← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#805: Omnissa CMO Renu Upadhyay on balancing AI innovation with org chart disruption
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on.
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Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can.
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Find us as well.
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And make sure you check out our.
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Sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in.
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Full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the biggest risk to your marketing AI strategy isn't the technology itself, but the org chart? It's fracturing.
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Agility requires more than just speed.
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It demands a framework of trust and collaboration. When it comes to AI, this means your ability to innovate is directly tied to your ability to partner effectively across the organization, especially with IT and security. Today we're going to talk about a critical tension point in the modern enterprise. Marketing is moving at the speed of AI, adopting powerful, often low code tools to drive results. But this speed creates new complexities and risks disrupting traditional roles and processes. Success is no longer just about having the best tech stack. It's about forging a strategic partnership between the CMO and IT leaders to balance innovation with governance and productivity with security. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Renu Opadhya, Chief Marketing Officer at Omnisa. Renu, welcome to the show.
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Great. Thanks for having me on.
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Yeah, really looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Omnessa?
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Absolutely. So interestingly Greg, my journey started with product. So with an engineering undergrad degree, I actually pivoted very quickly to marketing, got my mba and that really helped me establish what I would say the right vocabulary and relationship with a lot of tech leaders. Soon after that, after the first five years of my career in product management, I made my way into product marketing. Product marketing to me has been a very interesting evolution and I really see it almost at the center and at the crux of driving many aspects of business, especially when it comes to connecting the brand to the technology, connecting the brand to storytelling, and also all aspects of go to market. So, you know, it was what I felt set me up really well to take on this role as a CMO at Omnisa so as Omnisa, along with being the cmo, I also run the channel strategy. So it really helps me bring, you know, product all the way to go to market and build a complete picture for the business.
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Great. Yeah.
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And then for those listeners who may not be as familiar, could you tell us a little bit about Omnisa? You know, what's the company's core focus and who are your primary customers?
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Absolutely. So Omnisa is a digital platform company. What that means is we make it really easy for employees everywhere to access all the digital tools, their applications, their data from any device that they choose to use. Whether it's a knowledge worker or a frontline employee. We provide that in a secure way and we provide that with a really simple, easy to use experience. So what that means is a lot of our customers use us to deliver great employee satisfaction because, you know, we all use technology a lot. And so they make that experience very seamless. But it also reduces cost complexity. From an IT admin perspective, at the end of the day, our platform really delivers four key solutions around virtual desktops, apps, security and compliance, unified endpoint management, and digital employee experience. The interesting thing is we've been doing this for over 20 years. So in our former instantiation, we were the end user computing business unit of VMware. And since 2004 we are an independent company, Omnisa. So it's been a fascinating experience launching this brand, especially because we are recognized as a market and thought leader in this space for the entire time we've been in this business. And we have over 26,000 customers and they span across industries, whether it's healthcare or retail financial services, across multitude of employee Personas. So that's just a quick. In a nutshell on Omnisa.
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Yeah, yeah, great.
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Well, yeah, so let's dive in here and I want to start with the strategic aspect of this and talk a little bit more about what I touched on in the intro, which is this new strategic alliance. You know, marketing and IT have always worked together, you know, as we all know, but this kind of new strategic alliance between them in the era of, you know, AI, generative AI, certainly SaaS was the beginning of that alliance. But in this era of SAS and now gen AI, the old model of, you know, marketing requests something and it delivers it is.
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It's not working.
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Right. So from your perspective, what is the single biggest catalyst forcing CMOs and CIOs to move from this tactical kind of service desk relationship to a more strategic partnership?
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Yeah, as you said, I mean, the wave of AI is definitely upon us. Right. And the biggest catalyst for this change, honestly, is the speed at which this is happening. The speed at which AI is accessible to everybody. And therefore how do you leverage it appropriately is a question that both CMOs and CIOs are grappling with at the same time. And the technology is evolving at the same time at high velocity as well. And you know, when, when I think about it from the marketing perspective, what does this mean for me, right? And what does it mean in terms of my buyer's journey? Of course, on the consumer side, we all search for things differently and we make our buying choices differently. The same experience is parlaying into the enterprise buyer and in their journey as well. So this means now we have yet another tool, yet another technology in our arsenal that we have to really understand and leverage and start to implement so that we are not outpaced by, by our buyers. We have to keep pace with our buyers. What this means sometimes is that marketing is moving, like you said, at the speed of AI, sometimes faster than the governance, the processes, the operational models, you know, all of that for an organization has been able to keep up with. So as marketing becomes one of the bigger decision makers in terms of where do we make our technology investments when it comes to AI, this is a really important catalyst for change and something we have to think about. So I just wanted to share a survey that I came across recently. This was from the Mayfield Fund called the agentic enterprise in 2026, so very current. They interviewed CxOs across large enterprises and the result was that, you know, line of business leaders like marketing, CMOs are now the largest decision maker group, around 46%, driving these decisions around AI tool adoption. So the rate of change is happening. Marketing is using these tools. And you talked about SaaS, right? So consumerization of it, which happened with the first wave of mobile, then happened with cloud, is happening with AI, is just happening at a 10x speed. So that's, that's a big change. And the reality is, frankly, when you think about it, is everything we do as a marketing organization, any tool we use doesn't just stay within marketing. Right. It connects into the enterprise IT infrastructure. So with AI, anything we implement as a marketing organization will connect into that backend infrastructure. And so it's important for us to have that connection point with the CIOs, to have a shared ownership and to get aligned on a lot of those goals as we are both feeling the pressure intensely.
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Yeah, yeah. And so for those CMOs out there, that are still, you know, they're still living in that, that service desk, you know, kind of mentality that, you know, that I mentioned previously. Building the bridge with a CIO is, you know, there's lots of things going on obviously in the enterprise, so, you know, there's lots of to do. But building that bridge is, is not only important, but it requires a new way of talking, a new, a new dialogue. What would you say is, is the first conversation that a CMO should really have with their CIO or CISO to start reframing that relationship?
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Yeah. And you know, because of the technology rate of change, it can feel daunting, especially if CMOs don't have a comfort level with technology. So first and foremost, neither side should assume we know what we're talking about when it comes to AI in the world of marketing. Right. So it's very important to get on the same page, establish a comfort level in the terms of what does this mean? What is the value proposition of AI in the context of marketing and then by virtue of that in revenue operations. Right. So we can be very clear in terms of understanding what's out there, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, and start to think about areas where you may need to be cautious, where you may need to have governance. So first and foremost is really having that conversation and that common comfort level about this technology itself and its value prop. Next is understanding how will work actually get done. Because now you have this technology, which frankly, even bigger than our roles, is just changing how work gets done across the board. Whether it's how code gets written to how calls are made or customer service is delivered, it's changing fundamentally the nature of work. So we need to identify what does that mean in terms of the organization and in terms of the CMO CIO relationship. How will data actually flow in this new world? How will leads get scored? So very tangibly thinking about the impact of AI on those use cases and then being very clear finally on ownership, because this is a shared ownership, it's blending because it's tech first, but marketing is the use case. So how do we have those clean and clear handoffs between marketing and it? So I would say those are sort of, you know, get comfortable, think about the work and the process and then be clear on the ownership, knowing that there will be a lot of shared ownership going forward.
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And then as far as how innovation happens and access and really the autonomy to do work, you know, one of the great things about a lot of the technology right now is, you know, there's low code, there's no code interfaces, a lot of IT enabled by AI and things like that. So, you know, it's great on the one hand and yet on the other hand there's this risk of, you know, shadow it.
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Right.
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And so how can marketing leaders strike that balance of providing autonomy and agility really to their teams while also having the right governance and security and all those types of things that are critical?
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It's so fascinating when you think about certain enterprise organizations in the era of cloud or mobile shadow, it was almost a go to market strategy. How do you go into the line of business? How do you get end users hooked onto your technology and then take it to it? That worked, right? It worked. It took some time. Of course there's fits and starts, but so it doesn't start from a bad intention, it starts from an organization, a line of business trying to achieve the business objectives and leverage technology. But the idea is that it can't happen at scale because when you are dabbling, it doesn't scale well into the organization. So it's very important first for the, you know, the IT peers to understand this. Shadow it is an intentional. It's the line of business, you know, marketing trying to accomplish a business outcome, right, for which they're leveraging this technology. And of course there's the external pressure like we talked about earlier. So now the question is, okay, how do you do this safely, right? How do you do this with the right guardrails so you can move forward faster and solve the real problems. And that's why it's important to have those dialogues early and to have them often. And these are the relationships. So I build, for example, with my IT counterparts saying this is what I'm seeing. So how do we get ahead of this? Because my goal is sure, I want to try, but my goal is to truly realize the value at scale. So how can I build the right guardrails infrastructure in place upfront at Omnisa? I just wanted to share. We recognized a lot of this last year because obviously we are watching the trends. We've had an opportunity to build the company from scratch, so to really modernize and leapfrog old technology stacks from the get go. And so we established an AI council. We brought together colleagues across, whether it's risk or privacy, governance, IT line of business, to really start to put a process in place so we can have these dialogues from the get go before we go too far down the road. And then it's back to that shadow it. Right. So it's really starting to get ahead of the problem that'll be caught at the back end.
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Yeah. And so in addition to kind of the access and the governance and those aspects, there's also just how some of these tools are disrupting the roles of marketers. Right. You know, if you have better access and easier access to things, you're able to do more, maybe even more through the funnel. You know, what, whatever the case may be, what are you seeing as far as, you know, what new skills or even entirely new roles do you see emerging on marketing teams to manage this new reality with, you know, all these AI powered tools? And, and how do you recommend that leaders approach upskilling their existing talent?
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Right. For me, as I mentioned earlier in my intro, having started my journey as a technology person, it's an extremely exciting time, but it also can be scary, right? So it's an extremely exciting time because the power of technology and what benefits it can bring is so real. But this is that area of continued discussion. Sometimes it's like a left brain, right brain, teams getting together and saying how do we as marketers truly leverage this technology and what does it mean, you know, in the, in terms of the future roles of the organization? So I'll say a couple of things. First and foremost, there's a change in mindset. Like you, you have to acknowledge this is happening, right? You have to acknowledge and accept it and you have to know that, you know, we've gone through these technology changes before. We've let. Marketing has always been a big consumer of technology. This is the next wave and it can have a very positive impact very quickly. So we have to be very open minded about that. So there's the mindset change and then when you think about the team members themselves, my colleagues in marketing, right. It's really two things. First is upskilling the team, right? So like I said, we've used tech, we are familiar with it. Automation is very core to our DNA. We are now just doing this in the realm of AI, so not look at it as this completely new thing, but really an evolution from a technology perspective. The next thing is learning those new skills again. Use them in your day to day consumer life and then bring them to work. So trying to understand what does prompt engineering mean, what are new kind of AI workflows and systems, you know, what are these conversational interfaces like how can we start getting familiar with the vocabulary and then start applying it into our day to day jobs and also really thinking about what workflows will actually benefit from it. Right. Not everything right away, but what are the workflows? So I think that AI literacy is very important to build that confidence and then to also pick and choose the right tools. Because let me tell you, there's no shortage of emails I get from vendors, right, who have some kind of a little AI do that. Right. That can solve a problem for me. So how do you parse that? To do that you have to have the literacy so you can. And then you already understand the function. Right. So my team already knows marketing inside out, so they have to kind of meld the two things so that upskilling is very important and it's easier now to upskill because again, AI allows us, right, whether it's ChatGPT or what have you, to ask those questions and get knowledgeable. So that's what we are doing inside of Omnis as well. Constantly having these dialogues and encouraging people who are leveraging AI to share those use cases to talk about it, but also to bring those to that AI council, like I mentioned earlier. Yeah, that's the upskilling. The second part is sourcing new talent. And when I talk about sourcing new talent, it's not just hiring an AI expert, which won't help because they don't know my business, but how can I augment or complement to help my teams upskill, but also augment certain skills that may not be available on the team. So whether it is through consultants or these vendors who offer their skills, but really being smart about where the gaps are and how can we leverage this sourced new talent to either close those gaps or finally be part of the team as we all upskill together. So again, at the end of the day, it's making sure the current teams are ready for this and investing in that and then also complementing and augmenting when needed through these external skills.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And so let's talk a little bit about how we measure success here. So, you know, beyond marketing is always going to have campaign metric, you know, there's always going to be those marketing KPIs that don't change. But how do you measure the success of a partnership with it? You know, are there specific shared KPIs or, you know, what works here and you know, how should leaders look at this?
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So yes, we will continue to have those metrics like campaign performance. Now it is how effectively do you run that campaign, how effectively is your pipeline flow? Right? How efficient is your pipeline? What's the quality of the leads? What's the quality of the attribution? Right. I can help in many of those ways. So it can take our existing metrics and make them a lot more accurate, a lot more richer and a lot more faster to achieve. Right? So just in terms of the existing marketing metrics, but another important metric which I'd like to talk about is really time to value. This is a new technology, right? So what's the time to value to achieving those metrics that I talked about earlier? Right? Much more accuracy, much better attribution, and so on. And that means how successfully can we execute on these projects, right? How successfully and quickly do we pick these pilots? How quickly do we show the results of these pilots? Do we have to re engineer systems and processes? Does it take a step back because we didn't consider a certain guardrail or risk or governance that we should have upfront? So I think that time to value of the projects that we decide and anchor on quickly is for me a new success metric. Especially when you are onboarding a new technology and so that you can ensure you're getting the outcome you wanted, but you're also doing it at the speed at which you wanted. That AI is promising.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And so looking ahead a little bit and you know, for, for those marketing leaders that are, let's say, you know, just to, to be a little stereotypical, you know, they're, they're feeling the friction between their marketing team's ambition and it is kind of the gatekeepers and the, the, you know, cautionary. What's a practical first step that, that a CMO can take, you know, to start trying to resolve that, that tension and build this more productive path forward that you've described.
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You know, in, in some ways the good news is both sides are feeling the tension, you know, the pressure right now. The pressure for them is where do we start? The pressure for marketing is how quickly can we start, right? So it's, it's. But both sides are feeling the pressure. But we all know as humans, whenever there's external pressure, where, whenever there's fear and you don't know what the, you know, there's unknown, you tend to kind of have this flight of fight response, right? And so you have to get on the same page. So I would say first and foremost, most practical step, sit down with your peer, right? Sit down with your cio, Walk them through where you see the power of AI and the impact it can have on marketing, be very clear about those outcomes and what it can do for driving the business forward. When you come to the table and start to share, you know, if you've started a shadow IT project, bring that to the front, right? Share that and give visibility to it. And that's how you start to establish trust with the team. Right? And then pick a use case. I would say very practical. Next step is pick a use case that you both can align on so that you can also accomplish that time to value with the speed that you want. And then finally define what that metric looks like. Be very clear, what are the metrics you're going to use to track and make this an ongoing dialogue. This is not a one and done conversation. This has to be an ongoing dialogue. But again, first and foremost is the conversation needs to start now. Both teams need to get aligned on the outcomes and then pick the use case, define the metric and build that into your ongoing system of operation and your operating model going forward.
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Yeah, I love that.
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Well, Renu, thanks so much for joining today. I've got two questions for you as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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Well, I would definitely say we get out of the shadows so we are no longer marketing is no longer contributing to shadow it. But this is mainstream, right? The usage of AI in marketing and transforming marketing is mainstream. So that to me would be a fantastic dialogue. To talk about best practices and how the collaboration worked and where we implemented those use cases and saw success would be that thing. I'd love us to get back and talk about it.
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Yeah, love it.
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Well, and last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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There's a lot happening, so I do rely on a lot of, I would say people, so a lot of peer networking, learning from others. But also I actually listen and read a lot of podcasts like this one. But I do listen to a lot of podcasts, especially to understand AI and what's happening in that world from a technology perspective and then applying it to the use cases. And then also I learn by doing so I've actually dabbled in wipe coding myself, built little apps to take away the mystique I would say behind this is really getting hands on with it is sort of how I learned by doing. And then finally, of course, my customers are my biggest source of input as well. So that constant communication. So all of those three things help me stay on top, hopefully as rapidly as this technology is evolving.
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Yeah, Love it. Well again, I'd like to thank Renu Apadier, Chief Marketing Officer at Omnissa, for joining the show. You can learn more about Renu and Omnissa by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E.
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G K I H L S t.
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R o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.