Prachi Gore trained to build electronics and discovered she was more interested in what happened after the thing was built. She liked the product, the customer, the strategy, the sale. The circuitry was real; so was the conversation around it. One simply held her attention longer. A mentor suggested that she sample a few business-school classes. Gore did, liked finance and marketing, and followed the curiosity into an MBA. It was less a rejection of engineering than a change of altitude. She kept the systems thinking and moved closer to the people using the system.
Two decades later, that instinct has carried her through solar power, outsourced services, recruiting software, background checks, and collaborative work management. In late 2025 she became Chief Marketing Officer at Asana, taking responsibility for global marketing strategy and brand development. The timing has a certain editorial neatness. Gore has arrived at a company built to organize work just as artificial intelligence is forcing companies to decide what work should belong to people at all.
Her answer is not mystical. Let machines carry more of the coordination. Keep human beings in charge of judgment, creativity, difficult problem-solving, and relationships. The future, in Gore's telling, is less robot pageant than a better division of chores.
An engineer learns to market
Gore earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics from the University of Mumbai and began her professional life at Tata Consultancy Services. She later entered Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School, where she studied marketing and strategy as a Wood Fellow. The full scholarship matters not as ornamental biography but as evidence of the clean break she was making: from the career she had prepared for to the career she was choosing.
After her MBA came SunPower, where her roles moved through online marketing, operations, and the global web. ServiceSource widened the brief to digital marketing, demand generation, and sales development. At SmartRecruiters, she first led demand generation and then the broader marketing function while the company shifted from a small-business product toward an enterprise talent-acquisition suite.
The widening brief · 2004 to now
There is a practical lesson in that sequence. Gore did not leap from engineer to brand oracle. She accumulated surfaces. Websites taught her measurement. Marketing operations taught her plumbing. Demand generation tied activity to revenue. Enterprise software added long buying cycles, committee decisions, and the fact that a clever message must eventually survive procurement. By the time the CMO title arrived, she had already been living in the joints between functions.
“As a leader, you have to make really good judgment calls with limited data.”Prachi Gore
The pleasure of visible impact
Gore joined Checkr in 2020, during the pandemic, as Vice President of Marketing. She was drawn to its fair-chance mission, its people-centered culture, and the possibility of modernizing an old industry. Over roughly six years, she rose to senior vice president and CMO. Asana credits her with building the demand engine, elevating the brand, and launching a product-led growth business.
That combination suits her. Gore describes product-led growth and sales-led enterprise marketing as her “happy place.” One supplies rigor, experimentation, and behavior at scale. The other demands deeper customer understanding and partnership. Small customers can arrive through a product; large enterprises often arrive through a procession of humans. A marketer who can respect both routes has a better chance of noticing where they converge.
She also likes bets large enough to teach something. In 2021, Checkr ran a brand campaign across 11 airports. It was not a timid test disguised as courage. The questions were plain: Who is the audience? Where are they? What works? Gore has said the bet required a growth-minded finance leader and executive team. Creativity may get the photograph, but permission, capital, and a shared appetite for learning get the campaign.
Her stated reason for preferring growth companies is even simpler: she can see the impact of a decision on the business trajectory within months. She has no announced plan to found a company. Supporting a large vision, then chasing it into reality, is the role she claims for herself. Maintenance does not hold much romance for her.
The coordination tax
At Asana, the product and the marketing problem now mirror each other. Every campaign contains hidden clerical weather: the missing brief, the ambiguous owner, the stale milestone, the follow-up that never became a task. Gore calls coordination an invisible tax. Nobody budgets for it, yet everyone pays.
Her recent example is wonderfully uncinematic. A marketing planning offsite ends. The room is energized. Then somebody must turn notes, projects, portfolios, goals, dates, and ownership into a system that colleagues in other time zones can understand. Gore described a review that normally required four hours of careful manual work. An Asana AI Teammate, given the planning project, team standards, and meeting transcripts, produced a draft in 45 minutes. She checked the output. It also caught details she might have skimmed.
Context gathering, workflow setup, repetitive review, handoffs, and first-pass synthesis.
Judgment, strategy, creative risk, relationships, accountability, and the final call.
Clear ownership, usable data, early feedback, and work that moves across time zones.
More tools without better flow, automated sameness, and activity confused with impact.
The 195 minutes saved are useful. More useful is the model: agent acts, person reviews, work continues asynchronously. AI does not become a colleague by wearing a cartoon face. It becomes useful when it inherits a bounded workstream and returns something inspectable.
This is consistent with Gore's older go-to-market advice. Complex work needs a program-management framework, explicit owners, early feedback, and brief daily standups to remove blocks. Data matters, but data also moves and decays. Leadership still requires judgment before the dashboard becomes conclusive. AI can accelerate the loop. It cannot absolve the leader.
“AI is great, but not without the human element.”Prachi Gore, speaking after Cannes Lions 2026
When polish becomes cheap
Gore's first Cannes Lions, in 2026, sharpened another part of the thesis. Polished content is now abundant. Credibility is not. Buyers are building shortlists from peer reviews, community conversation, and real-world experience. AI systems ingest many of the same signals when they recommend vendors. A company can make more copy in an afternoon than its customers wish to read in a year. It cannot order trust by the pallet.
This is why Gore has called user-generated content “infrastructure.” The phrase is deliberately unglamorous. Infrastructure sits beneath the campaign and determines whether it travels. In an AI-mediated market, the customer story is no longer a decorative quote near the bottom of a landing page. It may become the evidence that gets a brand onto a shortlist before the buyer visits the website.
Her emphasis on the human element is not an argument for nostalgia. Gore is plainly bullish on AI. She has used it to plan travel and weekly menus, and she has asked it to critique strategy documents. At Checkr, she spoke about win-loss analysis, call listening, RFP responses, sales copilots, and personalized customer journeys. She likes the machine. She simply expects it to do more than generate another paragraph.
A long plan with short loops
Gore sets goals by decade. The habit sounds almost comic in an industry that can declare a six-month roadmap antique. Yet it explains the shape of her career. The destination can be distant if the feedback arrives quickly. She wants growth, direct impact, and work attached to a consequential vision. The roles change; the criteria remain.
At Asana, those criteria have converged. She admired the brand as a customer before leading it. She likes the dual engine of self-serve product growth and enterprise selling. She sees AI adding a new layer to the company's Work Graph and a new story to the category. Her assignment is to translate that machinery without letting the machinery become the protagonist.
The engineer in Gore still seems present. She wants a cleaner flow, a measurable result, a system that does not lose context at every joint. The marketer knows the limit of the diagram. People trust people. They remember a story. They make a call before every variable is known. They sometimes place a campaign in 11 airports to discover whether a brand can become familiar at thirty miles an hour.
The future of work will contain agents, copilots, graphs, and enough automated content to make the internet feel upholstered. Gore's wager is that the winners will not be the organizations with the greatest quantity of AI. They will be the ones that decide, with unusual care, what the AI is for - and then leave their people with better work to do.