Context, Control, Collaboration: Why Capability Was Never the Bottleneck

The AI models have never been more capable. So why are so many companies still struggling to turn them into real value? Wrike CEO Tom Scott has an answer most enterprises haven’t accepted: capability was never the bottleneck. Matt Paige sits down with Tom Scott — CEO of Wrike, the intelligent work management platform used by 20,000+ organizations from NVIDIA to Jaguar Land Rover — to unpack the three Cs that actually decide whether AI delivers: context, control, and collaboration. Coming from a finance and operations background, Scott brings an operator’s lens to enterprise AI, not a hype merchant’s. They get into why more AI tools can make things worse, the “bring your own agent” shift reshaping SaaS, the danger of automating mediocrity, the full-stack professional replacing the specialist, and the hands-on leadership it takes to move a 20-year-old company into an agent world. The through line: stop optimizing the old thing and start reinventing it — faster than you think you need to. -- Key Moments: 01:19 — Why AI value stays trapped in silos 03:19 — The three Cs: context, control, and collaboration 07:26 — A research use case connected to Wrike via MCP 11:09 — 30 agents across 30 tools, or bring your own? 17:32 — The hard part isn’t strategy — it’s execution 21:00 — Don’t just automate mediocrity 23:20 — Transformation is messy — and the CEO has to own it 31:31 — The rise of the full-stack professional 44:21 — Advice to his pre-AI self: move faster -- Key Links: Wrike: https://www.wrike.com/ Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-scott-95420b