Your practical guide to Trello AI: Native features vs. powerful agents

Trello is great for seeing your work laid out visually. Its boards, lists, and cards are a simple way to get a handle on all of a project’s moving parts. But let’s be honest, those pristine boards can quickly turn into a digital version of a messy desk, cluttered with cards that you have to constantly drag, drop, and update by hand. It’s the little administrative tasks that get in the way of the actual work.

AI promises to fix this. It’s the key to turning your Trello boards from a static to-do list into a workflow that helps manage itself. But figuring out Trello AI can be a bit confusing. You’ve got built-in features, a whole marketplace of add-ons, and other automation tools all saying they’ll make your life easier.

This guide will cut through the noise. We’ll break down what you get out of the box with Atlassian Intelligence, look at where it comes up short, and show you how to fill in the gaps with powerful agentic AI that can actually change how you manage projects.

What is Trello AI and how does it work?

Okay, so first things first: "Trello AI" isn’t actually a single thing. It’s more of an ecosystem of different tools designed to bring a bit of intelligence to your boards. It helps to think of it in two main categories:

1. Native AI Features: This is Atlassian Intelligence, the AI that’s built right into Trello for Premium and Enterprise users. It’s there to help you write, summarize, and brainstorm inside your cards.

2. Third-Party AI Integrations: This is the wider world of external tools, usually called "Power-Ups," that you can add from the Trello marketplace. These tools offer more specialized AI skills, from automatically planning a whole project to analyzing how your board is performing.

Here’s a simple way to look at it: Trello’s native AI is like having a helpful writing assistant sitting with you, ready to help polish a sentence or jot down ideas. Autonomous AI agents, on the other hand, are more like an automated project coordinator that can actively manage parts of your workflow for you, even when you’re not online. One helps you out, the other can act on your behalf.

Exploring native Trello AI features (Atlassian Intelligence)

Atlassian has been weaving its own AI into its products, and Trello is no different. For teams on a Premium or Enterprise plan, these features show up right inside the card interface, hoping to make you more productive without any extra setup. But what can it actually do?

What can native Trello AI do?

Atlassian Intelligence is almost entirely focused on helping you with the words inside your Trello cards. It’s a text-based assistant that can pull off a few neat tricks:

• Drafting and polishing text: It can act as a writing partner. You can ask it to draft a card description, write a comment, or just clean up your grammar to make your communication a bit clearer.

• Getting past a creative block: If you’re stuck, you can give the AI a prompt like, "brainstorm marketing ideas for our new product," and it’ll spit out a list of suggestions right in the card.

• Getting the gist of long cards: For cards with long comment threads or super detailed descriptions, the AI can whip up a quick summary, saving you from having to read through everything.

• Finding tasks in your notes: You can paste a chunk of text (like your meeting notes) into a card, and the AI will try to find and pull out any potential to-dos into a clean list.

Trello AI: The good and the not-so-good with Atlassian Intelligence

While these features sound handy, and they can be, they have some pretty big limitations that become clear as soon as you try to automate a real workflow. The native AI is a nice starting point, but it’s not a complete solution.

Pros of Native Trello AI	Cons & Limitations of Native Trello AI
Simple to use: It’s already built-in and ready to go with a single click for paying users.	Only works with text: It just helps with writing and summarizing. It can’t automate your workflow or take any actions.
Helps with individual tasks: It’s useful for helping one person write faster or organize their thoughts on a specific card.	Its knowledge is stuck in Trello: It can’t look up information from other places, like your company wiki in Confluence or official documents in Google Docs. Its "memory" is limited to the single card you’re working on.
No extra setup needed: An admin can turn it on without you needing to mess with complex settings or API keys.	It can’t actually do anything: It can’t add tags to cards, move tasks to different lists, assign people, or close cards. It’s a passive tool.
Good for quick ideas: It can generate ideas without you having to switch to another app.	It only works when you click: It doesn’t run in the background. It only does something when a user clicks a button, so it can’t monitor boards on its own.
Basically, Atlassian Intelligence is great at helping you write, but it’s not going to manage your project for you. If you want to move beyond writing better and start doing less manual work, you’ll need to look at other options.

Supercharging your workflow with third-party Trello AI agents

So, if you want your AI to do more than just help with writing, you’ll need to explore the Trello marketplace and third-party integrations. To get real, hands-off automation, teams often turn to AI Power-Ups. These tools are built to perform actions, not just edit text, and they handle many of the things the native AI can’t.

Going beyond assistance: what Trello AI Power-Ups can do

The Power-Up marketplace has AI tools for almost every part of a project. They usually fall into a few key categories:

• AI Project Planners: Tools like AutoPlan or Ezy Task AI are designed to get projects off the ground. You give them a goal, like "Plan a company offsite," and they automatically build out a Trello board with suggested lists and task cards.

• AI Analysts: Power-Ups like AI Powered Analyst are like a data scientist for your boards. They scan your projects to find bottlenecks (like seeing that cards always get stuck in the "QA" list), check team performance, and create progress reports.

• AI Workflow Agents: Integrations like Beam.ai are all about process automation. They can move cards between lists based on certain triggers, create new cards from an email, or assign tasks to team members for you.

The headache of a fragmented Trello AI setup

But while these tools are more capable, stringing them together creates its own kind of headache. You might solve one problem but create a few new ones:

• Your AIs don’t talk to each other: Each Power-Up works in its own little bubble. The AI that plans your project has no clue what the AI analyzing your workflow is up to. They don’t share information or learn from each other, which leads to a clunky, disconnected process.

• They don’t know what the rest of the company knows: A project planning AI can create a task list, but it can’t answer a specific question about your company’s expense policy because that info is in a separate document. These tools are cut off from your company’s real source of truth.

• You’re stuck managing a bunch of different tools: All of a sudden, your team is juggling multiple new tools, each with its own subscription, settings, and learning curve. It can get complicated and expensive trying to manage a patchwork of different AI solutions, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of making things simpler.

You end up with a Trello board full of cool gadgets that don’t work together, like a smart home where the lights don’t talk to the thermostat.

Unifying your knowledge for a truly intelligent Trello AI workflow

The real problem with almost any Trello AI, whether it’s built-in or an add-on, is that it can’t see the full picture. Your company’s real knowledge isn’t just in Trello cards; it’s scattered across your Confluence wiki, your Google Docs, your Slack messages, and old support tickets in Zendesk.

This is the exact problem a tool like eesel AI was built to solve. Instead of adding another single-purpose gadget to Trello, eesel AI acts as a central brain that connects to all your knowledge sources and work platforms. It builds a single, unified intelligence for your company and lets you use it right inside Trello.

Here’s how this approach solves the problems we’ve been talking about:

• Give your Trello AI access to the company brain: You can connect eesel AI to your Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and even past Zendesk tickets. Now, your AI in Trello can answer tricky questions using verified info from your official wiki or find solutions based on how your team has solved similar problems before. It’s always up-to-date because it’s learning from your actual sources of truth.

• Get it running in minutes, seriously: Forget about complicated setups or having to sit through a sales demo. eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. With one-click integrations, you can connect your knowledge sources and get your AI agent working in Trello in just a few minutes, no developers needed.

• Automate work between your apps: Unlike the passive native AI, an eesel AI Agent can perform powerful actions that you define. For example, you can create a rule like: "When a Trello card with the label ‘Bug’ is moved to the ‘In Progress’ list, automatically create a linked ticket in Jira." This is real automation that works across your different tools.

• Use one AI, everywhere: The same central AI brain that helps organize your Trello projects can also answer your team’s internal questions in Slack or help your support agents reply to customers in your helpdesk. It’s one consistent and intelligent assistant that shows up wherever your team is working.

Build a smarter Trello AI workflow

So, let’s wrap this up. The Trello AI world comes in a few flavors. The native Atlassian Intelligence is a decent helper for writing and brainstorming. Third-party Power-Ups can give you powerful, specific automation, but you risk creating a messy, fragmented system.

The most effective way forward is to build a central AI that learns from all your company knowledge and can then take smart actions in all your tools. That’s how you go from just getting a little help to building a truly automated workflow. By unifying your company’s intelligence, you can build a Trello workflow that doesn’t just help you track work, but actively makes it easier.

Ready to build a smarter Trello AI workflow?

Don’t just add another gadget to Trello. Build a central brain for your entire company. Connect your knowledge sources and see how a truly unified AI can transform your workflows. Try eesel AI for free or book a demo today.