Zoe Engeman, 24 January, 2025
Carl Gribble has built a successful career in customer experience and now co-leads Dorothi AI, a company focused on helping professionals leverage Generative AI. He is also Director of Experience Design at digital agency, Evolut. In this Q&A, Carl shares insights from his journey, discusses the evolving role of AI in industries like marketing and product design, and explores how businesses can harness these tools to stay ahead in the future of work.
Can you share a bit about your professional journey since graduating from QUT?
After graduating from QUT, I led the Marketing Team at Pryme, where our efforts were instrumental in winning the Westfarmers Industrial and Safety Supplier of the Year for Growth in 2013. In 2014, I founded Aptico, an agency specializing in Customer Experience Design, which I successfully sold three years later. In 2018, I established the Experience Design function at RACQ, where I worked for two years. I am now Director of Experience Design at the digital agency Evolut, as well as Co-Founder of Dorothi AI.
What inspired you to co-found Dorothi AI, and what has been the most rewarding part of this venture?
Dorothi AI was established to assist marketing, product, and experience design professionals harness Generative AI tools like ChatGPT. These tools augment human intelligence to solve commercial knowledge work problems, such as campaign and product design, as well as customer research.
The most rewarding part of this start-up is seeing people's reactions when they realise the power of these tools. They assist in all facets of problem-solving, from research and ideation to analysis and content authoring. It's a game-changer. The foundational AI models are continuously improving, with OpenAI's o1 model making significant strides in assisting knowledge workers with complex reasoning tasks.
What skills do you think are essential for success in the AI industry?
It all depends on where you are in the industry—whether you are a coder/software developer, business analyst, user experience designer, trainer, or consultant. The common thread that links all these domains is a thirst to use the models in your work and identify the use cases or problems the models can solve.
It's about constant learning and experimentation as well as understanding the market space and keeping an eye on competitors. AI News alone has become its own media channel with daily updates.
How do you see the role of AI in marketing and customer experience design evolving in the next 5-10 years?
I do not think anyone will be able to understand the titanic shifts that will occur through all levels of marketing and CX industry from teaching at universities to how people will do their work. Two competition forces are at play, one being that change inertia limits the adoption of the technology versus the power of the models replacing people from their roles.
This year, we expect platforms to be released that allow agents to work together in teams, similar to how a marketing team collaborates. These will help create strategies and content and enable agents to scan the web, use cloud or local software, and perform tasks like posting on social media. The key question is whether humans will be completely removed from the workflow, or if they remain involved, what roles will they perform, and why? Those who get it right will outperform their competitors 10 to 1, and employees who adapt will secure their jobs.
But don’t forget, change inertia. How the future plays out will depend on technology adoption and an understanding of where humans are used in AI-powered workflows.
What are some common misconceptions about AI?
For tools such as ChatGPT, these include:
- AI cannot ideate and produce anything original
- AI cannot engage in complex problem-solving
- my job is strategic and cannot be replaced with AI
Today, the limiting factor with AI is “prompt engineering” or the ability of the user of tools such as ChatGPT to solve problems. A power user of ChatGPT can pretty much solve any problem in marketing and customer experience design, and that includes original, creative and strategic thinking.
How do you ensure your approach to integrating Generative AI remains human-centric, and why is this important in your work?
It all comes down to trust. AI is not perfect, and we cannot rely on it to produce what we want. Therefore, using Generative AI requires human evaluations to occur throughout any problem-solving workflow. Additionally, AI needs direction and delegation. Humans must guide AI, evaluate and refine their outputs to achieve a “commercial” grade quality. Agents specialising in specific tasks, such as competitive research or writing social media posts, are the best way to integrate AI into the daily workflows of knowledge workers. These agents work collaboratively in integrative, hybridised workflows.
Having completed some post-graduate courses with QUT, how important would you say continuing professional education is in your field?
Professional education is more than simply acquiring the knowledge taught, even if that knowledge is lagging behind the developments in the real world. The true value of any further education is learning how to think for yourself, and critically evaluate, independent of any specific domain. I was only able to develop my AI practice through the discipline of the Master's degree I completed at QUT, coupled with a thirst or curiosity for further learning and exploration.
What is the most exciting project you’re working on right now?
We have built a suite of agents to assist marketing, experience design, and product professionals in all areas from strategy to execution. The agents collaborate with human users, where the user is in complete control to research, ideate, refine and deliver tasks. This work was only possible with over 12 months of R&D into how to “code” the bots. That is, we have developed a proprietary prompt engineering language for solving complex problems in commercial contexts. We’ve also pioneered a consulting model to map creative and complex problem-solving workflows throughout an organisation, and also map how individual knowledge workers “work” such that we can fully customise every agent we create to align with the ways of working for individuals and teams at large.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting out in AI today?
Stay curious, be open-minded, stay on top of AI news, and seriously start thinking about the future of work.
Carl Gribble
QUT degrees - Graduate Certificate in Business (2011) and Master of Business (2012)
Have a question for Carl? Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Author
Zoe is a marketing and communications professional and Alumni Communications Coordinator at QUT. She is also a proud alumnus with a Bachelor of Business (Marketing).