Asana CMO Prachi Gore explains why AI’s biggest marketing opportunity lies beyond content creation, as agents reshape workflows, B2B buying and growth.
Damian Fowler (00:00):
I'm Damian Fowler.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):
And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.
Damian Fowler (00:02):
And welcome to The Big Impression.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:03):
This week we're joined by Prachi Gore, chief marketing officer at Asana.
Damian Fowler (00:08):
And today we're going to be talking about AI. In recent years, AI has largely been framed as a creative assistant, which helps people write faster, brainstorm quicker, and automate pieces of work. But now AI is playing a different kind of role.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:21):
And that's where Asana is making a big bet, positioning itself not just as a productivity tool, but as the connective layer between people, workflows, and AI agents.
Damian Fowler (00:31):
Asana's underway with a major brand transformation, signaling a bigger shift in how work might happen with AI that can actually act with context. Asana's now embedded directly into Anthropic's claude.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:42):
It's not just about what the model can do. It's about what it knows about your work, your team, and your priorities.
Damian Fowler (00:49):
So let's get into it. So Prachi, we talked there about a huge brand transformation with AI taking center stage. Can you talk us through that transformation and also the campaign that stems from it?
Prachi Gore (01:01):
Absolutely. So when I came to Asana about six months ago at this point, one thing was very clear to me that this was going to be a category transformation. And as marketers, we've dreamt of category definition for years. I didn't think that I would get the opportunity to come do it. And the reason was that Asana was playing in a category called collaborative work management, and that was amazing and just the right fit for what Asana was doing for all of these years for our customers. But in the last year or so, we've completely transformed our product strategy, our product roadmap. And if you look at what Asana is doing today and in the future, the value delivered to our customers is significantly different than what collaborative work management captured. And so that was the trigger to say, okay, we need brand transformation. And the pace of innovation is so rapid that we needed to go accomplish this fast.
(01:59):
We did have a large customer event in London that just happened on June 4th and we decided that was going to be our launch point. So it became like the galvanizing point to almost a forcing function for us to bring everything together and launch at this moment. And so that's the project. And we went from being a collaborative work management tool to the operating system for human agent teams. And the category that we are calling this is agentic work management where humans and agents work together in a workflow.
Damian Fowler (02:34):
So what changed in the product and then what changed
Prachi Gore (02:38):
In terms of
Damian Fowler (02:38):
How you market the product?
Prachi Gore (02:40):
Absolutely. Many, many things. So from a product perspective, what was clear to us, Asana is fantastic at making work easy. So we bring lots of humans together and allow them to collaborate on the platform to get work done. What was very clear a few years ago was that the future of work is agentic and in an agentic enterprise, you're going to have agents and humans both working together. And so for the product, we designed the workflows within Asana to be agentic, which meant we launched our own AI teammates. We work with most of the top LLMs, but we have our own teammates that have the context, that have the decisioning frameworks, the approval processes, all of the workgraph elements to work with the humans to say, "Okay, I'm your teammate." And the biggest difference from any other agent out there here is that our teammates are what we call multiplayer.
(03:35):
In that, I'll give you an example. I have a teammate called brand strategist and my teammate I work with, but most of my leadership team and brand team can also call the same agent to do back and forth just like you would with a human brand strategist. And so that is a huge differentiating factor where you can have these teammates. So I think that was a big product shift. We have other automation AI products, we have chat, MCP. So we've enabled all AI capabilities, but that was one big shift. And then the second big product shift was we served largely marketing, operations, IT product teams, but we were launching new products to do very different workflows outside of this. So not only did we create Agentic products, we created multiple Agentic products that we'll bring to market this year.
Damian Fowler (04:23):
That sounds like a fairly high pressure transformation.
Prachi Gore (04:29):
It is. I think high pressure, yes. But when you are changing so many things and being transformative as a company and as a product strategy, as a marketer, you have a lot more leeway to go test very different things out. The box just became significantly larger and different. And so I think yes, high pressure. And we gave ourselves a very short time, like 90 days from when we said we are going to go do this to actually deliver, but it has been a fun process.That
Ilyse Liffreing (04:56):
Is a quick timeframe.
Prachi Gore (04:58):
Yeah, it is. I
Ilyse Liffreing (05:00):
Know. When it comes to AI overall, we've basically spent the last two years talking about it as a creative tool, but now I feel like marketers and you're the best person to speak to this, are really taking it more in terms of operational and how they can use it internally to create faster work and
Prachi Gore (05:22):
Turnaround.
(05:23):
I agree with you. I like the framing of creative tool. I had not thought about it that way, but you're right because for the most part in the last two years, we've used AI to just produce more content, to produce images, produce ideas, lots and lots of ideas. And what that has resulted in is a lot of output. Each one of us individually just got so much faster at producing a ton of output. But when you take a step back, and it made us faster as individuals for sure. But when you take a step back and think about the business as a whole, whether it's just marketing or your entire company, you don't see the real impact of that on the metrics that matter, which is growth. The outcomes aren't quite there. And that is at this point, lots of different studies have indicated that 95% of the businesses who've experimented with AI or have embedded AI are seeing little to no ROI from those investments.
(06:21):
And the reason I believe is that we haven't yet unleashed the operational power of AI and that operational power will only be realized when we as humans bring the agents into our processes, into our workflows to go do the work. And when we start doing that, the outcome will be there and the outcome will drive ROI. So I think the technology is there. It can do it. I think we need to think differently about the how.
Damian Fowler (06:54):
For users of Asana, we use Asana, everyone does, what is the message? What do you need clients to understand about this shift?
Prachi Gore (07:03):
Yeah. If you're familiar with Asana and have used it for many years, you know it as a collaboration tool, a project management software. There are many kind of connotations of what it does for you, and that's true. I have been an Asana customer or I was an Asana customer for many years before I came to Asana. And when I met Dan, our CEO, for the first time and he shared his vision for the company, there was a big aha moment where I was like, wow, that is the problem I see with our own AI efforts, but I never saw Asana as the unlock for it. And going forward, our goal is to help our customers understand that they are going to need to identify their businesses, they are going to need a system that brings together people and their agents to have full context, to be able to run what we call workflows, but it's like who's going to do what, when, why, have the audit trail really go deliver on the outcomes together to be able to truly be agentic.
(08:03):
And that is a very different use of a product that you may have used as a project management system, for example. So that is what we want our clients to really understand. And we've had hundred plus early adopters and customers and some of these are big logos like FedEx and Cost, which is a big retail brand who've been design partners who've done early adoption of these AI technologies. And FedEx, for example, their speed to market improved nine times. So you can see the outcome, but you have to just do it differently.
Damian Fowler (08:39):
Wow.
Ilyse Liffreing (08:39):
That makes sense. Earlier this year, Asana also embedded itself directly into Claude, which is a big signal about where work is headed to. What made this the right partnership with all the other multiple LLMs out there?
Prachi Gore (08:52):
Yeah, look, our partnership with Claude is multifaceted. I'll say that our AI teammates use LLMs, all of the top tier LLMs. Claude is definitely one of them. And internally we use Claude as a customer. There is that customer relationship. We also launched our MCP, which then allows you to call on Asana using Claude. And the reason to do this is, and we have MCPs with all other LLMs too, but the reason to do this was to allow our customers to work where they want to work from. And so what we are seeing is if a Claude customer is using Claude for many of their own individual things like, "Oh, what tasks are you today? Can you reference these two tasks and tell me what blah, blah, blah?" They'll call on Asana context through Claude and then for more cross-team collaboration, "Hey, let's go launch this product in six weeks and we have our launch planner." They come to that in Asana and could leverage Claude as the LLM for it.
(09:55):
And then the third thing is Claude is our customer. So Claude uses Asana and their engineering leader has talked about this on his podcast multiple times where they call on Claude agents to run their own workflows with Asana. So it is a deep partnership in many ways.
Damian Fowler (10:09):
That's a good virtuous circle in lots
Prachi Gore (10:12):
Of ways, I think. It is, yeah.
Damian Fowler (10:14):
One of the challenges of AI is sometimes it's only as good as the context it has. How do you think about Asana's role in the context layer of all of these different elements that
Prachi Gore (10:24):
We talked about? Yeah. I mean, look, the context we naturally have is all the stuff that is embedded into our Wordgraph. And those are things like goals, the projects that ladder up to those goals, the tasks that everyone is doing, the decisions that were made, the approvals that are due. So it's like who did what when, all of that information for what outcome is all in Asana. That is the context we have. And in addition to that, we have all these integrations where we pull context from your Zoom meetings, from your Slack, from whatever, calendar, Gmail, Google Drive. So we have all of that. I can do that. You can do that. Yes. You just have to go and connect it, but we could do all of that. I mean, we use Google. We use Google Drive and Sheets. So you could get all of the context now into Asana.
(11:12):
And so that kind of in some ways is almost like your company brain, I would say, because everything you as a company do, all the projects, your teams, what are they working on is all in Asana. And for me, I think the light bulb moment was when I realized not only does it have context to give you better answers, to do the work better, but what is amazing is it can also signal risks. We use Asana for our aggressive brand campaign, for instance. It'll give you, it'll alert things like, oh, this project is not on track and that impacts all of your laddering initiatives. And so we could become so much more proactive as a marketing team, which in the past when we weren't using AI and Asana in that way, imagine how many meetings you would have to go to just uncover that one insight.
Ilyse Liffreing (12:04):
Aprachi, can you describe what you're hoping to achieve with this new brand transformation? Are there any specific KPIs that you're looking for?
Prachi Gore (12:13):
Yeah. For us, I mean, look, marketing is a growth driver for the business. And so the primary KPI is can we drive growth, especially for our agentic work management and all our new products. But the secondary, two other KPIs for this particular effort that are important to us is one is category creation and the awareness of Asana, but awareness as what? And so can we change the perception of the buyer and how long does it take us to go do that with this new messaging? So it is definitely that perception. And then the second element of that perception is we are truly today an AI first company in the products and in everything we've built, honestly. Can we change that perception as well? So the effort is geared towards really unveiling who Asana is today and what it can do for our customers through perception of Adnes and eventually growth.
Damian Fowler (13:09):
So kind of the brand story in lots of ways because I'm already intrigued where it's going as a user, but there's a lot of world to explore, it sounds
Prachi Gore (13:18):
Like. Yeah, yeah. No, it's going to be amazing.
Damian Fowler (13:22):
On that sort of point, I guess today, and obviously this happened at Asana, but it happens in all companies, AI is accelerating this change
Prachi Gore (13:30):
Inside
Damian Fowler (13:31):
Companies and the way things move at a new pace. How are you managing to kind of bridge gaps, stay on top of it, keep speed top of mind and get everything done?
Prachi Gore (13:44):
Yeah. I'll share two things that I learned through our process here in doing this. One is the pace of innovation is so high and the speed at product teams are able to launch real MVP and beyond products, like great products has, I don't know, 10X faster and it's definitely Asana. Our inch teams are fantastic, our product and edge, but I see that across other CMOs I speak to as well, just the pace of innovation and products coming to market has increased. And so as a CMO, you always have to be close to your product team and you're taking the product to market, but you just have so much more. You can run longer cycles on research, on value prop testing, on all of these different things, which is we don't have that luxury today. So we have to be very much in lockstep with our product teams way more than we need to in the past.
(14:38):
So I think that is one because product is talking to lots of customers. We are talking to customers. We have to be constantly be exchanging those ideas so we can iterate on our messaging and take something to market fast with the product launch. The second big takeaway for me in this is I've been doing this for a very long time and there was, I would say until two-ish years ago, there was a point where you lock in a positioning and that positioning stays relevant for three to five years, long enough. And what I'm finding in this, just because the pace of innovation is so fast and new strategies and new products can come to market so fast, the vision stays true. What you are here to do as a company, the value you want to serve to your customers, that doesn't change. But who you are today could change, not dramatically, but directionally based on new products you launch, new capabilities you bring to market so that you have to be nimble as a marketing team.
(15:35):
So you bring something to market, you test iterate, but don't get locked into it that now this is the only thing for three to five years because we have the capacity to innovate fast with the market and marketing has to keep up.
Ilyse Liffreing (15:47):
So Prachi, Sona has talked a lot about human agenting. What does that actually look like in practice over the next few years?
Prachi Gore (15:55):
Yeah. We firmly believe that the future is agentic, but in that agentic enterprise or that agentic future, the role of the human is very critical. We see it in our day-to-day. We use our AI teammates very regularly. We've been dogfooding this for a year, and so we use agents in their full capacity, but the humans play a very critical role still in dictating the strategy, the judgment. We've talked about this taste and judgment thing, but I've experienced it firsthand. When someone with experience and know-how and great judgment and taste prompts an agent to do something, the output is significantly different, and I would say significantly better than someone who doesn't. So agents left on their own will get you something. They do fine, but if you want great, if you want transformational, if you want to be that company that is really driving value and outcomes, the human aspect is very important, is very critical.
(16:59):
And so we see the role of the human as important. And in many of the conversations I've been having with other CMOs, I think that has been the theme that has been very consistent in the conversations, which wasn't two years ago. There was a lot of.
(17:18):
Jobs are going to change for sure. Everyone's job is going to change. We are going to be AI adjacent in many ways in the things we do, but there are many really important human aspects that when brought to the table will drive significantly better outcomes and output leveraging AI.
Damian Fowler (17:35):
Very much so. Now we've touched on this a little bit, but now you're very much in the game of B2B marketing, and we found that on this podcast, B2B marketing has evolved in its own right
Prachi Gore (17:48):
In the
Damian Fowler (17:49):
Last few years. What's the overall trend and where's Asana showing up in that evolution?
Prachi Gore (17:54):
Yeah. I mean, the B2B playbook has been completely disrupted. And I would say to some extent B2C as well, but definitely B2B. And a few aspects that I'll bring to this conversation here today. One disruption is that because the LLMs give answers, our buyers are almost coming to us with a shot list of their requirements or even vendors who they want to talk to and don't want to talk to. So gone are the days where we could get the click and then drive the user journey to get them to consideration, to get them to decision. They're coming in largely educated and with a shot list at hand. And so how do we, in that moment, in the journey of that research on the LLM show up in a credible way to drive that consideration without any contact with the customer? That is very new for B2B because we've had the luxury to have a deeper relationship, to do a lot of song and dance to get to the final outcome.
(19:00):
Now, the relationship aspect doesn't change. They still want to have that trust and have that confidence before they finally become a customer, but it's towards the tail end. They're coming already with a shot list made. Interesting. I think that is one big difference. I think the other big difference is how. So in B2B, you were able to segment your audiences by persona or industry, but beyond that, it was pretty much a generic message that you had to put out to say, "Hey, I know you are in manufacturing. I know you're a marketer or an operations person. Here's a message for you." And the power of AI allows us to get extremely tailored at the company, at the individual level, and then still have the human in the loop to say, "Okay, this message seems right, so send or not, you could do it in an automated way." But that to me is almost like ABM at an individual scale, which was never.
(19:56):
It was expensive to do it before if you wanted to do it that way. It's significantly accessible now to any company. And so there is no excuse in B2B to not be hyper relevant and hyper tailored and personalized at the individual level. The technology is finally there to allow us to do that. The promise has existed for a while, but today the technology is there. So you're
Damian Fowler (20:17):
Basically tailoring messaging to different
Prachi Gore (20:18):
Audiences? At the individual level. Yeah, you could get to that. We still have in our knowledge base, our product marketing team will still create persona specific narratives, messaging, content, industry specific. So we have the repository is still kind of segmented, but the exchange of, let's say I'm going to send you an email, I could be hyper tailored knowing you're a podcast host, you do this. It's like in my outreach, I don't have to just be like agencies or high level.
Ilyse Liffreing (20:47):
What becomes more valuable in an AI first workplace, would you say? Is it the speed, the alignment, the knowledge, or can you really not choose because they're all important to
Prachi Gore (20:59):
You? I mean, I think speed is there. So I think we've proven that speed is there, but the value in an AI, what's most valuable in an AI first world is the alignment, I would say. When things are moving so fast and if everyone has become so much faster, the value of the alignment and staying on course together as a collective company or team just becomes so much more important. Otherwise, the failure mode of the silos will just be more visible. So I do think the alignment piece is critical.
Damian Fowler (21:33):
I think that's such a good point because anytime, speaking from experience, things don't work, it's the silo thing. It's the
Prachi Gore (21:40):
Silo
Damian Fowler (21:40):
Effect. Oh, nobody communicated that to me.
Prachi Gore (21:43):
Yeah. And the silos were always bad, which is why you want to collaborate, you want the cross-functional visibility and alignment, but with the pace and the speed, we just don't have the breathing room to not be aligned.
Damian Fowler (21:57):
Very
Prachi Gore (21:58):
True.
Damian Fowler (21:58):
Do you think the winners in AI productivity will be the companies with the best models or the companies with the richest workflow data?
Prachi Gore (22:06):
I think the winners in AI productivity will be. The underlying models are strong. They are fantastic. And so we all have access to that and I think we leverage that. But I do think the winners will be the ones who take the models, layer that with context, like deep rich context, and then allow for the agents and humans to access that context together in long horizon end-to-end processes and workflows that we all work on together. That's the stack and the real unlock for productivity and outcomes.
Ilyse Liffreing (22:39):
All right. So looking forward five years from now, what will the most AI mature marketing organizations be doing differently than everyone else? Look into your crystal ball.
Prachi Gore (22:53):
Look, in marketing, our organizations are going to transform in many ways. Many of our teams in the past have done a lot of work for the work. AI can do a lot of that quite easily. It could do a ton with data and analytics and provide insights and write content. So I think we will be leveraging AI significantly to do repeatable pattern-based tasks, driving efficiency for all of us. We will be leveraging AI to do all of the work for work. And what that will create is a team that is capable and has the time to allocate to do the things that excite us all. The reason I got into marketing was not to do 15 status updates or make all these decks and presentations. It was to be creative and to be strategic and understand the customer and speak to the pain. I think the fundamentals of the value that marketing drives for an organization does not change.
(23:54):
The how has changed and is changing rapidly. So in five years, I think we'd still be leaning in on those first principles that make great marketing and then doing it in completely different ways, leveraging AI.
Ilyse Liffreing (24:07):
So we have some final hot seat
Prachi Gore (24:09):
Quick
Ilyse Liffreing (24:09):
Take questions for you. What would you say is the biggest myth about AI at work right now?
Prachi Gore (24:15):
That AI can solve all your problems. It doesn't. Fair. It could get you a long way, but not all of them.
Damian Fowler (24:21):
Okay. What's one workflow marketers should stop doing manually today?
Prachi Gore (24:25):
Status updates. I mean, those are important for visibility and communication, so we should be doing status updates, but not manually. What
Ilyse Liffreing (24:34):
Would you say are CMOs underestimating about AI adoption?
Prachi Gore (24:38):
How the unleash that marketing teams can get if you operationalize or embed AI into an end-to-end workflow. We've seen that with our events workflows and all of our campaigns, and I cannot describe the power of that. I think we are all kind of touching it at the seam, but don't be scared. Just get it into your workflow and build it out. It requires some systems thinking. It does require a different mindset, but that will unleash amazing stuff for marketing.
Damian Fowler (25:09):
And finally, what's one thing about the future of work that excites you the most?
Prachi Gore (25:14):
That we get a lot of time back to do the things that we love doing and work is going to change drastically and it's going to for the better. We firmly believe that the future is agentic, but in that agentic enterprise or that agentic future, the role of the human is very critical.