Wrike CMO Christine Royston on Building Agile Marketing Teams with AI

The Evolving Role of the CMO

• 🎯 The role of the CMO has significantly changed, especially with the rapid evolution of the marketing technology landscape and the acceleration of AI.
• 💡 CMOs must now act as orchestrators of AI strategy, balancing brand reputation with growth and ensuring marketing contributes to business results.
• 🧠 Key skills for future CMOs include driving agility across teams and go-to-market motions, and leveraging AI ethically and effectively.

Leveraging AI and Collaborative Work Management

• 🚀 Wrike's Co-pilot helps teams prioritize tasks, route approvals, and auto-summarize project updates, saving hours weekly for more strategic work.
• 🛠️ Wrike's Agent Builder allows users to create custom AI agents using natural language, accelerating AI adoption across teams.
• 📊 Outside of Wrike, AI is used for accelerating content creation, ideation, and personalization, with a focus on improving customer experiences.

Insights from Wrike's Agentic Research

• 📈 Over 60% of workers are already using AI agents, but effectiveness is limited by siloed data and lack of context.
• ⚠️ The primary risk with AI is not adoption, but whether it uses the right and complete data to move work along effectively.
• 📚 This highlights the need for structured knowledge and documented workflows to provide AI with the necessary inputs for accurate outputs.

The Crucial Role of Collaborative Work Management

• 🤝 Marketing is inherently collaborative, and technology should facilitate and enhance this collaboration to multiply team performance.
• 💡 Collaborative work management tools help capture ideas and input from across the organization, pulling agreed-upon ideas into projects.
• ✅ Platforms like Wrike ensure everyone is on the same page regarding project status and results, providing equal access to data and leveraging diverse team perspectives.

Measuring Success and Streamlining Processes

• ⏱️ Customers like Jellyfish have seen a 95% time saving in summarizing client calls and capturing action items using Wrike AI, saving individuals 3-5 hours per week.
• 🔍 Senos Health uses AI search across over 47,000 projects to quickly find the right standard operating procedures or documents, ensuring distributed teams have access to necessary information.
• ⚡ These tools save time, allowing teams to focus on more creative and strategic work rather than manual, task-oriented activities.

Building Agile and Adaptable Marketing Teams

• 🌱 Hire individuals who are encouraged to experiment with technology and new ideas, and who learn from failures.
• 🔄 Ensure workflows and processes are flexible to accommodate new technologies like AI, rather than being so rigid they require complete rebuilding.
• 🏢 Align team strategies with overall company strategy to ensure marketing efforts drive the right results and empower team members to contribute effectively.

Future Opportunities and Challenges

• 🌟 Personalization is evolving from a game-changer to a requirement; failing to deliver relevant experiences will be a significant drawback.
• 🔒 Challenges include ongoing concerns around privacy and data accuracy, and determining the optimal