← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Asana CMO Prachi Gore on realizing AI's true potential for marketing operations
00:30:59
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. What if the biggest risk of AI in marketing isn't about job replacement, but about creating more fragmented, siloed work? Agility requires more than just adopting new tools. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how teams collaborate and orchestrate work. When a technology like AI promises to accelerate individual tasks, true agility means ensuring that acceleration translates into collective momentum, not organizational friction. Today we're going to talk about moving beyond the hype of AI experimentation and into the reality of its operational impact on marketing teams. We're going to explore what happens when AI graduates from being a personal productivity tool to becoming an integrated part of a team's workflow, and how that shift changes everything from campaign execution to the very structure of marketing itself. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom 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 find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Prachi Gore, CMO at Asana. Prachi, welcome to the show.
- [01:43]
B
Thank you. This is such an honor. I'm excited to be here.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah, really, really looking forward to this topic. Definitely. It is definitely something top of mind for me. I know for many others as well. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Asana.
- [01:58]
B
Yeah, I'm the CMO at Asana. I am fairly new five months in, so kind of like enjoying every bit of it. It's a ramp and steep learning curve. Prior to Asana, I land marketing at a company called Chakr. I was there for about six years and got a lot of AI experimentation under my belt in the last two years I was there. So excited to be here.
- [02:19]
A
Love it. So yeah, let's dive in here and want to start with what I teed up in the intro and really talking about. I feel like since sometime in 2022 we've all been playing with AI tools, particularly generative AI tools and seeing the benefits of being able to create a lot of stuff very quickly. I think that stuff has maybe gotten better over the years. I'd like to think at least it's gotten better over the years, but still, what we have been kind of led to is a paradox here, which is AI. It's led to a lot more productivity. We can do a lot more in less time, even potentially with less people being tasked with a certain initiative or whatever. But it's also led to more fragmented work. Can you maybe expand on this challenge a little bit and what you're seeing here as far as what other marketing leaders are experiencing?
- [03:21]
B
Yeah, I would love to. And actually that's one of the reasons why I joined Asana, so I'll get into that in a minute as well. But when I was at checkout, like you said, we started our kind of marketing experimentation, like late 2023, around content and just briefs and all this amazing stuff. And the reality is that some experiments worked, some didn't, but mostly every individual got a little bit better. We got a lot more content out, we got a lot ideas out. Like, there was no shortage of ideas. And as a marketing leader, having said all of this, we didn't really see like pace of campaigns pick up or launches happening much faster or just like throughput and productivity as a team go up. And my aha was that, you know, output just went up materially and outcomes didn't follow that same path. And like, that's the paradox that you pointed out. And to me, and now it's public knowledge. There's lots of data that says 75% of the knowledge workers are using AI, which is fantastic. But only 5% of companies are seeing any real business outcome from it, are reporting any ROI. So there's a lot of data out there that's kind of saying this now, but that was my personal experience. And so when I talked to Asana, my aha click, because we used a lot of orchestration tools that were stitching different individual outcomes together, we experimented quite a lot. And, and I think the biggest fundamental reason why you see that gap is because two things, work is inherently hard and the workflows that actually matter across lots of different people, lots of different teams, lots of different systems need decisions, approvals, handoffs. It is complex. It is truly complex. It was complex for two humans, a team of humans working, and it's complex with agents as teams as well. And so there is no solution out there that solves that. And that's why every individual got faster. But in our case, we were copy pasting from one place to the other. We were editing here, then going back into our chat window and saying, oh, these were the edits, here's the feedback. So we were going through this back and forth and so we just became like individuals gluing different systems essentially. So the productivity we gained was lost in the coordination. And I think to me that is, it's not a technology problem anymore, it's not an ideas problem. There's a lot of personal assistance available for every individual to truly become agentic as a company. It is a coordination problem. So I think that's kind of like my view of the world and I experienced it firsthand and now I see us solve this for our customers, which is just exciting. Of course we've done it in house at Asana too.
- [06:10]
A
But yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's a, that's a great characterization of, of the challenge. I think because I have been there, I know many others have, have been the copying and pasting between things and oh, I need to remember to tell the, this platform what this one said and where was it in that chat. You know, like all, all, all of those things that, you know, to your point, we were doing it with people as well. But you know, people are better at certain things than AI and vice versa.
- [06:41]
B
And you don't have to context engineer people like they are in the meetings, they are listening to it, they get the context, they have the intelligence to use the context to apply. With your own personal agents, you are constantly context engineering like making sure they're connected to all the different dots flying around all the different feedback. And that is a loss of productivity while you gain in on one end.
- [07:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I think that context engineer, I think that's a great thing, that's a great word to, you know, phrase to put to that because I, I think it is it. I know we've most, if not all of us have been doing it and yet it's, you know, to kind of name it helps it as well. And you know, there's another thing that, that you've, you know, a concept that I know you've embraced. It's this idea of AI teammates which, you know, kind of along, along the lines of what you were saying as far as, you know, kind of the antithesis to the copy paste and everything. Can you talk maybe a little bit about the thoughts there and you know what this means and practice?
- [07:47]
B
Yeah, 100%. So you know, I just to establish I am personally a big user, we use Cloud, we use Gemini, love it, we use it heavily. And so that is technology is amazing. Those tools are amazing. We use them, right? And then as I think about like the vision state for my org or any full company, but let's just say marketing org, I want us to become you know, closer and closer to like a self driving org with humans in the loop. You know, the output of Our team is 10x, 100x. Even if we could use like a team of agents or teammates. And the reason I like not just the framing of teammates, but to realize this vision, the agents need to act as teammates. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. So agents that we use through LLMs today I see them as my one on one personal assistant. I'm brainstorming with them. They're the thought partner, they're putting together quick docs for me, editing my work, all of that good stuff. But in the context of a project or a critical workflow, let's just say a campaign launch, we are launching a campaign for a new vertical. It is not enough to just produce a creative brief to say, hey, here's a campaign brief. I need a teammate who, let's just call them a campaign strategist or something that can be in my environment. Work with me on creating the campaign brief, but then also work with my whole slew of team I.e. campaign managers, web designers, designers, content writers, there's a whole product, marketing managers. We have so many people working on a launch of a campaign. You say, hey, here's the campaign brief. Four parties, here are tasks. Go review this, edit this. I can read your comments, I can edit the brief and then I can create tasks for the handoff and the next step. And creative brief, that to me is a teammate, which is the agent has an identity, they have permission sets, they can see all the documents that we work off of and they can work independently across multiple people. So it's like not me and you, agent alone, like single player. It's truly multiplayer in that one agent can work with multiple people in a system following a plan. If you are commenting on my doc to say change this, blah blah blah, the agent is able to read it, make the edits inform both of us and keep the project moving forward. I think that unleashes truly the ROI for any team. And this is marketing specific. Of course I'm a marketing leader so I'm giving you those examples, but you could extrapolate that to any business workflow.
- [10:36]
A
So you know, we mentioned the fragmentation already of everybody kind of going in their own chat window as well. I also think that approach, there's also just the concept of sprawl, which I think is related. I mean, maybe they're two sides of the same coin, but, you know, just so many things going in so many different directions that are not tied to one another. And so I think what you're talking about, it is kind of the solve for that. Right?
- [11:04]
B
100%. I mean, I think this, like, just like slew of ideas and output, I actually think is creating more chaos at the company because everyone has 10 ideas now. Everything feels urgent, but you're still kind of tied to the same bottlenecks and the handoffs and the decisions. And so you can't actually take all the output and action it. So I believe it's creating more chaos than less chaos. And definitely there's individual productivity gain. I see it for my own work, I see it for our teams. But as an organization, as a marketing team, can I say, hey, we could ship like 10x more campaigns in the same amount of time with the same team. Not yet. And I would say my bar is 100x because the agentic technology is there. We should be able to ship 100x more. And the blockers are what I was stating. So the fragmentation, the output, the chaos, without that structured coordination is going to always stay.
- [12:05]
A
Yeah. So doing this well, utilizing AI more as a teammate than as a siloed. All the other stuff we talked about, what are the skills? What are the mindset shifts? How do teams need to behave and learn differently to make the most of this in a productive way?
- [12:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different. This is a very broad question, but I'll try and address a few different things. One is mindset. You mentioned skills and mindset, so I'll use that framing. But on the skills, you just have to be significantly more clear in your thought if you want to produce answers faster. And this is even just for me individually, for my own productivity. The more structured I am, the more clear I am in my prompt, the more context I'm giving it, the better the outcome's going to be. And the less back and forth I'm going to do with my own agent. So I think just the clarity of thought and the structure is important. I think the other skill piece that I'll call out is like, in the last many years, decades, I would say we've done, everyone has their special talents, the tastemaking, and we've all done a ton of work for the sake of work. And in this new world, I see agents doing a lot of the work for the sake of work, the orchestration, the process management. And so each one of us is going to need to identify our taste making, to uniquely bring that to the table and to change the outcome from average to great from an agentic process. Right. Because agents will have boundaries. I mean, so I think the tastemaking part of the skill, and that's a combination of, like, I need to recognize what I'm really great at, what taste making value I add, and then I have to play that up every single time in the context of skill. And then from a mindset standpoint, I think the biggest change in mindset is we have to think agents first in everything. So it's like I tell my team this. It's like when you start doing something, the first question I do this, ask myself, can my agent do this? And we in Asana, I have multiple agents that are shared. I of course use my cloud, Gemini. Yeah, it's like, can an agent do this? And if, you know, I have like my own list of questions of like, how to go through this, but if the answer to those is yes, then I don't touch it, Let the agent start, because then I get that time to go do something else. So I think that's like one mindset. The second mindset shift is at every level in the company. You've all become managers now, right? So every, you know, it's like, yeah, everybody is a manager of a team. And when I think of that team as a manager, you have to onboard every single individual, which means you have to be clear about the job they do, what their responsibilities are, what context you need to provide. And so in Asana, we have this concept of teammates. We talked about this. And the few teammates that I have that work for our team, they have a very clear job description that I've put in and a very clear guidance in terms of. Here is the stuff I want you to think about. I have a brand strategist that our team works with and I've given them in detail narrative documents, frameworks to use. So give them a little bit more context so they work like you'd want them to work. So truly think of them as teammates. So I think those are the two big mindset changes. It's like, first think agents first, and then everyone now is a manager. So you have to think about yourself as one. And like, you know, it's a different way of operating. For anyone who's been a manager, it's easier. But you know, for everyone else.
- [16:01]
A
Yeah. I mean, do you think it's also. I mean, because I will say about myself, and I've said this before, but I've always thought of myself. I think everyone probably thinks of themselves as a bit strategic and they can think a few steps ahead or whatever, but there's been nothing like AI to prove how important it is to be able to think a few steps ahead. And, you know, I. I think it's made me better at doing that, just kind of forcing it, you know, because, I mean, I've managed people before. I've, you know, all of that, but it's to see that AI kind of go down the wrong path and knowing that you could have given it better instructions, like, there's no better teacher than that to me, 100%.
- [16:43]
B
I mean, I think one of the things, you know, and a realization for me that I've changed my mind a little bit is my thinking was AI has all this experience set out there. It could read all the docs. Everyone's experience is all of that good stuff. And therefore any new entrant, do you need the years of experience that even I have gathered to actually go direct it strategically in the same way? And my learning over the course of my experimentation and with my teams is that you actually do. And that is exactly the point that you're calling out the value of that experience. Experience is helping you prompt better, is helping you catch the things that don't seem right, is helping you guide the agents better on the things. So I think in my process of experimentation with AI and where I was two and a half years ago, I've changed my mind in truly high value of not just the taste making and the skill, but the experience in spotting those things and guiding the agents better. So I agree with you. I mean, I think that is absolutely essential. I think the human in the loop is so critical. I know there's a lot of conversation around zero human, all agent. And I think depending on the scale of operation and the type of task, but anything that kind of starts to feel even just a little bit complex. The human in the loop is the safeguard. I think it can inject tastemaking and creativity into the task, especially the marketing stuff. And so there's a ton of potential for all the people working with the agents, and that is high value for the agents to deliver great outcomes from the people.
- [18:29]
A
So let's also talk a little bit about how we measure success. And of course, with the caveat that if we're marketers, we're not going to give up our marketing, KPIs and stuff like that. Of course we're still selling widgets or you know, doing whatever we, we need to do. But you know, you, you had mentioned it's certainly not about volume of output. Right. Because you know we can at this point, I mean there's tokens involved or whatever, but like there's near limitless output potential depending on your subscription levels to various cloud services or whatever. But so are there, are there different or are, are there metrics that we should be watching as far as like how are we being successful when we're using these and things like that?
- [19:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, my view on this is the metrics that matter are ultimately the business metrics. You know, marketing is in the business of driving growth. Can we drive growth and are we continuing to drive this growth? I think the second level metric that is important is revenue. Like just efficiency.
- [19:35]
A
Yeah.
- [19:36]
B
Given that we have this technology, am I driving this growth more efficiently? I should be able to in theory, like I really should be able to drive significant more growth. And so I think those are the two lenses, but the primary lens is always like growth. And so when I think about the outcomes that matter, not the output, it's like can I ship campaigns faster? Can we get hyper personalized with all of our campaigns? Because at the end of the day we are speaking to a person who's a Persona that cares about certain things and will AI allow me to go do that? Because right now otherwise you just need humans to be able to do that. And so it's all about just the growth equation, like how do we go drive 10x growth without really adding significant more cost. Now AI is expensive, right? It's not one for one, but it's cost and that is cost I'm willing to put to go drive the outcome. My vision for all of us is if we use this technology which is powerful and amazing, every 10 person team will be able to operate like 100 person team and every 100, 200,000 person company or team will be able to move at the pace of a 10 person team. And so I think we need to design this tech to allow us to do that. And that's where we as humans and as teams win and really leverage this. But the metric to your point is the outcome we are here to go drive, which is growth, but growth with a new, there's going to be a new expectation of efficiency in that growth for sure. And that is the right expectation to have because the technology can do that. For you?
- [21:16]
A
Yeah. I mean, in that scenario you described, it almost seems like it would be easier for the smaller team to do the work of the larger one than having worked with many enterprise orgs than the larger one being able to move at the speed of the smaller one. But I love that concept and I mean, so I guess where can one of those large organizations start making the right steps to being more nimble like that?
- [21:45]
B
Yeah, and we have like Fortune 50, lots of Fortune 50, Fortune 10, even customers. And they're all doing this. It's not that they aren't, they are. And my kind of learning from what I see them do is at every process step, start with the smallest job to be done and figure out how you can identify it, how you kind of drive the outcome. Focus on the outcome, not the output. Otherwise you'll create more chaos because you just have so many more people that are generating that. But if you have that systems thinking to say, okay, what is the smallest workflow to the most complex workflow and how do I step by step go solve this in an agentic way? I do believe that a 10,000 person company can operate at the pace of 100% company if they apply or deploy the technology the right way and drive of course that scale of outcome for their business.
- [22:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, love it. And last thing you know, before we wrap up here, I do want to touch on one other thing you've mentioned and I'm certainly hearing and reading a lot about this as well. You know, AI is contributing to the collapse of the traditional funnel for, you know, for, for a few different reasons. Can you maybe just talk a little bit about, you know, what does that look like and you know, what should brands be focusing on to still stay relevant at points in the funnel, even if it's collapsing? I guess, yeah.
- [23:12]
B
I mean, I think what AI has done is completely transformed the buying journey. We were as brands and B2B and B2C I would say very used to search being the primary browser, search bar being the entry point. We were all very used to and had designed our campaigns and marketing flows in a way where the click was coming to your website and then the journey began and that's not happening today. We've seen massive increase in just AI search. So people just talking to. Even if it's in Google, the AI results show up with recommendations. So you don't have to click through 10 sites anymore, you don't have to do all of the analysis. So there is a formed analysis and you can do back and forth and so the buyer journey is changing drastically. And so what does that mean for us as teams and brands? I think the fundamentals of marketing don't change. Like, if we are centered around who are we selling to and what are their pain points and therefore what is the message we are putting out there to help them solve their problems, that's not changing. That is exactly what we should be doing in every content, every touch point, everything we produce, the how we get to them is changing. And so there is, you know, there's all sorts of syllables for it, like aeo. Yeah, it's like there's a new one, but it's like at the end of the day, I'm just going to call it AI Search. Somebody said that to me yesterday and I was like, okay, that makes sense. But if you think about AI Search, they are searching, there's a recommendation and they might say, okay, like, oh, I like Asana. So I'm just going to go directly to asana.com, and they will start their journey much later in the purchase funnel. So how do we get into the chat bot? The things that we. And there's fundamentals and there's a playbook. So I think that's different. I think the other thing that is so discovery has changed. We have to go fix that. I think the other big piece is, I believe, and it's been true with all the digital noise anyways for the last five or 10 years. But investing in the brand and in the tastemaking and the standout brands, that's going to win. Because at the end of the day, you're still. The human is still making the decision today, at least today and in the foreseeable future. And I think that will continue for a little bit. But the taste making doesn't change. The creativity that marketing brings to the table doesn't change the brand. Importance of brand doesn't change. The importance of building trust with your customers doesn't change. So like many of the fundamentals that were always important are still very important and we have to go do that. Like, those are first principles as marketing teams. And then the tactics of how we were getting discovered, how we were getting them to purchase have changed and we have to lean in and might change our ways. I hope that answers your question.
- [26:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, it does. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, everything's different. But there's similarities here to SEO, there's similarities here to how things have to your point have always been, and I do think, you know, whether we're talking B2B software purchases which are not, you know, they're not insignificant, you know, purchases or, you know, any, anything above a commodity. I would say a human is going to choose one brand over the other. Right? I mean, they're not just going to say, hey, give me a car and they show up and there's a car in their drive. You know, that's not going to. I don't think that will happen anytime ever.
- [26:43]
B
It's not. And I think my only guidance to my team and anyone listening out there would be, it's like the old playbooks, just retire them. Keep your first principles thinking, keep the fundamentals of what marketing needs to go drive. Like that is still true. And then design new Playbooks because the buyer journey has changed, how the buyer is going to interact has changed. You're going to talk to many agents on the other side, so your agents will talk to their agents and we have to design new playbooks for that. But the fundamentals stayed the same.
- [27:10]
A
Yeah. Yeah, agreed. Well, Prachi, 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?
- [27:25]
B
All the success stories of us doing amazing identified work at Asana for sure in our own marketing team, I would have across every department and example, our teams are leaning in hard. I think the other thing that we would talk about for sure is a more informed opinion on how I've been able to change the metrics, having done that. So I gave you kind of a sense of we measured the growth and outcome at some kind of efficiency leverage. But I'd have true data points hopefully to talk about then because we will go drive more growth and our teams are leaning in hard. So those two potentially. And then from a worldview perspective, I think then I already start seeing like worldview as in, like in the marketing world. We are already starting to see the conversation move from like, hey, are you using AI in your teams? To what are the most critical workflows that you are being able to solve for that you're moving towards that you are like identifying in many ways, if that's the word. And I think a year out from now we'd have a high amount of confidence in that blueprint to say, okay, you start here, then you go there, then you do this and that gives you the measurable outcomes that I believe we'll be able to drive. So that is my hope.
- [28:50]
A
Love it. 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?
- [28:58]
B
My biggest motivator for the work I do is to be able to learn. And so today these times are the best times for me personally because I'm just soaking it up every single day, anything that I can learn and do and experiment with. But personally, right now to stay agile I'm doing two things. I'm like listening to a lot of podcasts and staying current and what are other people doing and even just talking to peers just to stay current. Because so much is changing every single even week or two weeks, I feel like there's new information out there. So how do I stay current? I'm very conscious about that. And then I do detach from all of this like usually on long hikes or runs or something to just bring the human back in the sentiment. Because ultimately I think the combination of both of those things are going to drive great outcomes for us as a team and the company. And so those are my go tos right now.
- [29:50]
A
Yeah, love it. Well again I'd like to thank Prachi Gore CMO at Asana for joining the show. You can learn more about Prachi and Asana 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@techsystems.com that's 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 event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G-R E G K-I H L S T 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. It until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [30:57]
B
The Agile brand.