What if AI could be your invaluable sidekick? Imagine freeing up hours of your day by letting AI handle the repetitive tasks, so you can focus on the big picture. Is your team ready to make that shift – and how can you as a leader help enable that?
Today we’re going to explore how AI can accelerate marketing velocity with Shannon Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. We’ll dive into how AI can be a powerful collaborator, how marketing leaders can start using AI themselves, and how to encourage teams to integrate AI into their daily workflows.
About Shannon Duffy
Shannon Duffy is the Chief Marketing Officer at Asana, leading global marketing efforts, including corporate, product, growth, revenue, and engagement. Prior to Asana, Shannon held the role of Executive Vice President Cloud & Industry Marketing at Salesforce. In this role she guided messaging, experiences, and go-to-market strategy for their flagship products. A technology marketing veteran, Shannon has held leadership positions in the industry since 2003. Shannon graduated from Boston College with a B.A. in Communications.
Resources
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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström 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. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
What if AI could be your invaluable sidekick? Imagine fraying up hours of your day by letting AI handle the repetitive tasks so you can focus on the big picture. Is your team ready to make that shift and how can you as a leader enable that? Today, we’re going to explore how AI can accelerate marketing velocity with Shannon Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. We’re going to dive into how AI can be a powerful collaborator, how marketing leaders can start using AI themselves, and how to encourage teams to integrate AI into their daily workflows. Shannon, welcome to the show.
Shannon Duffy: Hi, thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Why don’t we get started though with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at Asana.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, so I am Shannon Duffy. I am a CMO of Asana. I’ve been at Asana for gosh, about a year and 10 months, and we are revolutionizing the way people work. And so it’s an exciting product to market at an exciting time.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice. Love it. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in here and we’re going to talk about a few different topics, but I want to start with one of the things I touched on in the beginning, and that’s this idea as AI as a collaborative teammate, as opposed to, you know, there’s lots of talks about lots of different ways that AI could be characterized. But, you know, I like this idea of this collaboration. So, you know, you’ve described AI as this teammate or collaborator. So, you know, how can AI work within a marketing team to advise on priorities, streamline processes, and free up time for more strategic thinking?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, so I think marketers in particular, AI, I mean, AI is going to disrupt all knowledge workers. And when I say disrupt, I actually think that’s a positive thing. It’s going to disrupt the way the internet or social or mobile disrupted. So it’s ultimately going to be really positive. But I think for marketers in particular, like most of us who got into marketing, want to be collaborative, we want to be creative, we want to push boundaries in the way we sort of message and create that emotional connection with our product, service, whatever we’re marketing. And for marketers, on the flip side of that, we have so much busy work that we have to do to actually bring campaigns, events, product launches to market. And I think what’s so great about AI is AI right now, not the potential, AI right now can act like an extension of our team. It’s not something on the side. It’s not this thing over here that we can consult when we want. We actually have the ability to work AI into our major workflows. And that’s going to fundamentally change how we spend our time, but most importantly, open us up to be that creativity, that collaboration, all the reasons why we got into marketing in the first place.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And you know, there certainly has been a lot of hype around AI and I’m sure, I’m sure we’ve all read plenty of that as well, but I love what you’re talking about as far as there’s actually real stuff we can do today, which I, that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about, you know, the various flavors, you know, whether it’s Gen AI or other types of, of AI available. For those leaders listening out there that, um, you know, may not be using it as much as, as their team members may, um, maybe, or, or wanting to get started. Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about that component of it. Um, so, you know, as a marketing leader yourself, you know, how did you personally begin incorporating AI into your day-to-day tasks? And maybe give an example or two.
Shannon Duffy: So I’m lucky because I work at a company that’s very AI forward. And again, like at Asana, we are disrupting and most importantly, improving the way companies work, right? If you think about like where you spend your time, like in a day, like in a professional sense, so much of it is wasted on busy work. Like we have, you know, nine to six hours a week looking for information or trying to get sort of like basic things done. And so for me, I was already working at a place that was thinking of work differently, and then AI has just made it that much better. And so we look at it as how can we infuse AI into everything we do, specifically in workloads? And when we think of workloads, we think of like four major areas where we can incorporate AI. First is in the intake process. Like how are we using AI to gather all the requests, gather all the requirements from something, and then use AI to help us make sense of those, help prioritize those, help, you know, shift away from the things that we shouldn’t focus on so we focus on the things that we actually should do. The second is the plan. So we’re implementing AI in the planning process. So this is how do we make sure we have enough resources? How do we map the right humans to the right work and the right deadlines and the right time that it takes to accomplish? And then third is execution, right? And this is the point, this is the part that is truly revolutionary because so much execution can be done by AI. A perfect example I give to people is You know, if you’re doing events, you know, a lot of B2B companies put on events, you sign a contract for a venue. Well, a lot of times you get the contract back and then you have to say, okay, well, I got to email this to the web team and then I have to follow up to make sure, like, AI can do that automatically. Contracts close, AI can alert, the website team can update the website. Like all of this stuff can happen. So again, you’re focusing on how do we make the event an amazing experience for our customers. And the last is reporting. Like, you know, so much, so much of our time is spent actually executing on things and making sure something happens, but we don’t spend a lot of time is how do we report back on it and make sure it was impactful. And again, AI is at this step too. How can AI tease out the insights? Here’s what you did well, here’s what you can do better without having to spend the human calories of like, you know, finding that information and reporting back. And so that’s, again, how we’re looking at it. Like, how do we transform our major workflows and use AI at every single part of that journey?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s a, I think that’s a really great way of breaking that down as well. And I just want to underscore the, the last thing that you were talking about, because I think it’s, There’s two important things, at least to me in that is that, you know, reporting is so important and that, that feedback loop is so important and yet it’s kind of the last thing that gets thought of sometimes because I mean, it is sometimes last in the process, but also people are so busy that they already are onto the next thing before they have a time to look back. So I, I think it’s a great way for AI to you know, accelerate that, make it really, really easy to get the insights. And then the humans can act on that, right. And, and make sense of it. I think that’s such a great way of doing that. A lot of times, um, it takes a leader to lead by example, though, in, in some of these, these best practices that you’re talking about. How do you, how would you recommend to leaders? And, you know, just why it’s so important for them to do that, to, to lead by example when it comes to AI adoption and, you know, how can they help their teams get started with some of this stuff?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah. And I’m glad you said, I mean, I think leading by example is the most important thing, not just for AI, but in other, other topics too. That’s for another podcast. If you are not making yourself open to using new things and being willing to learn and also to fail, like how do you expect your team to do it too? Like you might have like the rogue person who maybe is like intellectually interested in it, but you’re not going to drive transformation of your team. And again, I’ve been doing marketing a long time and like go back 20 years, go back 30 years. The people who were early adopters of the internet, of mobile, of social, look at where they are now. And so, and this is even more fundamentally intense than that is going to be, but it’s still such the early days. So I look at it as like, again, the intellectual challenge of how can I run a world-class B2B marketing org using AI? And so I use it myself, right? I use it, everything from, you know, looking at a one-on-one project, like Going back to my astoundingness, we put everything in a project using AI to be like, what are the most important topics we should talk about this in this one-on-one? To actually using AI, like I’ve trained a bot to write in my voice. I’m a very unique sort of voice and like, it’s hard for other people to kind of write like me. And through working with AI, now I can say, hey, this is the message. I want this tone. It will come out in my voice, right? Things like that. And by me using it, it really empowers my team to be like, okay, if Shannon’s using us, We should be using this too from all different angles. Not, you know, not just writing, but creating briefs from looking for new ideas for getting feedback on messaging. Like the, the possibilities are really endless.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, it’s great that you’re, you’re leading by example in that way. And, and to your point, you know, I think, I think there are. probably a lot of team members using AI to a degree. I mean, you have some research and we’ll link to it in the show notes as well, but you have some research that shows that, you know, marketers are eager to use AI, 57% wanting to adopt it, but don’t always necessarily know how, or maybe they’re doing it in like siloed, you know, somebody is using one thing over here and another thing over there. So it’s not really, um, done as cohesively or really to the benefit of all. So, you know, how do you, um, how do marketing leaders encourage their teams to, you know, embrace it, um, embrace AI, you know, holistically use it to gain efficiency overall, but also, you know, make sure they’re doing so responsibly. Cause that’s, you know, that’s another thing, certainly top of mind for, for a lot of companies.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, absolutely. So you can’t improve what you can’t measure. So it has to be a top line goal. And however you set your marketing priorities, your objectives, your goals for the year, it has to be on there. Similarly, you kind of have to assign humans to championing it. And so we have, and what’s interesting is we started this at Asana, but as we talk to customers about AI, we’ve found a lot of customers have done this as well. Who’s your AI counsel? You’re the humans at your company that in addition to their day jobs are waking up and being like, how can we make these day jobs better with AI? Like that’s, that’s crucial, right? To have the people that you annoyed as the ones that are going to think about this. And I think for us, like a lot of it is sharing. Like, you know, we have a Slack channel where we talk, you know, AI adventures and inspiration where people are sharing and it’s amazing to see. what different departments are doing and taking some of those and being like, what is the marketing use case for this? It is phenomenal. And the other thing too, is like, I would challenge your employees. Like, think of the thing that you hate doing the most in your day that is repetitive, that could be automated, and how would you use AI? Like, try to use AI to solve that. And it’s amazing what you see people come up with.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I, I do, I, some workshops on, on AI and stuff, and I’m always amazed that how much I learned from them, you know, just seeing people, uh, you know, give, give them an assignment and they, they, to use AI in a couple of different ways or whatever, and just see how creative they can be with that. I, you know, I do think it reminds me of, you know, kind of early days of the internet. Um, I know you mentioned that too, just like. There’s a lot of possibility here. And again, there’s some hype here too, but I think the practical use cases um, make this different than I think some other buzzwords we’ve heard over the, over the last several years as well. And, you know, you mentioned a few use cases as well. I’m wondering maybe if you could just give, uh, give a, an example or two of, you know, whether it’s, um, you know, starting creative processes, improving content creation, project planning, like maybe give, give a couple of use cases that you’ve seen that, that have been compelling.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah. So last week I was, or two weeks ago, we had our work innovation summit in New York and I was lucky enough to spend some time with the CMO of Clear Channel. And Clear Channel, you know, you know them, like especially if you’re in marketing, you know, build more out of home, an amazing company that’s been around for a long time. And they are using AI to completely transform their creative production and their campaign. So they’re a huge company, they operate in 65 countries, you know, billions of dollars of revenue, and they have, you know, hundreds of thousands of billboards and displays all over the world. And they get so many creative requests, like they have a small creative team, it’s all over the place, and they get literally thousands of work requests a month. And what they’ve been able to use is use AI, smart workflows in Asana in particular. And they’re able to streamline this process because they’re able to group creative resources into, you know, to various categories. They’re able to prioritize these creative requests. They’re able to get them into the right place. And they’re saving like, they reduce manual work by 60%. Think of that at scale in your organization. If you could reduce the amount of one thing by 60%, think of what that would mean in other areas that your team could work on. And they’re saving like hours and hours a week per person, just being able to route requests to the correct places, right? So like creative production, and that’s a creative production. The same goes for campaign planning, event production, product launches, a very similar use case that has various applications across many different marketing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, wow. 60%. That’s, I mean, that’s a, and you know, think of what strategic or creative or, you know, other kinds of ways that that time and effort could be used, um, you know, otherwise versus, you know, some of these just kind of rote tasks that Nobody likes doing anyway, right?
Shannon Duffy: And nobody likes searching for emails. Like, can you think of the worst, like a thing that like enrages you more or frustrates you is when you know you have that email somewhere. When AI is in your workflow, AI just knows that this content and this, this directive or this work exists and is able to get it in front of you or to the right person. Like that is truly game, game changing.
Greg Kihlstrom: I might have spent way too much time searching for an email even earlier today. So that resonates with me. So yeah.
Shannon Duffy: And you’re searching and you’re like, oh my God, it just is so annoying.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, totally. Yeah. So, um, you know, speaking of another, another 60% number, you know, king of your research as well. Um, you know, some research found that nearly 60% of people are more likely to use AI when they receive simple training, so not even weeks and months and stuff like that, but even just simple AI training. I think one of the things here, there’s definitely some early adopters. I certainly would consider myself one of them, but there’s some early adopters when it comes to AI. There’s also some people that they’ve Like the way they’re doing things don’t necessarily see the immediate benefits, but with training and education, you know, they can start to realize some of those, you know, some of those gains that you mentioned. Do you think that AI training is happening enough and, you know, what kind of training and support can marketing leaders provide so that their teams can use AI effectively?
Shannon Duffy: So I don’t think it’s happening enough, but the good news is we’re trying to solve that at Asana. Like, I have so much to say about this. I firmly believe that we are at a point in time where we need to democratize access to, you know, traditional knowledge working jobs. And a lot of the way that happens is through education. And we need to think of education differently than the traditional, you know, grade school, high school, college, maybe master degree. And so I think, again, this is an inflection point. And how we can get access to training around the principles of AI and how to use AI for work and workflows is one of the most important things that we can do if you work in B2B token. So at Asana, we’ve actually just launched a badging program. It’s available to anyone where you can learn not just about Asana, you learn that too. But most importantly, you learn how to use AI for work. How do you build workflows? How do you use AI for project management? How do you embed AI into each stage of that workflow that I talked about earlier? in the podcast, and that is so critical because everybody is going to need access to these skills. And when you think of your, if you’re a marketing leader, one thing that keeps me up at night is how do I grow my people? I feel very responsible to grow the careers of every single person on my marketing team. A great way you can do this is offering them access to training on AI. It’s going to make them better at their jobs. It’s going to also give them the skills that they are going to need as the market changes, as, you know, marketing is not going away. The way we market is going to change. And isn’t that a great gift that you can give as your leader, the ability for your team to truly understand how to use these principles. So I could talk about this all day. Um, but I think it’s really important you make the space and you, you know, send them to the Asana training. It’s free right now. Like learn how to use AI for work. Like this is the skills that everyone’s going to need to know and will transform the way people get into marketing going forward.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And, you know, I think going back to, you know, you use the, you use the term, you know, democratizing and, and I, I think there’s, there’s another aspect of that too is. you know, getting people trained and being able to use their time better. That’s an amazing gift a leader can give to their team. But also giving them access to, you know, if you’re not a data scientist, but you’re a marketer that relies heavily on data, you know, just to use an example. That’s a great way of you know, utilizing AI and, you know, we get better ideas, the more people are looking at things and bringing their perspectives to, to all of those things as well. So it’s like saving time can help some of those people that again, they may, they don’t need to learn Python and R and all that stuff to be data scientists. They can ask the right questions, but as marketers look at it with the right insights, again, just using that, that data. So I, I like how it, it democratizes on a, in a couple of different dimensions, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So, um, looking forward, um, you know, cause, um, certainly things are moving quickly and, and there’s a lot today to, um, you know, to, to, to take advantage of, but, you know, looking forward to how do you see AI evolving in the marketing space and, you know, what should leaders do now to, in addition to some of those things we talked about doing today, but, you know, how do they help prepare their teams for tomorrow for, for some of these changes coming?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, I look at AI for me, like AI is going to make all my wildest, craziest marketing ideas, make them closer to coming true in reality. And here’s an example, like years and years ago, we did a campaign where we were trying to reach executive buyers, like C-suite people. And we created, I don’t want to give away too much, you know, because it’ll, it’ll, people might go, we did very specific pieces of content that was tailored to each human. It was wildly successful. People loved it. It was incredibly time-consuming and manual to create that level of personalization. And so we did it for like 50 people, right? Because that’s all we could do. Now imagine if you could do some of that for 5,000 people, right? That’s what AI is going to enable us to do, right? Create this amazing personalized bespoke experience that two years ago would take so much human capital and would be limited by the amount of like, you know, humans that you had. Now you can take those same amount of humans and you can do that almost to infinite level, infinity levels of personalization. Like that’s me, like that’s why you get into marketing, right? That’s how marketing is going to fundamentally transform. It’s like, you know, we’ve been talking about like, oh, you know, personalization and personalization at scale literally for years, probably since like the If the internet started and we’re like, oh, cool, banner ads, right? You can target based on location. Like now we can do it at a level that is not only unprecedented, but will resonate with your customers in a way that can truly transform the way they feel about your brand, product, or service, right? To me, that is what’s really exciting. So my message to marketers is like, whoever figures that out first and can do that well, you’re going to win. And so you should have, in addition to your marketing plan, what is that going back to that goal? What is that goal you have to use AI to fundamentally transform the way you’re connecting with your customers? That is going to be transformative and also really fun. That’s why we got into marketing. We had no idea that this was going to happen. I’m old, I’ve been doing this for we’re doing here. But now that it can, like the possibilities are endless and it’s super exciting.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. I, you know, I think we’re at this like convergence of, you know, big data was all the all the all the rage, you know, 10 some years ago, and then personalization, to your point, I feel like it’s Um, back in the day, like every year was supposed to be the year of mobile, right? And then finally it was with the iPhone and all that stuff. I feel like we’ve been talking about personalization in the same way to your point, but we’ve got big data, we’ve got personalization. Now we have AI kind of this, this convergence and yeah, like actual. one-to-one, it’s not like buzzwords and like science fiction, like it’s actually going to be possible. So yeah, I’m, in case you can’t tell, I’m kind of excited about that.
Shannon Duffy: I’m excited too, and it’s working with the words, it’s pictures, it’s graphics, it’s video, like possibilities.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Well, one last question before we wrap up here, something I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Shannon Duffy: I think for me, I make sure I get deep into the organization and hear from people at all levels, right? It’s very easy as a leader, especially when you have like, you know, really big teams to surround yourself with the same people. And I make conscious effort. I have office hours every week where anyone can come and show me, tell me, you have to give people that space. that psychological safety and the time and permission to speak their truth. And if you do not do that, it’s really hard to be an agile leader because you’re only hearing from one set of people that sometimes only tell you what you want to hear.
