I just recorded a new Tech Marketing Rewired podcast with Christine Royston, CMO at Wrike. Gotta tell you, I was super excited to talk to her as Wrike is kind of killing it right now in the AI game… and am quite the nerd when it comes to great workflow software.
Last year, most CMOs were in “experimentation mode” with AI. But as we enter 2026, the game has changed. Christine is leading one of the most progressive operational shifts I’ve seen, moving Wrike beyond the hype to truly operationalize AI to hit high growth targets.
What’s fascinating is what I’d call her “superpower” perspective. She isn’t just a marketer using AI; she is the CMO of the platform that builds the very operating system for how work gets done.
Here are my biggest takeaways from our conversation:
Most companies tack AI onto an existing Ops person’s plate. Christine did the opposite: she created a dedicated role reporting directly to her to upskill an existing, non-AI native organization.
“I created a dedicated role on my team reporting to me, that is focused on AI and automation specific to marketing... We’re looking at how do we move from sort of traditional marketing to AI enabled marketing, without requiring that everybody becomes a data scientist overnight.”
My take: You need a “builder” who understands marketing but has the technical chops to audit workflows. This “hybrid” role acts as an internal consultant, sitting down with leadership to find pain points and build solutions so the rest of the team can stay in their flow.
Christine implemented a team-wide OKR to improve efficiency by 10%. By leaving the specific tactics up to individual functions, she turned a corporate mandate into a grassroots innovation challenge.
“I set an OKR for the entire marketing team to improve efficiency by 10% for each of their workflows. And I left it open because I wanted them to identify what are those workflows that have the biggest opportunity for efficiency with AI.”
My take: Efficiency gains don’t “click” for a team until they experience them firsthand. When an automation saves an SEO team 90% of the time on redirect mapping, they don’t see AI as a threat. They see it as a gift of time for more strategic work.
Traditional marketing structures, where strategy is handed from team to team like a conveyor belt, create massive bottlenecks. We see that in our agency world too. Christine is breaking those silos by restructuring her team into agile pods organized around specific business outcomes like brand awareness or specific industry pipelines.
“We’re moving away from these silos toward building these cross-functional pods that have specific objectives... We’re looking at how does a combined team drive more impact than passing it down this conveyor belt of production.”
My take: This is the most significant structural shift a CMO can make in 2026. When you put a designer, a demand gen lead, and a product marketer in a single pod with one objective, you eliminate the “messy middle” and allow the team to act in real-time. By the way, we use “pods” here at Mighty & True, and I gotta tell you, it works.
To complement the pod structure, Wrike moved away from rigid quarterly cadences to an ongoing, rolling three-month planning cycle. This allows the team to spin up temporary pods for short-term initiatives, like a big event, without waiting for the next fiscal quarter.
“One of the other sort of operational changes that we made was moving to a rolling planning process... ongoing three-month planning cycles... we want to make sure we’re not drawing these artificial lines of a fiscal quarter to hamper the way we are thinking about planning for the future.”
My take: In the AI era, an annual plan is basically ancient history by month six. Rolling planning ensures your resources are always allocated to your highest-priority bets, allowing you to “borrow” people from one pod to another as priorities shift.
Christine is a firm believer that you cannot automate a broken process. Before implementing AI at scale, her teams must revisit, document, and optimize their workflows to ensure the technology is actually driving value.
“Before implementing AI at scale, you have to look at your processes first... and then apply AI on top of it. I’m definitely a proponent of human in the loop. I think humans still have to be involved, but maybe it allows us to shorten that review cycle.”
My take: AI shouldn’t be a “rubber stamp.” The goal is to use AI to push the work further before a human ever touches it, reclaiming hundreds of hours for the team while maintaining strict clarity around who owns the final output.
Listen to the full conversation:
Catch all the Tech Marketing Rewired Podcasts here. Have an idea for a guest or podcast topic? Let me know!
If you need help with strategic gaps that you just can’t seem to fill and are looking for ways to use AI and automation in your marketing organization, contact the team at my company, Mighty & True and we’ll be glad to help!
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