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AI agents are learning on the job — just not for your whole team

When someone on a team corrects an AI agent — better prompts, better feedback, better context — that improvement disappears the moment a colleague opens the same tool. The correction doesn't transfer, and the next person starts from zero.The problem compounds in multi-agent workflows, where teams expect agents to share context across users and tasks. Without a shared memory layer, every team member effectively trains a different version of the same agent — and those versions never sync.That gap shows up in the numbers. According to Asana's own research, 75% of knowledge workers use AI on the job, but only 5% of companies have reported productivity gains. “Model providers are getting really, really good at improving reasoning and retry loops, but what they’re not good at is bringing the enterprise work context in a way that human beings can reason about for shared memory,” Asana Chief Product Officer Arnab Bose told VentureBeat. Asana had been building toward an agentic platform that centers context and shared memory. Its Agentic Work Management platform ensures that if any team member corrects an agent, that correction applies to everyone else on the team. “That context graph is automatically provided to agents operating inside Asana’s system so you don’t have to have every human member of the team become an expert at prompt engineering or context engineering,” Bose said. Bose said the shared memory architecture matters beyond Asana's own product; it's the design decision enterprises need to make for any multi-agent system.Shared memory also becomes important when enterprises begin moving from simple single agents to multi-agent workflows that need to share context and behaviors. Memories for a multi-agent, multi-platform workflowThe models powering agents are stateless by design, so memory becomes a dedicated layer outside of a context window. While this area of AI innovation is marching towards maturity, the question of what gets stored, who controls it, and how it stays consistent when different agents and users write to the same instance remains largely unsolved.This is manageable for use cases with only one user. However, in enterprise agentic workflows, the idea is for agents to work with the entire team. Most platforms have agents that still act for individuals, which leads to task repeating and inconsistent versions of reality and spreading mistakes. Agents could then also contradict each other.Sriharsha Chintalapani, co-founder and CTO of Collate, said in an email to VentureBeat that the lack of shared memory is a major obstacle for multi-agent workflows particularly around consistency."Agents are sensitive to the quality of their prompts," Chintalapani said. "Someone with a strong understanding of the task will generally get more accurate results than someone less experienced. Partly that’s because they’re able to construct more detailed prompts, but also because they’re able to give the agent better feedback. The agent remembers the corrections it’s received and applies that knowledge to successive prompts. The more accurate the feedback, the better the agent will perform for that user. "He added that organizations should stop treating shared memory as a prompt engineering problem but think of building systems that repeat context across every conversation. Neej Gore, chief data officer at Zeta Global, said in a separate email that shared context becomes a living memory that "compounds intelligence across the enterprise."The opportunity may lie in building AI agents that retrieve memory relationally, pulling in relevant context based on what's being asked — an approach Chintalapani says few organizations outside the largest model providers are equipped to build.Personal versus team agentsAI agents already proliferate enterprises; it’s just that many of these operate as personal agents doing work specific to individual users. Most prompts start from one person, any files are uploaded by one account, and even for agents living in a company-wide system mostly learn individual user preferences. Most enterprise AI workflow platforms recognize that memory is important but approach it through different lenses. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot takes an individual-first approach by learning a user’s role within the organization, tone preferences and working patterns, which are then stored as personal memories for the agent to apply across the different Microsoft 365 surfaces. For engineering and orchestration teams evaluating agentic platforms, the shared memory question is now a procurement criterion — not just a technical nicety. An agent that learns only for the person using it will require ongoing individual upkeep. One connected to a team-wide memory layer builds institutional knowledge automatically.