AI can save your team hours of work, eliminate tasks no one wanted to do in the first place, and unlock use cases you never even thought of. So, how do you make the most of it?
AI can save your team hours of work, eliminate tasks no one wanted to do in the first place, and unlock use cases you never even thought of. So, how do you make the most of it?
Ross Rich, CEO and Co-Founder of Accord, sat down with Christine Royston, CMO at Wrike, to find out. Here are her three hottest takes.
Everyone has an opinion when it comes to AI. Some people are excited, others are skeptical, some are downright afraid, and then you have the person who wants to AI-enable everything.
For Christine, navigating that range of reactions is one of the most frustrating parts of rolling out AI. But her own take is pretty simple — to focus on what AI can give back to people.
“When someone says, ‘This is going to free you up to do more interesting things and you can stop doing the things you don’t like to do,’ I’m all in,” says Christine.
AI is a tool. It has the power to make your job easier by taking some of the mundane, soul-sucking tasks off your plate. But the goal isn’t necessarily to do the same work (or more work) faster, it’s to give people more time and energy to do the work that benefits from having a human behind it.
You can spend months coming up with an AI strategy, identifying use cases, and deciding when, where, and how your teams should use it. But sometimes, the best use cases are the ones you never saw coming. Like when someone on your team figures out how to automate something you didn’t even know was possible and suddenly saves themselves five hours of work every week.
Christine sees this happen at Wrike all the time.
“We try to highlight wins. People have done interesting use cases. We have people talk on all hands. And I still discover things and I think, ‘How did you not tell me about that? That's amazing.’”
And those unexpected wins can show up just about anywhere. Maybe someone uses AI to pull themes out of hundreds of customer comments before a meeting. Maybe a marketer finds a way to turn one webinar into a bunch of usable content. Or maybe someone finally automates that ridiculous spreadsheet they’ve been manually updating every Friday for the last three years.
The point is, leadership doesn't have to come up with every great AI use case. Your people are closest to the work. Give them room to experiment, pay attention to what they come up with, and when something works, tell everyone.
“I feel like you can have the perfect prompt, you can have all the right data, and you still have to make sure that you are looking at the final product before it's actually final to say, ‘Is this truly our brand voice? Is this truly something we want to put out to market, that we want customers and prospects to want to see?’” says Christine.
Her point? You can let AI create your content, but a human still needs to sign off on what goes out the door.
Of course, not all content is created equal. The bigger the audience and potential impact, the more human oversight Christine wants before something goes out the door.
“If this is going out to 100 people, the person creating it can review it and sign off. If it’s going out to my entire database, you’re going to look at it, I’m going to ask to look at it too because it has such a big impact,” Christine stresses.
With AI making it easier than ever to create more content, you might assume brand becomes less important. Christine thinks the opposite.
“Something that I've been talking about more and more and I hear from other CMOs is just the increasing importance of brand,” says Christine. “I feel like we all got away from brand investment for a while. It was all about demand gen and connecting this dollar to this activity.”
But buyer behavior has changed, and so has the role brand plays in getting onto a buyer’s radar in the first place.
“They are [buyers], going to go out and find out about you before they even come to your website, before they even talk to you,” says Christine. “So you’ve got to make sure you’ve got consistent brand awareness. And it’s the brand you want out there.”
