Two years ago, launching an integrated marketing campaign at Eightfold could eat up several weeks. Messaging had to align. Research had to be gathered. Stakeholders had to be coordinated, one meeting at a time.
Today, that same work can happen in under a day. The marketing team’s recent Oracle partnership campaign plan, in fact, came together in less than two hours.
The shift didn’t come from a new tool landing on someone’s desk. It came from a marketing team, led in part by Christy Hodgson, Sr. Director of Partner Marketing, deciding to rethink how work gets done from the ground up.
Necessity, then a bigger question
Hodgson is candid about where the journey started: with pressure, not inspiration.
“We market AI for a living, so we knew we had to authentically demonstrate what AI-first work looks like ourselves,” she says. That pressure pushed the team out of its comfort zone and forced it to question assumptions it had carried for years. “Looking back, I don’t think we would have moved nearly as quickly if we hadn’t felt that urgency.”
But necessity only explains the starting line. What kept the team moving was a bigger question. Marketing organizations everywhere are being asked to do more with rising expectations from customers and the business alike.
Hodgson’s team didn’t want AI to just make individuals faster at their existing tasks. They wanted to rethink the operating model itself, starting with how integrated campaigns get built. The goal: eliminate repetitive work, make decisions faster, and free people to spend their time on strategy and creativity, the things only humans do well.
From tool to teammate
That thinking led to MIRA, the team’s Marketing Intelligence and Response Architect. MIRA isn’t a tool people log into to complete a task. It’s designed to function more like a colleague, pulling together market insights, partner intelligence, campaign planning, content, and workflow automation in one place.
“Marketers shouldn’t have to spend hours searching for information or coordinating work,” Hodgson says. “AI should surface the right insights, recommend actions, and help move work forward.”
MIRA didn’t arrive fully formed. The team started small, using AI to draft content, summarize meetings, and speed up research. But Hodgson says they quickly realized they were asking the wrong question. Instead of “How can AI help me complete this task?” the team began asking, “How can AI help us solve this problem differently?”
Campaign planning became the proving ground. The team mapped the entire process end to end, from market research and messaging through content creation and cross-functional execution, then interrogated every step: What should stay human? What could AI accelerate? What could be reimagined entirely? That exercise, more than any single feature, is what turned MIRA from an idea into infrastructure.
Every marketing function has since contributed to shaping it, bringing its own expertise to define which skills and workflows matter most. It’s a collective build, not a top-down rollout.
The turning point
Not every challenge along the way was technical. Hodgson says the harder work was helping people change how they thought about their own jobs.
“The technology has actually been the easy part,” she says. “The harder work has been helping people change the way they think about work.”
Years of habits don’t move just because a new capability exists. The real lesson, she says, is that successful AI adoption isn’t a technology project. It’s a change management project, one that requires shifting from a fixed mindset of “this is how we’ve always done it” to a growth mindset that’s curious and comfortable learning in public.
There was a specific moment when that shift became visible. Early on, MIRA was treated like just another AI tool. But as more capabilities connected and people saw what it could actually do, something changed.
“It started to feel almost like magic,” Hodgson says. People stopped asking AI to complete single tasks and started imagining entirely new ways of working. “That’s when I knew we’d moved beyond experimentation — our team was starting to rethink what marketing could do altogether.”
What it looks like now
The impact shows up in the calendar. Work that once took multiple days of manual research and synthesis, executive program prep, competitive intelligence, now happens in hours. But Hodgson is careful to name the deeper change: “It’s not just that we’re faster — it’s that we’re able to take on work we simply wouldn’t have had the capacity to do before.”
That capacity is going somewhere specific. People are spending more time on strategy, relationship-building, and solving customer problems, and less time manually assembling information.
AI, in Hodgson’s words, isn’t replacing marketers. It’s amplifying what each one can accomplish.
Why it happened here
Ask Hodgson why her team was able to build something like MIRA, and she doesn’t point to resources or timing. She points to culture: urgency paired with trust. “We weren’t expected to get everything right on the first try. We were expected to learn, share what worked, and keep improving.”
That belief shows up in the calendar, too. The team runs weekly, optional agentic office hours, where anyone can bring a question or test an idea. Once a month, marketing prompt sessions let team members show off what they’ve built so others can learn from it.
Beyond marketing, employees can also tap into a company-wide AI upskill Slack channel and Claude office hours.
“Not every idea works, and that’s okay,” Hodgson says. “We learn quickly, adapt, and keep moving.”
For anyone considering joining the team, Hodgson offers an honest preview: “I think they’d be surprised that we don’t pretend to have it all figured out. We’ve made tremendous progress, but we’re still learning every day.”
What’s next
Hodgson sees the next shift as a move from AI as an assistant to AI as an active teammate, one that continuously monitors the market, coordinates workflows, and recommends action, leaving marketers more room for strategy and human connection.
The skills she thinks matter most for that future aren’t technical. “A growth mindset is essential because AI is evolving so quickly that the people who thrive will be the ones who are constantly learning, experimenting, and adapting.” Critical thinking matters just as much: AI can generate ideas, but marketers still need to ask the right questions, evaluate what’s actually useful, and make sound calls.
Asked to finish the sentence “Innovation works here…” Hodgson doesn’t hesitate: “because we’re given both the challenge and the freedom to rethink what’s possible.”
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