What Is an AI‑Native Visual Workspace? Meet ALLO AI

ALLO’s updated platform introduces a streamlined interface for seamless collaboration.

Hello everyone – Ray here, co-founder of ALLO. At the end of July, we rolled out a major update to ALLO’s interface for the first time in 3 years. In the week that followed, our team worked hard to fix overlooked issues from internal testing and polish any rough edges. Now that the dust has settled, I want to share why we undertook this redesign, how you can get the most out of the new features, and where ALLO is headed next.

Listening to Your Feedback: Why We Redesigned ALLO

Overhauling an interface that our users have known for three years was not a decision we took lightly. We knew any big change can cause short-term inconvenience, and indeed some of you have felt a bit lost with the new layout initially. Internally, we debated and critiqued every aspect of this update to make sure it would be worth it in the long run. In the end, we identified three main objectives for the redesign:

1. Simplify navigation and reduce friction: Too many steps were previously required to find features or accomplish tasks. We needed to streamline the user journey so you can get where you need with fewer clicks and less hunting around.
2. Empower more robust project management: ALLO was great for basic projects and goal tracking, but we heard that managing more complex projects or multiple teams in ALLO was challenging. We set out to improve the management, insights, and reporting capabilities so ALLO can handle advanced project workflows with ease.
3. Make ALLO an AI-native product: Rather than just bolting an AI onto the side, we are rebuilding ALLO’s core to be AI-driven. For managers, ALLO AI should act like a brilliant chief-of-staff. For team members, ALLO AI should feel like a diligent assistant or research teammate. By leveraging the massive amount of knowledge and context already stored in ALLO, you essentially gain a personalized ChatGPT that truly knows your business and your team’s work.

These goals were our north star. We know change can be uncomfortable in the short term, but each of the updates below was designed to make ALLO more intuitive and powerful for you. And critically, we aimed to do it without making ALLO complex or overwhelming – maintaining the simplicity that sets us apart from other tools.

A New Home: One Screen to Access It All

The new ALLO Home interface brings all your work into one view – from projects and goals to recent canvases, team directory, and AI insights. The first thing you’ll notice is that ALLO now opens to a Home screen. This Home dashboard is designed to get you wherever you need to go in a snap. During research, we found that users were jumping into ALLO with many different intents – some went straight to a specific project or goal, others reopened a canvas they were editing, some checked overall workspace activity feeds, and many clicked notifications taking them to feedback or tasks requiring their input.

Now, all of these pathways start from one place. The Home screen includes quick links to key sections (like Projects, Goals, Teams/Org chart, Settings), a consolidated activity feed for your entire workspace, and one-stop access to things that previously took multiple clicks. In short, as soon as you launch ALLO, you can jump directly to whatever matters most, without drilling through menus.

Crucially, the Home screen also introduces ALLO AI front and center. You’ll see a panel where you can chat with ALLO AI right from the Home view. This isn’t a gimmick or just an embedded chatbot – we’ve re-architected ALLO so that many core functions can be handled through natural language via the AI. Our vision is that you should be able to simply ask ALLO AI for anything you need and get an instant, intelligent response.

For example, you can ask “What’s the status of our Q3 Marketing OKRs?” or “Show me any new canvases created last week” and ALLO AI will retrieve that information for you. Eventually, tasks like adding a new member to the workspace, pulling up the org chart, changing a billing card, or generating a report will be as easy as typing a request to ALLO AI. No more clicking through settings or searching manually – just ask, and ALLO will do it.

It will take time to reach that full vision, but we’ve started laying the groundwork. Even today, ALLO AI can pull quick project progress reports or highlight a specific team’s performance, and it’s getting better every week. The real power here is personalization. Traditional AI chatbots like ChatGPT operate in a vacuum without your company’s context, but ALLO AI leverages all the knowledge, files, and data within your workspace to give answers tailored to your team.

Can’t remember where you saved that marketing plan from last month? Ask ALLO AI with whatever details you recall (“that draft I wrote about our product launch”) and it will find the exact canvas or task for you. We’re continually improving the AI model to handle these “fuzzy” searches and dig up the exact info you need from ALLO’s knowledge base. According to McKinsey, employees spend on average 1.8 hours every day (or 9.3 hours a week) just searching for information – essentially hiring five employees but only getting four people’s worth of actual work done. Our aim is to give you that “fifth person” back by letting ALLO AI surface the information you need in seconds.

Bookmark Anything with Unified Favorites

One seemingly small but mighty new feature is unified Favorites. In the past, ALLO allowed you to favorite certain items within individual sections (like favorite a project, or favorite a canvas separately), but there was no single place to see all your favorites. As teams used ALLO over months and years, we heard a common pain point: with so many projects, canvases, OKR sessions, and tasks accumulating, it could become tricky to locate the things you personally access most frequently. This problem isn’t unique to ALLO – information overload is a real challenge in all collaboration tools (nearly 20% of the average workweek is wasted just searching for information). Our new Favorites panel is here to help by serving as your personal control center in ALLO.

Now you can drag-and-drop or one-click add any item in ALLO to your Favorites, whether it’s a project, an important canvas, a goal, or even a key result. All your favorites are collected in one place (visible on the new sidebar) and only you can see your favorites list. Think of it as your bookmark bar for work – tailor it exactly to what you need quick access to, and update it as your priorities change. Unlike the shared project lists or workspace-wide views (which everyone can browse), the Favorites are just for you – a totally user-controlled space in an otherwise collaborative environment. This means you don’t have to worry about naming or organizing things for everyone; just bookmark what you need and you’re one click away from it at all times.

If you’ve been feeling a little disoriented by the interface changes (we know, muscle memory is real!), try leaning on the Favorites feature. As you navigate to an important goal, canvas, or project, add it to Favorites. You’ll soon have a personalized dashboard of shortcuts to complement the Home screen. And of course, ALLO AI is also there to help you find or summarize anything you didn’t think to favorite. We truly believe that with a combination of smart AI search and user-curated favorites, finding information in ALLO will be easier than ever – even as your team’s content multiplies.

Smarter Project Management with Tags and Filters

Projects in ALLO got a facelift and some significant upgrades. We know many of you live in the Projects section to keep track of work, so we focused on making this area more scalable and informative. The first change you’ll notice is that “Project Groups” have been replaced by Project Tags. Don’t worry – they function similarly to the old groups, so your existing setup should carry over. Tags allow you to categorize and label projects in multiple ways (whereas a project used to belong to just one group). You can filter your projects by these tags to instantly see, say, all projects tagged Marketing, or all projects tagged Q3 OKRs.

Speaking of filters, we consolidated several old filtering mechanisms (such as viewing by status or by team) into one unified Filter tool. The new filter lets you slice the project list by a variety of attributes: tag, project status (active/archived), visibility (public/private), team, owner, and more. This means instead of navigating through separate menus to, for example, find all private projects in design team, you can now apply a couple of filter toggles on the main Projects screen to get that view in one go. Our goal is to help you quickly zero in on what you need to see, without endlessly scrolling or mentally sorting a long list of projects.

Even with tagging and filtering, we recognize that a master list of all projects can become overwhelming as your organization grows. No matter how we design the interface, if you have dozens or hundreds of projects, any “everything visible” view will be unwieldy. That’s why we encourage using the combination of Filters + Favorites to manage project complexity. Use filters or search to find projects by criteria when you need, and for the handful of projects you’re actively working on this week or month, add them to Favorites for one-click access. The main Projects screen is always there to browse, but you no longer need to rely on it for daily navigation. In essence, the project view is now a tool you use occasionally to locate or organize projects, rather than a screen you have to live in all the time. This approach keeps your focus on just the projects that matter most at the moment.

As a result of these changes, project navigation is far simpler and more personalized. In fact, it aligns with a general trend in productivity tools: reduce the noise and let each user focus on their priorities. Research shows that fragmented tools and constant context-switching take a serious toll on productivity – one study found that workers toggle between apps and websites about 1,200 times a day, and lose nearly 5 weeks per year just reorienting after all that switching. We want ALLO to be the antidote to that problem. By bringing more of your work into one unified platform (and one Home screen) and allowing you to customize what you see (via favorites and filters), you won’t need to jump in and out of different apps or dig through cluttered lists. Everything’s organized, accessible, and tuned to your workflow.

Jumpstart Projects with ALLO AI

One of the most exciting additions in this update is the ability to create projects using ALLO AI. You no longer have to start with a blank project and manually add tasks one by one. Instead, when you create a new project, you can choose to have ALLO AI generate an initial project plan for you. Simply describe your project in natural language – you can paste a chunk of an email, a project brief, or even just freestyle what you’re aiming to do. ALLO AI will analyze that description and intelligently draft a set of tasks (and even subtasks) as a proposed project outline.

For example, imagine onboarding a new hire at your company. You could type: “Onboard new marketing manager – tasks should include setting up accounts, product training, 30-day check-in, introducing to key team members, etc.” ALLO AI will take that and produce a structured project with tasks for each step of the onboarding process. It might even include things you forgot to mention – perhaps a task to schedule a role-specific training or to verify paperwork – because the AI can infer common steps from its knowledge of similar projects. Of course, you can edit any of the AI’s suggestions, add or remove tasks, but the point is to save you from starting from scratch. This not only saves time, it also helps leverage best practices that you might not have documented. In line with industry trends, we’re harnessing AI to handle the tedious planning work so you can focus on the high-level strategy and creative parts of projects.

Initial user feedback on AI-generated projects has been very positive – many of you said it feels like having a project manager or consultant assist in the planning phase. This is exactly what we envisioned. In fact, studies have found that companies using AI in project management see tangible benefits: one PMI study reported that teams with AI-driven tools delivered 61% of their projects on time, versus 47% for those without AI assistance. The same study noted significantly higher ROI fulfillment when AI is involved in project planning and tracking. These improvements come from AI’s ability to quickly crunch data, consider dependencies, and automate routine steps. With ALLO becoming an AI-native platform, we’re positioning you to reap those benefits. The AI will continue to learn and improve its project creation skills, and we’ll be expanding what it can do. Our endgame is that describing a project in ALLO could become as effective as hiring an expert project planner – ALLO AI will handle the structure, so you and your team can get straight to work.

Real-Time Progress Tracking: Completed Tasks and Project Dashboards

Project management isn’t just about planning tasks – it’s about tracking progress to completion. Many of you have requested better progress tracking and visualization in ALLO, and we’re happy to deliver a solution: the new Completed section and Project Dashboard. Here’s how it works: within each project, any task that you mark as done will now move into a “Completed” column (on kanban views) or section. As you start completing tasks and that section populates, ALLO will automatically generate a Project Dashboard for that project. The dashboard provides at-a-glance insights into the project’s status. For instance, you might see the number of tasks completed vs remaining, upcoming due dates, how long the project has been active, and other key metrics. This dashboard builds itself in the background – there’s no extra work for you.

What’s really powerful is how this evolves with ALLO AI. Soon, you’ll be able to ask ALLO AI questions like “Give me a summary of Project X’s progress” or “What got done on Project X this week?”, and it will use the data from the Project Dashboard to answer in plain language. In other words, ALLO AI can act as your reporting assistant, pulling together the stats and updates you need without you having to sift through the project details manually. We know that project reporting and status meetings can be a huge time sink for project managers. With ALLO, our goal is that much of this overhead disappears – the status is always up-to-date in the dashboard, and ALLO AI can brief you or your stakeholders whenever required.

The Project Dashboard is in its early stages, and currently includes the most commonly requested info. We plan to add more widgets and data points over time to make it even more useful. If there are specific metrics or charts you’d love to see, please let us know! The beauty of an AI-enhanced, software-generated dashboard is that we can iterate quickly based on feedback and even tailor it to different project types. Ultimately, if you’re managing projects with ALLO, you shouldn’t have to build PowerPoints or spreadsheets to communicate progress – it should be instantly available and even proactively delivered to you via AI. This is a big step in that direction.

AI in Canvas: Your Creative Co-Pilot

Finally, let’s talk about ALLO AI in the Canvas, one of the features I’m personally most excited about. We’ve all faced the “blank page” problem – you open up a new canvas to brainstorm or document something, and you’re not sure how to start, so you stare at an empty page. Now, ALLO AI is here to help conquer that. When you’re in a canvas (which is ALLO’s version of an interactive document or whiteboard), you can ask the AI to generate a first draft or outline for you. For example, if the task is titled “30-Day Check-in and Initial Goal Setting,” you can hit the ALLO AI prompt in that canvas and say “Draft an outline for a 30-day new hire check-in meeting.” Within seconds, you’ll see a structured draft appear on the canvas – perhaps a welcome section, a review of the first month’s accomplishments, initial goal discussion points, etc. The AI looks at the context (like the title of the task or any notes you’ve provided) and produces a sensible starting point. It’s like having a colleague who preps a meeting agenda or a document outline for you. Even if you don’t end up using everything it generates, it’s a million times easier to edit an AI-generated draft than to start from zero.

Now, imagine you open someone else’s canvas – maybe a teammate has created a detailed project plan or a research doc that’s pages and pages long. Rather than reading the whole thing right away, you can ask ALLO AI to summarize that canvas for you. In a blink, it will give you a concise overview or the key points from that document. This is incredibly useful for onboarding to a project or getting up to speed on what happened while you were out. ALLO AI essentially reads the document so you don’t have to (or helps you decide which parts to focus on). And because ALLO AI has access to all the linked information, it can even pull in relevant context – for instance, if the canvas references a file or a prior project, the AI can help retrieve those or explain them.

Another superpower of ALLO AI in the canvas is doing on-the-spot research. Let’s say you’re drafting a market analysis and you need some data that you’re sure is stored somewhere in ALLO (maybe in another project’s file or a canvas from last quarter). You can ask ALLO AI right within your canvas, something like: “ALLO AI, find the sales figures from Q2 report and insert the chart here”. The AI will search through the workspace, find that chart or data if it exists, and bring it into your current canvas. It’s like having an intern who knows every file in your company’s library and can fetch whatever you need. We’re continuously improving this capability, making ALLO AI smarter at retrieving and even analyzing content across your projects.

Overall, ALLO AI is becoming an integral teammate in your creative and analytical work. It can brainstorm with you, help write content, summarize information, and gather resources – all in one place. Our focus is to make these AI features feel like a natural extension of ALLO (and of your team), rather than a clunky add-on. We’ve built the AI features to enhance your workflow, not complicate it. So if you haven’t tried out the canvas AI features yet, please do – ask it to draft something or summarize something and see how it can boost your productivity and spark ideas.

What’s Next: Our Vision Going Forward

This update represents a huge leap for ALLO – not just in the user interface you see, but under the hood where we’ve made ALLO truly AI-native. ALLO can now grow in ways it simply couldn’t before. Expect the AI to get more and more capable with each improvement. We’re working on making ALLO AI respond faster and handle even more complex requests. In the near future, you’ll be able to complete entire workflows through a chat with ALLO AI without manually navigating at all. The interface changes you see now (Home screen, unified favorites, etc.) are setting the stage for that AI-centric experience where the tool adapts to you, rather than you adapting to the tool.

Through all these changes, one thing remains constant: our mission to help teams achieve real, tangible results with less hassle. We’ve always believed that just having a project management tool isn’t enough to boost productivity or success. True performance gains happen when people’s ways of working improve – when you can spend more time on creative, strategic tasks and less on “managing the tool” or searching for information. In other words, productivity isn’t only about better management, it’s about better mindsets and workflows. Our hope is that ALLO, especially now with AI in its DNA, will actively shape better workflows for you and your team. By simplifying navigation, surfacing knowledge on demand, and automating grunt work, ALLO frees you to focus on the creative and strategic aspects of your projects. The end result? You accomplish things that might have felt out of reach before. We’ve seen teams use ALLO to break silos and collaborate more visually and effectively than ever, and we want to push those boundaries even further.

On behalf of the entire ALLO team, I want to sincerely thank all our users – especially those of you who have been with us over the years and provided invaluable feedback. This update was a direct result of your input, and we hope it makes ALLO a better place for you to think, plan, and create together. Please continue to share your thoughts and let us know what you love and what can be improved. We’re in this for the long haul, driven by the vision that ALLO helps you not just manage work, but truly transform how work happens. We’re excited about this new direction and we hope you are too.

Thank you for reading, and as always, happy collaborating!

– Ray and the ALLO Team

Sources: Supporting research and references have been included to provide real-world context and evidence for the changes:

• McKinsey & Interact research on time wasted searching for information cottrillresearch.com
• Harvard Business Review on productivity loss from app switching (the “toggle tax”) conclude.io
• G2 Crowd overview of ALLO’s differentiators vs other tools g2.com
• ALLO product site descriptions of AI co-pilot capabilities allo.io
• Project Management Institute (PMI) study on AI improving project outcomes epicflow.comepicflow.com
• Excerpts from ALLO: not just another collaboration tool (2020) on ALLO’s all-in-one philosophy allo.io