In Q1 of 2025, I told my marketing team that we needed to increase efficiency by 10% … all with the power of AI. I’ll get into how I completely underestimated the possible gains in an upcoming post. For now, I want to start at the beginning.
There are a lot of stories on the topic of AI in the workplace. But what I believe would be beneficial to other teams is a case study from my own department, a look inside a marketing department that’s aggressively adopting AI with clear goals and humans taking the lead. That’s why I’m kicking off a new series today: Marketing Rewired: The Future Powered by AI.
Over the next five posts, I’ll pull back the curtain on our entire AI journey, including our approach to AI budgeting when resources are tight (Part 2), how we’re measuring and exceeding our original efficiency targets (Part 3), the story behind building our own AI portal and when to build vs. buy (Part 4), and our framework for balancing leadership vision with team experimentation (Part 5). I think all this is timely, as 2026 plans are well underway.
If you find yourself in a similar position of leading a marketing team in this new age of AI, read on and keep checking back for future posts. I hope that sharing our journey with AI helps you with your own, and that we can swap success (and learning) stories as we go.
Marketing strategy starts with company vision
We began our marketing journey with the big picture. Wrike’s vision for AI — both on our platform and within our own organization — keeps humans in the loop. As a marketing leader with more than 20 years of experience working with teams and as the CMO of a collaborative work management software company that brings teams together, I know that there’s no replacement for human intuition, nuance, or creative insight.
Our vision is to bring together what humans do best with what AI does best to enable organizations to move as one, with insight and agility. When you pair human intelligence with AI, you can deliver what we call, powerful organizational intelligence.
AI alone can’t adjust or shift based on environmental changes or cultural moments. Humans can. That’s why we’re putting AI in the hands of our incredibly smart team, and it’s empowering them to do even greater work.
That’s our vision for our customers and our own teams. We want to keep you in the driver’s seat while multiplying your impact with powerful AI features.
Putting specific marketing team AI goals into place
Next, we drilled down.
Here at Wrike, we’re extremely focused on what AI can bring to our organization. We aren’t adopting AI for AI’s sake. We’re adopting AI with several specific goals in mind:
- Faster time to market: From automated content creation to personalization at scale, AI helps our marketing department deliver our message faster and more effectively to audiences. We want to help our marketers reach more prospects with messages that clearly demonstrate how Wrike meets their needs.
- More efficiency: We’ve long known that powerful work intelligence automations can deliver efficiency, and new AI tools (both within Wrike with our Work Intelligence suite of AI features, and within our broader tech stack with content creation, email, and reporting tools) have allowed us to double down on efficiency.
- Team empowerment: We want AI to help our marketers make better decisions faster. AI allows our department to forecast trends and campaign outcomes, enabling data-driven decisions that deliver better results. One example of this is using tools like a content optimization platform to analyze and improve assets for better SEO and GEO before we hit publish.
Achieving these goals pushes our entire organization toward efficiency and delivers better outcomes.
Phases of AI adoption
Looking back, I can see several clear phases of our marketing department’s adoption of AI, and I’d like to share that evolution with you because it illustrates what you might be working through as well.
Here’s a simplified version of the approach we took over the last year:
- Ad hoc experimentation and individual adoption
- Implementation of an internal company-wide Wrike AI portal
- Introduction of OKRs to track AI-related productivity (I’ll get to this in a future post.)
- Department-wide introduction of AI tools
Our marketing team is made up of curious people who always look to innovate, experiment, and implement the latest technology wherever possible, so we saw tremendous AI adoption early on. Of course, our Wrikers have also long been using Wrike’s Work Intelligence tools to automate task and status updates, and more. It didn’t take much for our team to see that eliminating or automating low-value work opens up time for creative, strategic thinking.
As AI tools proliferated, we made sure our teams had access to resources that would improve their productivity and eliminate even more admin work so they could focus on high-value tasks.
And earlier this year, it became clear that we needed to track our time and energy savings using AI — both to measure the actual time savings we were achieving and to determine the ROI of our investment in AI tools.
Early in the AI evolution, we set an initial metric of increasing efficiency within our marketing department by 10%. Some efficiency gains using AI are hard to quantify, so we set the bar at what we felt was a reasonable number. Well, we quickly blew that number out of the water. I’ll reveal the results in the third part of this series, but for now — take this as a point that you should not underestimate the impact of leveraging AI.
What’s next in this series?
I hope you’ll return over the next few weeks as I continue this conversation on AI rollout within the Wrike marketing department. I’ll be discussing budgeting and the considerations we’ve made for AI investment — which will be important as you plan for 2026, as well as concrete use cases that have made big differences in our team’s efficiency, and how we’re tracking success with our AI initiatives.
This is a topic I’m passionate about in part because it’s what I’m living day in and day out here at Wrike. I’m excited about transforming our marketing team with AI because there’s likely no bigger shift we’ll see in our lifetimes than this. It’s fast-moving and requires constant shifting and adjusting. It’s keeping me on my toes, and I hope our experience here at Wrike can help you in your own journey.
I’d love to continue this conversation on LinkedIn. Join me over there and let me know your thoughts, what’s going on at your organization, and even what you’re interested in learning about our experience.
