This article was based on the interview with Christine Royston, CMO at Wrike by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As marketing leaders, we’ve become accustomed to a certain level of controlled chaos. The MarTech landscape chart, once a useful if sprawling map, now resembles an abstract art piece where the individual logos are indiscernible. We’ve navigated the rise of digital, the shift to mobile, the data explosion, and the demand for accountability. Yet, the current inflection point driven by artificial intelligence feels fundamentally different. It’s not just another channel to manage or tool to adopt; it’s a foundational shift in how work gets done, how strategies are formulated, and how teams are structured. The pressure to adapt isn’t just about staying competitive; it’s about redefining what marketing is capable of achieving.
This new era demands more than just a passing familiarity with AI prompts or a line item in the budget for a new generative tool. It requires us to become orchestrators of a complex symphony of human talent, intelligent automation, and interconnected data. The challenge—and the opportunity—lies in weaving these elements together within a framework of agility and collaboration. How do we empower our teams with the right technology without overwhelming them? How do we build processes that are both robust and flexible enough to incorporate rapid innovation? These are the questions keeping leaders up at night, and they require a thoughtful, strategic approach. Christine Royston, Chief Marketing Officer at Wrike, has a unique vantage point on this evolution, both as a marketing leader building an agile organization and as an executive at a company powering collaborative work for enterprises globally.
The CMO as AI Orchestrator
The role of the CMO has always been a balancing act—brand steward, growth driver, customer advocate, and budget hawk. The introduction of AI at scale doesn’t remove any of these responsibilities; it adds a new, critical layer of strategic oversight. It’s no longer sufficient to simply approve the purchase of new technology. The modern CMO must now champion and guide its integration into the very fabric of the marketing function, ensuring it enhances, rather than complicates, the work. This requires a shift in mindset from being a manager of functions to an orchestrator of capabilities, both human and artificial.
Royston sees this as a pivotal evolution of the role, where the focus moves beyond simple resource allocation to a more holistic strategy for technological enablement. It’s about understanding how AI can amplify creativity, streamline execution, and unlock efficiencies across the entire go-to-market motion. This orchestration involves not just the marketing team, but also the cross-functional partners that marketing touches, ensuring a cohesive and intelligent approach across the business.
“I think now CMOs are really needing to think about how do they become orchestrators of AI strategy across their team, across marketing, as well as the pieces of the business that marketing is touching. So I think it’s always been about managing resourcing… But now we need to think about how do we leverage AI within all of that to be more efficient, more creative?”
This perspective reframes AI adoption from a tactical IT decision to a core strategic imperative for the marketing leader. The goal isn’t simply to have more tools, but to have the right tools, deeply integrated into established workflows. The ultimate aim is to augment the human talent on the team—freeing them from manual, repetitive tasks to focus on the strategic, creative, and empathetic work that drives real impact. The orchestrator’s role is to ensure technology serves the team, not the other way around, fostering an environment where innovation can flourish without sacrificing operational excellence.
The Data Dilemma: AI is Only as Good as its Inputs
For all the justifiable excitement around AI agents and intelligent automation, there’s a sobering reality that seasoned leaders understand implicitly: garbage in, garbage out. The promise of AI—whether it’s summarizing project updates, routing approvals, or personalizing campaigns—is entirely dependent on the quality, context, and completeness of the data it can access. For years, we’ve talked about breaking down organizational silos. Now, that conversation has a new, urgent technological imperative. An AI agent, no matter how sophisticated, cannot be effective if it’s operating with fragmented information from disconnected systems.
Royston highlights that while employee adoption of AI tools is high, their effectiveness is often capped by this very problem. The real risk isn’t that people won’t use AI; it’s that the AI they use will be hamstrung by a lack of structured, centralized knowledge, leading to suboptimal or even incorrect outputs. This places a new premium on establishing a single source of truth for work.
“I think the risk is, is AI using the right data? Is it using a complete set of data to help to move work along? And so I think that really points to the need for having this structured knowledge. Do you have all of your workflows documented so that AI has the right inputs to actually be helpful to you and give you the right output?”
This insight should resonate with every marketing leader who has ever struggled to get a clear status on a campaign or find the latest approved version of a creative asset. The foundational work of establishing clear, documented workflows and centralizing work in a collaborative management platform is no longer just a best practice for human efficiency; it is the essential prerequisite for unlocking the power of AI. By creating a structured knowledge base—a living record of projects, tasks, goals, and results—we are not only enabling our human teams to collaborate more effectively but also training our future AI assistants to be truly helpful partners in the work.
Cultivating Agility in an Era of Perpetual Change
“Do more with less” is a phrase that has echoed in marketing departments for decades. Today, however, it’s paired with the relentless acceleration of technological change and shifting market dynamics. Building a team that can thrive in this environment requires more than just implementing agile methodologies; it requires cultivating a culture of adaptability from the ground up. This starts with hiring and extends to the very processes that govern how work gets done. The goal is to build an organization that is not just resilient to change, but one that actively embraces it as an opportunity for innovation.
Royston emphasizes that agility is a function of both people and process. It begins with creating a team that is inherently curious and providing them the psychological safety to experiment, learn, and sometimes fail. But this culture must be supported by operational frameworks that are designed for flexibility. Rigid, set-it-and-forget-it workflows are a liability in a world where a new technology or market shift can render them obsolete overnight.
“…as you think about your workflows, your processes, certainly you want them to be robust and measurable. Now we need to make sure they are flexible because technology is changing so much. How are we going to apply AI and new innovation to those workflows so that we’re not building something that’s so rigid that we have to rebuild it when there is a change in process or when there is a new technology that’s gonna make it so much more efficient.”
This approach calls for a continuous optimization mindset. Leaders must empower their teams to constantly question and refine their processes, integrating new tools and innovations as they become available. This flexibility, however, cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be tethered to a clear and unwavering alignment with the broader company strategy. When every team member understands what success looks like for the business, they are empowered to make agile decisions and experiment in ways that drive the right results. It’s this combination of an experimental culture, flexible processes, and strategic alignment that transforms a marketing department from a reactive cost center into a proactive engine for growth.
The New Imperative
The path forward for marketing leaders is one of thoughtful integration and continuous evolution. The core tenets of marketing—understanding the customer, building a brand, and driving growth—remain unchanged. What has changed is the toolkit at our disposal and the speed at which we are expected to operate. The successful CMOs of tomorrow will be those who can seamlessly weave AI into the collaborative fabric of their organizations, not as a replacement for human ingenuity, but as a powerful amplifier of it. This requires a deep focus on the foundational elements: building a culture of curiosity, establishing flexible yet robust workflows, and ensuring that all efforts are underpinned by a clean, structured, and accessible source of data.
Looking ahead, the stakes will only get higher. As AI makes sophisticated execution more accessible, customer expectations will rise in tandem. The era of one-size-fits-all messaging is decisively over. As Royston notes, personalization is rapidly shifting from a “nice-to-have” differentiator to a fundamental requirement. A missed mark in communication will no longer be seen as an impersonal quirk, but as a failure of the brand to leverage the technology it knows its customers assume it has. This presents both a challenge and a profound opportunity. By embracing our roles as orchestrators and building intelligent, agile, and collaborative marketing organizations, we can move beyond simply reaching customers to connecting with them in ways that are more relevant, valuable, and meaningful than ever before. It is, without a doubt, a fascinating time to be a marketer.
