With Asana powering our marketing workflows, it has allowed us to move faster on market opportunities while maintaining our strategic discipline. It strengthens our enterprise campaign execution and reinforces our position as a growth engine for the bank.

Larry Jacobs

VP Marketing

Winner: 2026 Work Innovation Award for AI Breakthrough, AMER

This award recognized Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) for its pioneering use of AI-powered workflows to solve complex governance challenges in a highly regulated industry. By embedding AI directly into the architecture of work, RBC has established a new global benchmark for enterprise-scale marketing execution.

When we set out to transform how our Marketing organization works, we knew it required a fundamental shift in how we approach collaboration, workflow, and AI integration across RBC. The AI capabilities and workflow efficiencies we've built position us to deliver faster time-to-market, better resource deployment, and more agile responses to market opportunities.

Liz Hopkins

Marketing Director, RBC

Stage 1: Standardized intake and AI-led validation

The Personal & Commercial Banking Marketing Teams at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) transformed its front door for work by replacing dozens of fragmented intake forms with a single, intelligent entry point. Previously, campaign data lived across spreadsheets and email, requiring marketers to repeat the same information. By centralizing intake, RBC established a gate-based architecture that ensures every submission meets strict regulatory and quality standards before any resources are deployed.

• AI-powered data extraction: When a user attaches a brief, AI Studio automatically reads PDFs and other documents to populate custom fields, making the campaign reportable immediately.

• Automated quality gates: Nine AI-powered rules scan every submission to standardize naming, flag missing information, and detect logic conflicts between selections.

• Standardized request routing: Based on the campaign type and line of business, the system automatically adds the correct collaborators and reviewers.

• Technical triage: AI validates that the request aligns with business-critical attributes, reducing the intake processing time by half.

Errors are caught before campaigns advance, eliminating the manual review cycles that previously caused 50% of campaigns to require rework.

Marquis Murray

CEO, Cirface

Stage 2: Intelligent execution and dynamic governance

After passing through the intake gates, the workflow uses AI to handle the cognitive load of project setup. In a highly regulated financial environment, maintaining a timestamped audit trail is non-negotiable. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) uses Asana to generate dynamic approval steps and execution tasks based on the selected channels, ensuring no compliance steps are skipped.

• Dynamic project generation: Approved requests are converted into projects using Custom Templates that generate tasks based on campaign complexity.

• AI-driven escalation: If a task becomes overdue, an AI rule scans an organization chart to identify the assignee's manager and sends an automated notification to unblock work.

• Role-based capacity markers: The system automatically assigns estimated effort to tasks, enabling leadership to proactively manage resourcing through Workload.

• Auditability-first design: Every approval and stage transition is recorded, providing a clear audit trail for federal regulatory requirements.

Our smart workflows are a true example of how AI can be used intentionally across every stage—not just as a feature, but as architecture. We’ve replaced manual resourcing, guesswork, and offline follow-up with real-time, intelligent workload visibility across thousands of campaigns.

Liz Hopkins

Marketing Director, RBC

Stage 3: Enterprise visibility and strategic redeployment

By moving process knowledge into a centralized system, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) shifted the Marketing culture from reactive coordination to proactive orchestration. Leadership now has real-time visibility at scale, into campaigns across various lines of business. This clarity has allowed the bank to redeploy specialized talent from manual status chasing to high-value strategic initiatives.

• Portfolio mission control: Related projects roll up into Portfolios, giving executives a single source of truth for status, ownership, and launch readiness.

• Strategic resource shift: FTEs previously dedicated to manual status reporting were redeployed to focus on training and outcome analysis.

• Tableau integration: Real-time data flows into Tableau dashboards, providing leadership with long-term insights into resource optimization.

• Human-in-the-loop validation: While AI handles validation and update drafting, human judgment remains central. Leaders review AI-generated insights to make final strategic decisions.

Teams are adopting Asana organically, positioning us to deliver faster time-to-market, better resource deployment, and more agile responses to market opportunities.

Liz Hopkins

Marketing Director, RBC

Conclusion

Before this transformation, RBC’s campaign management was limited by manual coordination and a high error rate. By building an AI-native campaign engine, the bank has redefined "good work" as proactive orchestration rather than reactive coordination. As RBC continues to scale this blueprint, its AI-augmented infrastructure ensures that speed, quality, and compliance grow together.