, or AWM, is Asana’s term for coordinating work across people, agents and systems on the same plan.

Three details are worth holding onto:

• It applies to existing customers, not just new ones. You do not have to renegotiate to get the base allocation.
• “Included” describes a base level, not unlimited use. Beyond that base, Asana is moving to consumption-based pricing.
• Asana is paying for this deliberately. Megji said the shift would contribute to a $1.2 million revenue headwind and pressure gross margins by 150 basis points in the second half of the year. “We’re seeding that usage deliberately, investing to drive adoption first,” he said.

The company also changed how it recognizes the money: revenue from new AI Teammates sales will be recognized as customers use their allotted AI requests, rather than spread evenly across the contract term.

The numbers behind the bet

Asana’s disclosure gives an unusually clear read on how fast AI is actually being bought in the work-management category. AI Studio and AI Teammates generated about 25% of net new annual recurring revenue in the company’s fiscal 2027 second quarter, up from 17% the previous quarter, CEO Dan Rogers said on the call. More than 25% of customers spending at least $100,000 a year have purchased one of the AI products, and Asana raised its full-year target for AI products to roughly 20% of net new ARR, from about 15%.

Rogers also described the company’s largest AI expansion deal to date — a three-year, multimillion-dollar agreement with a Fortune 500 media company, where AI products represented nearly half the contract value. His framing of that customer is the part project managers should read twice: the customer “is operating with a smaller workforce, which historically would have resulted in a seat contraction,” and AI spend more than offset the smaller footprint.

Why it matters for project managers

Seat-based software has one very useful property for a PM: it is predictable. You know how many licences your team holds, the number changes when someone joins or leaves, and the annual figure lands in a budget line you can defend. Consumption pricing does not work that way. It scales with how enthusiastically your team uses the thing — which means the most engaged project is also the most expensive one, and nobody finds out until the period closes.

This is not an argument against AI in your PM stack. It is an argument for three habits that most teams do not yet have:

Know where “included” ends. Somebody on your project should be able to say what the base allocation is and roughly how much of it the team is consuming. If nobody can answer that, the first real answer arrives as an invoice.

Treat AI spend as a project cost, not an IT cost. If agents are doing status rollups and drafting updates for your project, that consumption is attributable to your project. Atlassian introduced its own usage meters earlier this year, so the pattern is now the category norm rather than one vendor’s experiment — a point worth raising at your next portfolio review.

Measure the time saved, not the tasks automated. Rogers’s Fortune 500 example describes a workforce that got smaller while spend held. Whatever you think of that trade, the only defensible way to evaluate it on your own projects is a before-and-after on cycle time and rework, not a count of AI actions.

If your organization is weighing AI-assisted delivery more broadly, MPUG’s master classes and live events regularly cover tool governance and the practitioner-level questions vendors tend not to answer, and both earn PDUs you can log in the PDU tracker.

What to do next

• Check which Asana tier your workspace is on and confirm whether the AI base allocation has landed for your organization.
• Find the usage view before you need it. Locate where consumption is reported in admin settings, and check it on a known cadence — monthly at minimum.
• Set an internal guardrail for which workflows agents run unattended, and which require a human review step.
• Add AI consumption to your project cost baseline if agents are doing work on your project’s behalf.
• Compare against what you already pay for. If your organization also runs Jira, Microsoft Planner or another platform with its own AI meter, you may be funding the same capability twice.
• Read the primary source, not the summary. Asana’s prepared earnings remarks are the authoritative record of what was actually committed to.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to pay more to get Asana AI Teammates? No. Asana said the base level of AI tools including AI Teammates and Dash is included in the Agentic Work Management tiers without a change to tier pricing, for both new and existing customers.

Is the included AI unlimited? No. Asana described it as a base level, with the company moving toward consumption-based pricing beyond that and recognizing revenue as customers use their allotted AI requests.

When did this take effect? Asana’s CFO said the change begins in mid-September 2026; the announcement was made on the company’s fiscal 2027 second-quarter earnings call, reported 4 September 2026.

The bottom line

Asana just made AI the default rather than the upsell, and absorbed a real cost to do it. For project managers, the feature is the easy part — AI teammates that draft, summarize and route work are genuinely useful. The harder part is that your tooling bill has quietly become variable, and variable costs belong in a plan. Find the usage view, watch it for a month, and you will know what this is worth to your projects long before finance asks.

Source: CFO Dive — “Asana’s AI pricing shift brings near-term revenue pressure,” 4 September 2026. Verify plan entitlements, included allocations and consumption rates against Asana’s own pricing documentation, as terms vary by tier and contract.