Now that Collaborate 2024 has wrapped up, we’re looking back at some of the highlights, including our hotly anticipated product keynote from Wrike CPO Alexey Korotich. Focused on the connection between humans and technology, this year’s session traced the evolution of intelligent workflows, looking at how advances such as AI can help people work smarter, collaborate better, and break free of barriers.
“Connection is an overlooked component in today’s digital workplace, yet it’s the essence of how work flows,” Alexey told an international audience. “Wrike is the connection that makes it possible to overcome challenges and achieve collective goals that are beyond our individual reach.”
Ready to learn from the brightest minds in the field of product development? Let’s recap all the best moments from this Collaborate 2024 product keynote.
The evolution of intelligent workflows
“I’ve been in technology for 20 years, and the pace of development today is unlike any other I’ve experienced, largely due to AI,” Alexey said. “Yet many still struggle to understand and employ it.” While a rapidly advancing work environment is exciting, it’s not without its downsides, including too many applications, meetings, and priorities — leading to uninspired, disconnected, and inefficient employees.
The solution is a better connection between humans and technology. How? By making work flow through Wrike’s game-changing innovations, including:
- Work Intelligence®, our industry-leading human-led and AI-assisted intelligence engine. It’s designed to overcome workplace challenges and achieve collective goals.
- Cutting-edge AI developments to automate mundane work, speed up processes, and free up time. These include powerful automations, content creation and edits, and summaries on the web and mobile.
- An exciting new partnership with Microsoft to leverage the renowned Azure platform for secure, enterprise-scale AI implementation across our global community of customers.
- The release of next-gen analytics, with 2.5x growth in adoption. In fact, 80% of customers started using our dynamic new dashboards within a year, raving about their flexibility, simplicity, and speed.
- New insights and smart recommendations that simplify project staffing and support end-to-end client service delivery, including skills-based resource assignments, time tracking-to-billing integration, profitability analysis, and more.
- The launch of Datahub, an exclusive new release that connects data stored outside of Wrike with projects and tasks within Wrike. It creates a dynamic source of truth, streamlining reporting, empowering confident decision making, and enriching your daily work with actionable insights.
Making work flow every day
But what does a strong, successful connection between humans and technology look like in real life?
To answer this question, Alexey was joined by Wrike customers Morten Frost Harboe, Head of EcoStruxure IT Services at Schneider Electric; Kate Tranter, Global Marketing Transformation Director at AVEVA; and Ryan Mills, Senior Manager of Project Management for the Miami Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium, and Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix.
Morten Frost Harboe, Head of EcoStruxure IT Services at Schneider Electric, spoke about the need for a software solution that scales and spans diverse projects and multiple teams.
“We had to tie together a lot of loose ends,” Morton said. “We had to take that workflow all the way from presales to implementation, working with customers across various stages of the project, and ultimately getting [the service] deployed in a qualitative way.”
Wrike was key to streamlining his professional services workflow, unlocking complete collaboration and allowing the IT Services team to turn data into better decision making, avoiding “wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter.”
Kate Tranter, Global Marketing Transformation Director at AVEVA, went one step further, rolling out Wrike not just to her entire marketing organization but also externally to outside agencies and contractors.
“It’s a requirement when working with AVEVA,” Kate told Alexey. “Any agency we bring on or freelancer we have must learn to use Wrike … That’s how we manage how much time they put into all of our campaigns and so that we can check to see that they’re fulfilling their scope with us.”
She and her team managed over 4,000 requests last year with the information collected, monitored, and actioned within Wrike — something that “wouldn’t be possible on an Excel spreadsheet.”
Ryan Mills, Senior Manager of Project Management for the Miami Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium, and Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix, confirmed that he has managed to unite multiple major brands under one workflow, an extraordinary feat made possible by Wrike — and one very sophisticated custom request form that facilitates up to 20 different types of work items.
“We have over 400 employees that work here,” Ryan said. “Most of them work across all of our lines of business, so the most streamlined way to work was to have one consistent process for everybody to use … It has been a huge success.”
Dashboards have also proven to be a major benefit to Ryan and his team, allowing them to track vital data. One insight they’re currently focusing on is the average lead time on requests, which is of particular importance in the fast-paced sports and entertainment industry. “It’s something we can track and report back to leadership so we can plan more effectively.”
Summing up the panel’s revealing customer testimonials, Alexey pointed out that Wrike is the unifying factor, acting as a “connective tissue across different groups, powering more efficient, transparent, and connected workflows.”
Wrike’s vision for a connected future
Alexey then shifted to the future, looking at how that connective tissue is being expanded and strengthened with each “artifact of work” in Wrike: every customer’s goals, ideas, projects, assets, and knowledge. Thanks to a unique and powerful data model, Wrike is turning this digital trail into a path to better, more efficient, and higher-impact work.
Every workflow goes through common phases, and Wrike is working to supercharge all of these stages with potent intelligence, enabling you to “do less to achieve more.”
- Ideation: Wrike could promote big ideas with the introduction of an infinite canvas for visual collaboration, allowing a seamless transition from brainstorming to structured project plans.
- Planning: Wrike could model roadmaps, dependencies, workloads, and budgets to help customers optimize portfolios and reach goals.
- Execution: Wrike could create more capacity for you and your team with Workmates, our AI-powered assistants that can carry out specific tasks, taking mundane work off your full plates.
- Analysis: Wrike next-gen analytics are about to get even better, with predictive capabilities and risk assessments that’ll allow you to address issues proactively, combining past experience with future forecasts for informed decisions.
- Learning: Wrike plans to help organizations document and learn from past projects. Powerful natural language capabilities will offer fast answers about documents, people, ideas, and projects, while an information capture area could provide details about past work.
Summing up his Collaborate 2024 keynote speech, Alexey reminded the audience that Wrike product innovation is a truly collaborative process. He and his team consider every piece of customer feedback, turning many of those comments directly into new product features.
“I spoke of the tissue that connects humans and technology, ideas with goals, and work with knowledge,” he said. “But the strongest connective tissue is the one that binds Wrike’s product and engineering teams with you, our customers.”
“Together, we look forward to a future where work flows freely, silos are a thing of the past, and all workers are empowered to do the best, most meaningful work of their lives.”
Want to see this product keynote in full or check out other inspiring sessions? Simply register here to watch on demand whenever you want.
