SaaStr 2025 Ai Stage

Partners, John Gleason.

We're waiting.

Please welcome to the stage—

there we go—

CCO Canva, Rob Giglio.

Hey, John.

Hey, how you doing, Ralph?

That's a long walk from over there, let me tell you.

I know, the smoke, I got a little lost on the way. All right, folks.

This is a good desk setup.

I know, you ready to get grilled?

I'm ready, let's go.

Game on.

Hope they're ready.

All right, folks. Hey, everybody, my name is John Gleason. I'm the founder and managing partner at Success Venture Partners. The significance of that fund is that the LPs are some of the best CCOs in the world, 130 CCOs. So if there's one thing I love talking to and talking about and talking with, it's great CCOs. So let me introduce you all to my friend, Rob Ji Lee Ho. There we go. Did we get that right?

Nailed it.

There. There we go. All right. So Rob is the Chief Customer Officer at Canva. Where he oversees not only customer success, but Canva's entire sales and go-to-market functions. Rob brings over 20 years of industry experience leading and executing global marketing and sales initiatives. Before Canva, Rob was at HubSpot, where he was also the Chief Customer Officer. Before that, he was the Chief Marketing Officer at DocuSign, and prior to that, he spent 10 years at Adobe, where he's leading their go-to-market teams for their digital media business, and was responsible for $7 billion worth of revenue. He's truly one of the most accomplished and sharpest leaders I know in go-to-market. Everybody, let's welcome Rob. Here we go.

You're a pretty good hype man, John. That's good. Thank you.

I'm hyping you up.

Yeah, that's really good. You're gassing me up. Me right up.

Game on. All right, so Rob, I gotta ask, because you've got a pretty big title, Chief Customer Officer, but when we were prepping, it's more than just, you know, the customer side of things. It's in the entire go-to-market motion. So tell me a little bit more just like about the title. What's your remit? What does it look like?

Yeah, I think it's an evolution that's going on in our industry, which is there are groups of people who care the most about a customer, and you organize those teams into a single organization. Some places call it go-to-market, some people call it the customer org, and some people describe the leader of that group as the chief customer officer, really for no other reason other than to give a title that attaches to the most important entity in any business's, um, radar, which is the customer. And I think just by title, it forces you back to focus on the customer. So it's a big to-do about a title that just really is focusing you on customers.

Which is like, it's so obvious, right? Like ultimately, all of us exist, we're building our companies to serve customers, and somewhere in the mix, we forgot about that capital C thing, the customer, right?

Yeah, yeah, and I think we always used to sort of, have these like very commercial sounding titles to do the same thing, and it just disconnected the work from who you're serving. And so that's why Canva did it, that's why HubSpot does it that way, and that's why many companies have changed their titling to a Chief Customer Officer, or oftentimes it's like purely customer success, but in Canva it's customer success, and it's sales, and it's operations, and things focused on the customer.

I love it. I love it. All right. So you've held the top go-to-market position, though, at Adobe, at DocuSign, at HubSpot, now Canva. You know, I often tell people, you know, when you're building a career, think of your career maybe as like if you're a venture capitalist, right? And unlike me, I get to make a whole bunch of mistakes. I only need one to work out. You're quite the picker. You— You picked, you know, 4 amazing companies. So just like talk me through that like picking process. Like how did, you know, you left one amazing company off to another amazing company. How'd that process come to be? You know, how did you know that this was the next one?

Yeah, so how did I know Canva was the right place to go?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I do a lot of mentoring to folks that are younger in their career. And one of the things I describe is as you're managing your career, you are actually managing a portfolio of opportunities. You have a portfolio of options, and you're gonna place a bet. And the way you place a bet on a career should be very similar to the way you'd place a bet on making an investment. Do you believe in the product is A, number one. Do you believe in the leadership team and the culture? That's number two. Unlike placing a bet where you're removed from what happens with the outcomes, the third one is, can you make a, can you make a difference? Like, is this a company where your unique set of skills are needed and you're actually adding some kind of incremental value as opposed to just taking up a job in a role that anybody could do? And so I've tried to avoid jobs where, um, like anybody could just do it because it would be hard to really create a difference. and I've tried to find places where maybe my unique experiences or things that I've learned along the way can, can be helpful to the company. So Canva was really pretty straightforward. A massive customer scale with a product that people loved, a leadership team that had an amazing culture, one that I really aligned with, one that was definitely customer first. Like we talk about giving value first and getting value second. We talk about our two-step mission, which is we want to do as much good as we can in the world as possible, but the only way to do a lot of good is to get a lot of value. So we want to be big so we can do a lot of good. And so I just— that aligned really well with me. And when I got a— I actually got a text from one of the founders who I had met years before, and it was like the afternoon before Thanksgiving here in the US. Australia obviously he doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, and he's like, "Hey, can we talk tomorrow?" And I was like, "Well, it's Thanksgiving, but maybe my family would be okay with that. Maybe early morning." He's like, "Oh, sorry, mate, early morning is middle of the night for us." So late afternoon on Thanksgiving, we chatted, and the rest was history. At the time, Canva was like maybe 170 million monthly active users, and depending on what slide you're looking at, You'll see that we're at 230 million monthly active users now. So the company has come a long way in a very short period of time. Yeah, I'm getting a wow from the audience. That's a quarter of a billion people using the product every month. Yeah, clap for me. It's an amazing product. So back to the idea that it's a great product. Um, and I think the cool thing is a lot of companies think about vanity stats. You know, you could throw a chart like this up and you and you could think about it as a vanity stat, but we at Canva try really hard to make sure that when we say monthly active use, it's actually completing a design. So it's not just opening something and starting, it's opening something and finishing, feeling like they've completed it. It's been shared with someone, it's been downloaded, it's been saved, it's been copied. Something has happened with that design, it's been published, and then that qualifies as monthly active use. So these are not vanity stats as much as they're north stars for us to stay focused.

And I love that. It's like really thinking through almost like the desired outcome. Sometimes like, yeah, the first click we measured it there, but it's actually like people are getting like that desired outcome when they sign up for Canva.

Yeah, that's the idea.

That's the idea.

Okay.

The numbers though, like, oh my God, those are insane numbers. Everybody, I think, admires Canva for the product-led motion that you've all built. You know, if there was a poster, you know, best PLG-led company, Canva would be probably front and center. But you came in to build a different part of the business in a lot of ways. Like, you're— you got brought in to build the enterprise part of the business. So, like, tell me about that, right? Sometimes it's a big hurdle when you have a PLG motion and and then you start to go into the enterprise. What did it look like day one? What were some of the cool things, the green flags, let's call them, and what were some of the red flags?

Yeah, so I think the first things first is, and most of you probably know this, if you've been knocking around in the SaaS world for a while, we all know it's a lot easier to go from PLG to SLG than to go from SLG to PLG. That is a very hard motion to backchannel. I worked on that side of the business back when I was at Adobe, and I can tell you it's really hard to go from like a mindset of enterprise only down into a touchless PLG motion. It's way easier to go PLG upmarket. And the reason I say that is, um, in a PLG motion, when you have a well-instrumented product and a decent amount of customer love and product engagement, you're getting signals every day. And so So green flags for us were we had a lot of data, we had a lot of good product usage data. We weren't using it necessarily in the ways that looked like you could get a sales-led motion going, but we knew what we needed to do to get there. Um, it was literally all about the data and its use. Uh, so that was one of the biggest green flags. I think the other big green flag was we were building an enterprise product, so we had an intentionality to building something that was really right for enterprises, as opposed to just having this self-serve product and thinking we could charge more and jam it into an enterprise. That was not our mindset at all. We wanted to give value first and get value second. Red flags: we hadn't done it before. We had a culture that thought touchless. We had a culture that, like, really leaned heavily on organic network-driven adoption. And so we had to think about, like, what is organic network-led adoption inside of an enterprise. And although I think Canva does a great job at PLG and we've done a good job transitioning early phases to SLG, there are a million and one great examples in the world that do it really, really well and arguably in many vectors better than Canva does. And we try to spend a lot of time watching what others do and, and we try to search and reapply. I mean, that's like the, the highest form form of flattery.

Yeah, of course. And, you know, like, Canva's got a really special culture, so I imagine, like, you know, introducing this new part of, you know, the business wasn't something that the founders took lightly. So, like, what was the journey they went on? You know, were they, you know, fully fleshed out with where they thought PLG could take them? Was it, you know, the next frontier of scale? Like, what, what was their process when they came to you and they're like, yo, Rob, like, "We got a job for you here." Well, it was—

it started with— the company's mission is to empower the world to design. So if you're going to empower the world to design, you have to be where the world is designing, and largely that's inside of businesses, that's inside of companies, organizations, higher ed, places where applications, in particular SaaS applications, are largely controlled by some sort of administrative process. So think CIO, CTO, admin. And so to get into those kind of environments, we had to, we had to think differently. And so it started first with the founders saying, that's a place we want to help people design and create and communicate. And then the next step was, let's figure out how to go do that. The thing that was really, I think, as anybody who's a founder in here or an early-stage company, the thing that really mattered a lot was is like, don't have two different cultures. Don't build an enterprise culture over here with like all the sort of downsides of what we think of as enterprise culture. Like there's a lot of like, you know, sort of like deal-making, finger-pistoling kind of vibe that we did not want to have. That's not our culture. We were, you know, we were really interested in like trying to take complex things and make them easy easy, and we were interested in helping businesses express themselves and communicate and scale, and we felt like we could do that with an enterprise motion if we did it in the context of Canva's culture. Right, right.

So like, what did it all look like? Like, was there actually, was there any AEs there when you got there, or did you have to like start that from the ground up?

There were a couple. There weren't a lot. There was a couple, um, and they were frustrated because they knew what they wanted to to do, and yet the product wasn't there, the motion wasn't there. We weren't really putting the right signals in place. And one of the expressions that I think maybe is showing up on a slide is data drives signals, and then signals drive actions. And so the data was living passively. We weren't grabbing it and sending signals to AEs. And those signals didn't have a set of steps or actions that live behind them. And so now, as an example, we gather together network effect inside of a business. We look at like multiple use and collaboration inside of an organization, and then we send a certain amount of touchless signals, email, in-product, maybe ABM. We might do retargeting, and then eventually that sequence is ready for some sort of outbound motion. But it's not a totally cold outbound motion. We're going outbound into an enterprise that's already using Canva. And so we think data drives these signals. These signals make us prepared to create actions, and then we have to have the right actions. And the next slide I love because the process of how you do that matters as much as the skill. And so we started talking about, well, what would be the sales process we would follow? And one of the first things that everybody thinks about is like, will this be a Challenger sale or will you use Medpick? or we'll use Winning by Design's SPICE. And I think those questions matter, and the answers to those questions matter. And for the record, we did pick Winning by Design. We are using SPICE. We have a little bit of a Canva flair on it. And that process and methodology matters a lot. But actually what matters underneath that is the skill of our team, our customer success team being great communicators and having a playbook. That's tied to those signals we're getting, and the AEs and our BDRs working in collaboration to have the right level of skill to carry good conversations. And the one thing that we all miss, everybody knows this, is are we super clear on the problem we're solving for our customers? And we anchor ourselves on that like daily. And so yeah, process matters a lot. But if you don't have the skill to have a good customer conversation that feels genuine, that actually is empathetic around the problems they're trying to solve, like, game over. You'll have a hard time, you really will have a hard time growing your sales momentum.

Yeah, and I think like that through line to the customer is like so key. I was telling you backstage, the coworking space where I work out of sometimes, Guy Kawasaki, the Guy Kawasaki, who's your Chief Product Evangelist, he also works out of there, and I said, Guy, like, what, What should I be asking Rob? And he's like, well, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but listen to this podcast with Melanie. And, you know, they go deep on just the culture of Canva. And the thing that like really struck me was just like this incredible customer centricity that you've woven into whether it's like, you know, a student sitting in, you know, some remote place anywhere in the world right through to, you know, a chief designer at IDEO, maybe that customer is front and center. And I thought that was like really a special customer thought.

Well, I mean, it really like ultimately the headline is it always comes down to customer value. The way we think about customer value is we follow a customer journey framework. I think like most of us, this is not any big like, ooh, new thing. Most of us do this, but I think the difference between those that talk about it and those that do it well are the ones who do it well actually start to embed the tracing and tracking of a customer journey from the very first point of awareness all the way through some expression of loyalty, and you can follow the through line of this single customer experience. You're not looking at it as like, what was my my traffic last week, you're actually looking at it at the customer, how— what stages and steps are the customer following to get themselves to some level of loyalty, and are we helping them or are they doing it on their own? And ultimately, if all we think about that matters for Canva is taking someone who's aware and interested in the product and leading them through to solving the problems that they're trying to accomplish, that they're trying to knock down, which might be it might be telling a story, it might be doing something as simple as managing a social media account. If we can draw them through that experience and they're happy with the outcomes, well then we've won. That's one customer that's moved through the customer journey effectively, and then now the question is, can we do that at scale, and can we do it without throwing a whole bunch of bodies at it? And so can we instrument it with some digital experiences and some great trained rep experience? If we can do that, We're off to the races. Right.

So, okay, so as you built that, you know, upmarket enterprise motion, there was a lot of culture there that you wanted to keep. But no doubt there was like things that you wanted to change in process. So what were like some of the tweaks that you made and what were some of the things that you kept?

Yeah, well, I mean, the nice thing is on the, on the enterprise side, there wasn't much that we had to not do. One thing I would say that we had to not do was organizationally. Many of you might work in organizations where you have a customer success team that's like the high-touch customer success team. And then oftentimes what happens is there's a marketing organization or a product organization that is doing customer touches to your online PLG customers. And what that creates is a huge separation between teams. That are essentially trying to solve the same problem, which is how do I help an individual customer accomplish the task that they're trying to accomplish? And am I paying attention to some of the same signals? And so maybe one of the things that we like knocked down was we just decided there's a pool of people and they are in businesses and they are individuals and they are in teams, but they live inside of this common population. And that population are our users, they're our customers. And we shouldn't care whether or not they're paying us a lot of money, or a little bit of money, or no money at all. We should actually be thoughtful about, are we helping them solve their problems, and are we moving them through a journey with the use of our product? And if we do that really effectively, we're gonna get value later. They're gonna tell people about us, they're gonna move up a version and maybe move to a paid version, They're going to invite somebody else in their team to use the product, and ultimately maybe they become a, a larger paying customer. And so we worry a lot less about how much money we're making from a customer. We worry a lot more about how much value are they getting out of the product. Now, our first intent, because we want to be scaled, is can we do that digitally? Can we do it in product? Can we do it through email? Can we do it with some other outreach methodology? Can we do it with AI? If we can, We do, right? If we can't, we try to batch them up. We try to pull them into groups of customers that have like problems, and we can use something like a webinar, or we can use a group email, or we can use a group Zoom session, and we can invite them to connect with a customer success rep with enough scale and enough customers that it's like financially viable because that's what your CFO is going to care about. Like, what is the per-touch cost? And we don't worry about the per-touch cost if you're thinking about scale every time.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting you say that, because I actually had a very similar conversation with John Hurstein, who's the CCO at Box. Similar problem, in that, you know, you could have the end user using Canva to help their kid with their homework, and that person actually happens to be, you know, the Chief Customer Officer at big company XYZ, and is pulling you upmarket into that organization. And so the blanket statement is just like, treat all your customers like gold and really good things happen.

100%. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of us don't pause and actually like unpack the economics of our business models such that we do think about like, what is the real cost of letting a customer wallow versus what is the real cost of providing some level of support? And would be willing to invest in building an infrastructure that provides the kind of scaled support and success experiences that customers really need. So that's how we think about it. The one last thought that I'll throw out with you is we all do an amazing job of customer acquisition. Like, this is an industry, SaaS in particular, we kick ass at orchestrated customer acquisition. Our lead funnels are dialed. We understand We understand all of our funnels. We know the difference between top of funnel and lower funnel. We're great at it. That level of orchestration does not need to live in the presale environment. That orchestration actually is better served in the post-sale environment. Yeah. Like we should be better in the post-sale orchestration of customer experiences than we are in the front side, because most of us, if we're in a SaaS business, we have an install base. And there's no way that the new customer acquisition in any given quarter is gonna dwarf the current install base. All the value's in the install base. So I just, I evangelize that with our team. I evangelize it with people that I talk to. I think it's, it's an overlooked discipline. Be orchestrated post-sale better than you are pre-sale.

And I love it because yeah, we always talk about like, okay, what's the second order revenue if we give them a great experience? And what we forget about is like, what's the second-order loss that happens if we don't give them a great experience? And I think that is really hard to account for, and we kind of just bury that deep somewhere and don't think about it. But man, it can really come back to bite you.

Yep.

All right, so we talked about a little bit about your process. This whole conversation was meant to be about AI. There's so many things I wanted to talk to you about.

Everybody's already talking about AI.

But what about AI?

AI's in every other sentence. Session. We don't need that here.

But okay, so like, tell me some of the cool things that you're doing in your organization right now because you've got an AI-centric platform. No doubt you're doing a ton of amazing work.

Well, we think about AI in like two forms. There's the AI that's in Canva that's available for customers to use. That gets a pretty significant portion of our attention, as you can imagine, because we're trying to put experiences tools in the hands of our end users that allow them to scale imagery ads creation. You know, I think we recently shared that we've had like 16 billion instances of AI usage, which I think ranks amongst the top AI use cases with some of the tippy-top performers in the AI space. So I think we're pretty good on the consumer side. Yeah. On the backend side, If we advance one slide, you'll get the headline. So just like the way we try to make complex things simple, we are focusing for our own team to find complex workflows and complex experiences for our reps. And we're trying to stitch AI next to those to make them easier. And I think that's largely what everybody's trying to do. That's not unique to us. We have a mindset that's like, there are probably great tools in the world. We should start with those tools and implement them in our own workflows as opposed to try to build them ourselves right now. Um, and we're willing to try almost anything if it's a reasonable investment. And we're kind of finding our way. We're building rep to CS processes that are heavily underpinned with AI. We are using AI to like understand. So we're talking about these signals. You get data to give you signals, signals guide actions. That framework is literally our AI philosophy. Great data underpins the models that we're putting in place and the experiences we're stitching on top. And so I think we're okay at it. I think we have a long way to go, which is nice when you're a private company, you can say statements like that. When you're a public company, if you say we have a long way to go, you're like hammered. But I'd say that Canva has a long way to go. We're gonna focus first on getting it right for our customers. Yeah. And then we're gonna get it right for our own team, and we're gonna be thinking about ways to scale to make better experiences for our customers and make it easier for all of our reps to perform their tasks.

You know, I love that though, because it's, you know, it's almost that same humility that has made you such an amazing company from day one. Like solve a small problem for a niche group, right? I think the initial goal was, you know, people in academic situations, and do that really well and go from there and start small and make it big. And it's a pretty amazing journey you've been on. I admire it a lot. So, dude, thank you so much. Thanks so much.

And thanks everybody for listening. Hopefully you got something out of that.

Yeah.

Thank you. All right. Have a great day.

Please welcome to the stage CMO Asana, Shannon Duffy. Happy, happy Tuesday. Got to come get my clicker. All right, so let's talk about AI, marketing, and demand gen. So as I was putting this presentation together, I was reflecting on my career and marketing and how many things that I've seen change. But one thing has remained constant. If you're in marketing, you have been trying pretty much your entire career for the holy grail, and that is how to drive hyper-personalization at scale. Now as marketers, we have been talking about this for years, if not decades, and there's a lot of technologies will say that we can do this and And we can do some of it. But when I think about AI and I think about the power that it gives us as marketers, being able to finally drive this personalization at massive scale is something we're going to be able to do. Now, I want to be clear, we can't necessarily do it just yet. But by implementing marketing into our teams, into our programs, we're going to get that much closer. Now, the thing about AI is it's driving productivity, it's driving all these great gains, but how many times have you gotten something a little weird from AI? And you're probably like, I would like to know what that weird thing is behind you, Shannon. Well, don't worry, I will tell you. So I'm a huge Britney Spears fan. And so every month when I do my all hands call, I have like a little Easter egg of Britney Spears. Britney Spears in there somewhere. Again, I think I'm very funny. And about 6 months ago, I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna have a picture of Britney Spears. I'm gonna use AI, and Britney Spears is gonna thank the marketing team. So off I go to one of the LLMs, and this is what I got, right? And I love this because I think it tells a really good story that AI is getting us there, but there's still some wonky things that we need to work workout. And we're seeing this in the way our marketers and our marketing teams are thinking about AI and what it means. Now, at Asana, we are very passionate about work. Asana is all about making work easier, making work effortless, and we study the way people work. We study the way knowledge workers interact with tasks and tools and projects and we've been studying the way marketers think about AI. And here's what we've seen. We've seen that 38% of marketers are skeptical about using AI. They're skeptical because they don't want to build a janky Britney Spears and send it off to their boss, right? That could be really scary. And we're seeing that 19% of marketers worry that people at work will trust them less. And 26% 77% are worried that their teammates, their colleagues, their boss might think they're lazy. Now this is really important because if people are worried about using AI, they're already worried that AI might take their job away, and now they're worried that the perception that AI means that they're not fully committed to what they're doing. Now here's the thing, AI is going to make people more productive. What it is going to do is transform small teams, individual contributors, small organization into powerhouses. It is going to completely level the playing field. But in order to do this, we have to start using it now, and we have to start think of the technology transformation and the leadership and the cultural transformation we have to drive into our teams. So there are 3 There's 3 main ways that we think about changing the way marketing teams, revenue organization, demand gen organizations think about AI. The first is to start small. If you go to your team and say, I want you to run product launches end to end with AI, you will fail. Now I'm gonna talk about product launches in a little bit because there are ways to start doing something small to get to that ultimate product launch in AI. But we'll talk about that a little bit later. Second, this is probably the greatest leadership challenge we will have in our careers. And the way we get people to use AI is we inspire, we don't mandate. And last, and just as importantly, find those superconductors in your organization. They are there. They might not be where you think they're gonna be. But how do you find these voices, elevate them, and make them those super connectors for your company? Now, what do I mean when I say start small at first? Well, again, at Asana, we talk about work and think about work all the time, and it doesn't matter what project or program or initiative that you're going to drive. There are 4 key parts of any workflow or any project. That's intake, planning, execution, and reporting. Think of this. Think of this next time you have to do a thing, a big thing, a big project. If you think about it, all of the work can be put in one of these buckets. So intake, that is how you get all the requests, how do you sort them in the right places and make sense of what you have to do. Planning, how do you assign deadlines, resources, deliverables to to certain dates. Execution, actually doing the work, writing the content, writing the brief, creating the creative, and of course reporting. Now I like to tell people is when you're thinking about getting started with AI for these marketing programs, think about the manual repetitive tasks at each of these stages. They exist at each and every one of them. In particular, there's a lot in planning and execution But really, when you're thinking about how do we start small and move big with AI, you can find them at every part of this process. The second, how do you inspire and not mandate? Now, I want to be clear, AI will disrupt work. It will transform jobs, and it will probably take certain jobs away. But the way that people can lean into this and truly revolutionize and change their careers are even greater. And I know from past experience it's really, really hard to drive cultural transformations through fear. Think of your own career. Think of times where you've been in a situation where you have been motivated by fear. Probably can't think of a lot. So it's all about inspiring. So two things that we're doing in my marketing team. First, we've transformed the promotion guidelines. So if you think when you're looking at how you promote people, there's usually like a set of things, a rubric, 4 or 5 things that that person would have had to accomplish, behaviors they would have had to demonstrate. We've added, how have you scaled yourself, your team, or the organization with AI? So again, this is much more inspirational than a mandate. This is giving people the authority, and the innovation to come up with ways that they can scale themselves. Second, when we talk about career development, I have career conversations probably every week with people across the organization. And the conversation I have is, how are you leaning into AI? Because this will make you more marketable. Right? This isn't going to take your job away. This isn't going to remove your job. The conversation you need to be thinking about is in 2 years, 3 years, 5 years when you're sitting across a hiring manager at whatever company it is, how are you telling your story of how you transform the way you work, your department works, your company works with AI? And this is so important. There's so important that we inspire and we get our teams using AI. Again, Work Innovation Lab research done with Anthropic, and we've seen when marketers Leaders use AI monthly, they're 41% more effective. When they use it weekly, they are 75% more effective. And those that use it daily are 93% more effective. Now imagine, imagine if you could inspire your teams to use AI daily and your team is almost double as effective and impactful as they are today. These are some real numbers. And then lastly, how do you find your super connectors? These people that are deep in your organization that are using AI to, to transform and to solve real business challenges, real business challenges specific and unique to your business. Now we studied these and we found that they have a lot of things in common. First and foremost, they work cross-functionally. Those people that touch a lot of teams. Second, they aren't necessarily early adopters. Now they might be, they might be early adopters of AI, but more likely they are people that have a problem and they create a workflow that other people use. We've also seen from our research that when you have somebody in your organization create a real workflow, again, specific to their needs and your business, it's 95% more likely to get picked up by the rest of people in your organization. And so when you think of that flywheel effect, like how do we get our whole organization using AI every day, these super connectors coming up with these real workflows is a key way to do it. Now, this is my favorite slide in the presentation. These are not AI-generated people. These are actual Asana employees, and these are two of our super connectors. The first is Steph. Steph is on our content team, and when we were creating our marketing plan at the beginning of this year, we said, okay, we have 3 ICPs across 6 different verticals. We're going to need content, blogs, articles, all the things for all those ICPs. Our content team is 5 people. So she said to herself, okay, I got to figure it out. And what she created was an AI editorial assistant. Assistant. And she started small. She started with planning. She started with some content generation. And now she uses it for planning, for the creation, for the scheduling, for the delegation of things to get posted to the web team. Things that took her weeks now take her hours. And she's able to scale herself across many different profiles and many different verticals. Again, getting bringing us closer to that personalization at scale. This guy right here, this guy is close to my heart. This is Ethan. Ethan was an SDR, right? You know, Ethan's starting his career. He's on the phones, he's getting all the leads come in from marketing, and he said to himself, there has to be a better way. No one asked him to. He decided, you know what, I'm gonna get in and see if I can use AI to really customize and personalize, again, going back to that personalization at scale, the communication I send via email through prospects that are coming in. Just by himself. He was so successful. We were looking at the numbers. We're like, what is this guy doing that the rest of them aren't? It was, it was incredible. And so we said, all right, Ethan, now you get to train the rest of the SDR team. And then he was so good at it. We said, you know what, Ethan, we're elevating you. No more SDR land for you. You are one of our chief AI evangelists, and now he's working on things with our CRO on forecasting. Now, I don't know if the people out here do— for, you know, how hard forecasting is for CFOs and looking at deal cycles and historical data and, you know, how many touches and all the things. And he's revolutionized the way we are forecasting, all just been coming from an SDR who is looking to do his job in a better place. And I guarantee you, these, these These people, they're in your organization. You have to find them. You have to celebrate them. You have to give them a platform so they can spread this knowledge internally. All right. Now I want to talk about 5 real examples of ways that you can use AI to transform your marketing, transform the way you drive revenue and demand. Now I want to be clear. For each of these, there are designed to start small. All of the work is in those 4 stages of work: intake, planning, execution, and reporting. And you can use AI to automate any parts of these steps, right? So I'm gonna give you a couple examples, but again, my advice is if you implement some of these, start small and then build from there. So let's talk about campaign and project task management. So if you are in marketing, I bet you have launched a campaign. And if you've launched a campaign, I expect that you have done hours, hours in meetings talking about said campaign. In fact, I bet you've probably talked more about the campaign than you actually have done planning and execution. Right? It can be a hard process. A lot of manual task tracking, a lot of hours spent aligning, realigning, and don't even get me started on analysis and reporting. How many of you have launched a campaign and then 2 hours later somebody, probably with the title CEO, is like, hey, how many leads? How many leads? How many leads came in, right? That can be painful. It can be time-consuming. And now with AI, you can automate so much of that. You can use AI to kickstart your plans. You can take your historical data from campaigns that you've done in the past, the campaigns that worked, and even the campaigns that didn't, and you can explain to AI, I want you to plan based off of the good and the bad. Give me a plan for this new campaign. It can definitely help you with drafting and tailoring content. Again, personalization at scale. How do we draft multiple types of content, not just one size fits all? How do we help with timelines and deliverables, and how can AI automatically, the second that first lead comes in, send you an update letting you know that the campaign is being effective? Now, a company that's doing amazing things with this is Accor. Now, Accor is a— they're based in Europe. They're a global hotel conglomerate. They have brands like Sofitel. I think they have like 44, 45 brands, and they have 7,000 employees. And they are constantly launching campaigns to get people into their hotels across the world in multiple languages. And they are using AI to transform the way they do this, so much so that they have 50% less meetings. No more of that talking. The AI information can get rid of all that talking when people are sitting in a room or sitting on a Zoom call trying to decide what to do. 50% less meetings. Meetings, and 96% increase in team efficiency. All right, let's talk about creative intake and production. Now, across— again, AI is disrupting anything. I predict AI is really, really going to disrupt the way we produce creative assets. And if you don't believe me, I want you to go and Google the latest commercial from Porsche. Has anyone seen that, the latest Porsche commercial? Okay, few people. You have to see this. They did a commercial that looks like a movie, completely done in AI. Completely in AI. But they didn't stop there. They also did a behind the scenes that looks like, you know, a director talking about his vision, interviewing the actors, all in AI. There are no people, there are no sets, there was no filming. It was all done in AI. It's absolutely amazing, so please go and watch it. Now that's a great vision, but the way we do creative today is really time-intensive, and I love, love, love my head of creative. Hopefully he loves me, but I can't tell you how many times I've given him feedback on something and he says to me— these words are burned into my brain— "Was it in the brief?" And if any of If any of you worked in a brief process with creatives, you know how time-intensive that is. If it's not in the brief, it doesn't get done, right? Then there's the tracking of where things are, the version control, and of course, all the time it takes to actually build those assets. Well, now with AI, the old ways of the brief, it's totally gone. And what I mean by that is someone fills out a brief, you can have AI AI check that against briefs that were good and briefs that were bad. And it can flag to you, and it can flag to humans. Again, we want humans and AI working together. It can say, like, not this isn't filled out, like somebody left the field blank. Like, that's not particularly impactful. What it can tell you is this is not clear enough. If you send this to the creative team the way you have it phrased, they are not going to be able to execute. Would you rather say it like this, or did you mean that? This is a huge time saver for creative teams, especially creative teams working with non-creatives. So AI can flag blockers. It can automate quality. One thing that we have done is we've created an AI teammate that has all of our brand guidelines. So it has our brand guidelines. It has our tone. I remember our CEO asked me a few months ago, he's like, how do you guys quality control your creative assets? I'm like, someone looks at it and says it's good. Yeah, you do that too, right? I know I'm not the only one. And so now we are able to have AI check it against the brand guidelines, check it against the tone. It saves us so much time. And more importantly, it helps us drive that brand consistency that we're looking for. So a company that's doing amazing things Clear Channel. So if you've seen a billboard, if you were driving here today and you saw a billboard, it was probably a Clear Channel billboard. Now Clear Channel, again, a global company. They, they had to manage all their creative requests for billboards. They all come into one small team. And what they were able to do is use AI to triage. They were able to use AI to show if they had creative that already looked like that, sounded like that, stuff that they could reuse. And more importantly, they could get it to the right team in real time because the AI is not sleeping, right? So again, this global 24/7, these creative requests are coming in, being triaged, getting the work halfway done. And as a result, again, less meetings. We all love that. And they save 15 hours per work request. Every single request they get for a new billboard now takes them 15 hours less. Imagine that. At scale across a multi-thousand-dollar— multi-thousand-person organization. All right. Customer insights and UX research. So customer research has always been a very time-consuming thing, right? You got to find the customers. You have to talk to the customers. You have to look at what comes out of what the customers are saying, and then you have to go through and pull out the insights, get the stuff to the right place, and hopefully someone understands it, and more importantly, hoping someone in the organization, the product team, the marketing team, they do something with it, right? Very, very time-consuming. Very, very important, but time-consuming. Well, I'm gonna use Asana as a case study here for a second because we've transformed the way we're doing customer research with AI. So what we've been able to do is we have fed our AI teammate with all of our our customer data, all of our customer calls, all of our cab notes, and all of this is unstructured. We just put it in there. We don't format it. We just put it in there. And what we're able to do now, now we can generate research plans easier. We can get insights, all the things. But what's really cool is we've created an AI teammate that anyone can query in real time. Okay, why is that important? Well, think of, a product team. Think of a product team that's iterating fast, especially with AI, and they're trying to do something and they want customer research. They don't have to wait now until all of this stuff is ingested and the, the report comes out. They can ask it for insights in real time based off of all the customer conversations, all the customer research we have had. Like that is game changing and it's helped us move so much faster. And you can see right here, like we do 83% less time of sort of analyzing those interviews. Our AI teammate does it for us, and we're able to actually act on it. All right, product launches. Now, a little bit about me. We're getting to know each other so well. You know I love Britney Spears. What I will also tell you is I spent 12 years in product marketing at Salesforce. And so I have launched many products. And yes, I still have trauma from it. Product launches are hard, and if you don't think they're hard, please tell me later why they're not hard. And they're hard for a couple reasons. One, because things change so fast. But two, they are so cross-functional, and they're so dependent. If some feature is going to slip, or it's not going to go when you think it's gonna go, there's so much dependencies, and there's so many people that have to be in the loop in real time time on what's happening. How is the product being priced? When is it GA? What are the customer references? There are so many pieces. And again, as someone who launched many, many products, the hours, the hours of meetings and aligning and email and having to check and make sure that everyone was aligned. Well, again, AI has changed this. And what I love about this is we are now able to build these cross-functional plans easier. But what's most important is the AI can call out the blockers. It can call out the dependencies. It can clearly state, you cannot market this feature until you get confirmation that XYZ has shipped. Again, it sounds simple, but in the old way of working, and it costs a big, you know, global company, it becomes even more complicated. A great example of this is Toast. Toast is completely revolutionizing their product launches. They've been able to see an 80% better teamwork by having these plans, these product launches that are built by past data that's worked and what they want to do, marry these together, everyone's more efficient. Okay. Last, marketing ops. Now, I love marketing ops. Because I'm definitely more of a creative. And so marketing ops, they are, they are my right-hand people. They are the gas in the tank. They are the oil in the engine. Whatever weird analogy you want to give is they help marketing organizations run. And they have a really hard job because we often look at them to tell us if our marketing is being impactful. And this data lives everywhere. They have to use use all these different tools, and it's really, really hard for them to be effective. And that's even worse if you're dealing with a marketing ops team that has to be HIPAA or has regulations. So AI is transforming marketing ops. It's making them more effective so we can be more effective. It's helping create that single source of truth, similar to the customer example, where how do you put your data all in one place and how are you able to easily query it to get those insights in real time? Another thing is optimizing A/B testing. I mean, the old way of A/B testing is a lot of people sitting in a room being, we should test that, right? Now AI can give much more granular, much more insightful things to test. And the thing I love the most is this predicting emerging trends. Where are we red? What are the corners we can't see? Around. How are you looking at the context from the past with the information we have today with what we want to accomplish in the future? How are you getting these all together so we know what we need to focus on? A great, great example of this is Children's Health. Children's Health is an amazing organization. They are based in the Southeast. They are children's health and wellness. And they have to be HIPAA compliant. And they have data not just about their marketing campaigns, but they have data about their, their, their patients all over the place. And for them to be efficient isn't just a nice to have, it's literally a matter of life or death for the patients that they treat. And what they've been able to do is create this single source of truth. So it, so people aren't, you know, focusing on duplicative work. They know what's happening. They have a complete sort of single source of truth of everything that's going on, and they are saving days and their team team is happier. All right, I went through that really fast. I hope I showed you there are 5 ways you can start using AI today. Break these off into pieces. This is all meant to be food for thought. And let's make sure we have no more janky Britneys and we have AI that's driving demand for our marketing teams. Thank you.