How an Australian grocery chain transforms cross-functional approvals with AI Studio

For large, distributed organizations, putting anything new into the physical environment—whether it’s a small equipment change or a full-scale rollout—requires careful coordination. Stakeholders across functions like safety, operations, and finance need to weigh in to ensure alignment, minimize risk, and maintain compliance.

These organizations often rely on a governance approval process to review and sign off on anything going into stores, from fixtures and signage to technology pilots and layout changes.

That governance is essential, but without the right systems in place, it can be a bottleneck. Manual reviews, inconsistent inputs, and crowded approval meetings slow down progress and create friction for everyone involved. And in a fast-moving business, those delays didn’t just cost time—they cost money.

Why Woolworths needed a smarter way to manage approvals

That was the case for Asana customer Woolworths, one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains. With a thousand stores and dozens of teams involved in in-store decisions, Woolworths needed a more efficient way to manage approvals without sacrificing rigor.

Lachlan Drummond, Head of Value Engineering at Woolworths, leads a stream of work focused on reducing capital costs across the business. One of the key functions of that work is managing Safety and Capital Governance (SCG), a catch-all process for reviewing anything going into physical stores. It ensures the right checks and balances are in place—from safety sign-offs to commercial input—so Woolworths can make sure the right things get into store at the right time.

While the SCG process was essential, Lachlan recognized that its complexity created opportunities for streamlining. How could his team reduce bottlenecks, increase visibility, and accelerate approvals without sacrificing thoroughness? These questions led him to explore new technological solutions.

At one of Asana's hands-on workshops focused on building with AI Studio, Lachlan and his team saw an opportunity to rethink how work moves through their SCG workflow by leveraging automation.

“If you’ve got information and want to get it approved, you should be able to input it through the process, and keep working on your work—not wait weeks or months for approvals to come through,” Lachlan said. “That’s empowering.”

The challenges: manual reviews, inconsistent inputs, and meeting fatigue

To meet internal standards and manage Safety and Capital Governance, the Woolworths team relied on a shared slide deck to capture cross-functional approvals for anything going into stores. Teams filled in details manually, then marked themselves as approvers, or not applicable, depending on the scope of work.

Over time, the cracks in the process began to show:

• No consistent format: Teams submitted information in different ways, making it difficult for stakeholders to quickly scan for the right context.

• Overreliance on meetings: Biweekly calls ballooned to 50–60 attendees, many of whom weren’t actually required.

• Limited accountability: With approvals buried in slide decks and email threads, there was no clear audit trail.

“We had people changing the format of the deck or adding extra pages,” Lachlan said about the previous process. “It wasn’t necessarily inconsistent, but it meant approvers would receive information in different ways.”

They needed a smarter way to manage approvals—one that worked at the scale of their stores, not against it.

How Woolworths used AI Studio to automate their approvals process

Working alongside Martyne Obrien from the PMO team, who led implementation, Lachlan and the team built a new workflow using AI Studio to standardize the SCG approvals process.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: A standardized form captures the right information

The first step was replacing the shared slide deck with a structured intake form, which allowed the team to collect consistent information up front, without the formatting or version control issues that came with slide decks.

Using the new form, submitters enter key details, like what the initiative is, why it matters, which part of the business it applies to, alongside supporting documents or media. This standardization ensures every submission includes the right context, so stakeholders can quickly understand what’s being requested and make informed decisions without unnecessary back-and-forth.

Step 2: AI recommends relevant approvers

Next, the team needed a way to flag the right approvers, without relying on manual triage or rigid rules. With AI Studio, teams can upload instructions and provide reference materials, like documents or PDFs, to guide AI’s decision-making. By giving AI specific context about the work, along with clear instructions and boundaries on how to make judgments and operate within workflows, teams can trust that it’s making the right calls, in the right moments.

To help AI identify which departments need to sign off, the Woolworths team uploaded PDFs of previous SCG submissions as reference material. From there, they instructed AI to evaluate new submissions against that historical context and identify which stakeholders should be looped in, automatically routing requests to the right reviewers based on what’s being proposed.

For example, if an initiative relates to food prep, the system will assign the food safety team. If it’s a new wall type, only the construction team is notified—no need to pull in unrelated departments.

Step 3: Approvals are assigned automatically

Based on its assessment, AI creates subtasks for each approver. The tasks include due dates and context pulled from the original form submission, and are automatically added to a pre-configured approvals project, which gives stakeholders a centralized place to track what’s been assigned, what’s pending, and what’s ready for review.

Step 4: Once approved, the initiative is scheduled for review

Once all required subtasks are marked complete, AI adds the initiative to a biweekly SCG meeting agenda. Each session is capped at 10 items to ensure reviewers have enough time for due diligence.

If the upcoming agenda is full, AI automatically adds the initiative to the next available meeting. Everything is tracked in Asana—including timestamps and ownership—creating a clear record of approvals.

“It’s actually changing the dynamic,” Lachlan said. “It’s more of a push now—giving stakeholders the information they need to approve—rather than a back-and-forth pull for details.”

Early benefits: less admin, more clarity

The Woolworths team saw early signs of impact during the testing phase. Some of the benefits they’re anticipating include:

• Smaller, more focused meetings: Attendance is limited to the submitters, a core group of approvers, and the PMO, meaning fewer unnecessary conversations and more time for thoughtful discussion.

• Clearer communication: Standardized inputs will reduce back-and-forth and make it easier for stakeholders to quickly assess requests.

• Greater accountability: Every approval is timestamped and traceable, making it easier to track who approved what and when. 

“There’s still work and effort required,” Lachlan said of the transformation, “but it’s in the conversation and getting the thing ready to go into store—not the paperwork.”

What’s next: Building on early momentum

The team is gearing up to scale the workflow across the department, and are exploring ways to apply a similar model to other approval workflows, including an internal innovation fund.

By using AI Studio to coordinate workflows between teams and AI, Woolworths is streamlining approvals, improving accountability, and helping people focus on what really matters: getting the right updates, equipment, and ideas into stores—faster.