7 January, 2025
Marco Morales is a dynamic QUT alumnus whose exciting career journey has taken him across the globe. From his early days in web design to his current role as an innovation strategist, Marco's path has been driven by a relentless curiosity and passion for creativity. With experience in Brisbane, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Melbourne, Marco has honed his skills in art direction, service design, and digital transformation. In this Q&A, Marco shares insights into his journey, the secrets to staying ahead in the fast-paced world of tech, and his vision for the future of AI in various industries.
Can you tell us about your journey since graduating from QUT and how you got to where you are today?
My innate curiosity and passion for novelty drove my journey from web design to art direction in marketing and advertising, then to creative direction, service design and—currently—innovation strategy. I worked for agencies in Brisbane, Barcelona and Amsterdam before running my own creative agency in Melbourne. Still, I found Amsterdam to be a better fit, so I moved back—this time as a consultant in the domains of service design, digital transformation and innovation strategy.
What's your secret to staying ahead in the fast-paced world of tech and AI?
I find that asking, “What if…?” with genuine curiosity and empathy is the most powerful driver to discover and understand how the future is being shaped in a way that integrates technology and humanity. It also gives my research and experimentation very concrete topics to solve.
What sparked the idea of co-founding AI/CC, and what excites you most about this community?
Google’s DeepDream made Neural Networks cool, but Midjourney made generative AI accessible. LinkedIn has become a hotspot for everyone curious about and experimenting with these new AI tools. Show-and-tell, exchanging insights, and networking boomed on LinkedIn among AI artists, so forming a community such as the AI/CC was a logical step to organise ourselves and help each other grow. It also provided a safe space for new ideas and protected early adopters from a very vocal and vicious anti-AI movement.
How did your time at QUT prepare you for your career?
At QUT, we were given access to explore and learn all the various tools we needed, while guiding our thinking with a strong ‘Why?’, coupling technology with user needs. When the World Wide Web started, we were told to use ‘view source’ to analyse the HTML of those first web pages and to code our very first page with well-structured, conceptually strong content. We learned to think for ourselves, becoming resourceful and able to articulate a strong vision.
How do you see AI transforming jobs in the future, and what skills will be key?
Just as the internet changed the world in ways we couldn’t imagine, the AI revolution is transforming jobs, roles, and expectations. AI provides new tools that each industry, organisation, and individual will adopt differently. While we will still need traditional jobs, we will also see an acceleration of innovation in aerospace, materials engineering, and pharmacology research, to name a few.
AI applications can behave like eager, well-informed little helpers, so we will need the skills to integrate them into existing pipelines, manage their efforts and articulate our needs and wants.
AIs may be trained on contradicting data and their output might not consider human emotion and irrationality, so critical thinking and an eye for discerning fact from hallucination are invaluable.
What about the future of AI in creative industries? Are there any exciting innovations on the horizon?
When it comes to harnessing the power of AI, how do you balance ethical and societal implications?
How do you address artists' concerns about AI and intellectual property, especially with fan art and existing IP?
As an artist, my most radical ideas revolve around tearing down the existing frameworks based on scarcity and creating new ones that are rooted in abundance. Locking up styles into copyright containers would destroy artistic movements: the relationship between property and culture will always be tense. I look to the camera, the photocopier, and even the printed press, as earlier examples of the discussions happening today. I lean towards Copyleft and Public Domain, where monetisation comes from products and services rather than ownership of art.
As an innovation consultant, however, my approach is one of careful consideration for each use case, and I consider generative AI as an opportunity to experiment and shift mindsets. An individual might be able to generate their own fan art of the latest superhero movie for their own consumption, but a global organisation must take other considerations into account: from the scaled impact of their actions that can result in job loss and economic upheaval, to the vulnerability of using a technology that is heavily contested and still being tested in court.
In your role at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), how has AI been integrated into your digital transformation projects, and what impact has it had on the industries you work with?
AI isn’t new—it has been part of automation and analytics for years—but with the rise of generative AI, there are new opportunities. In the retail sector, TCS is implementing AI to enhance customer personalisation, leveraging machine learning to analyse consumer behaviour and recommend tailored products in real time. In healthcare, TCS has deployed AI models for predictive diagnostics by identifying potential risks earlier. In manufacturing, we are applying AI-powered predictive maintenance systems to reduce downtime and optimise operations.
While these are great examples, my observation is that AI currently scores high on the hype-cycle but all industries are playing it safe and waiting for someone else to take the early-adopter risks. When it comes to generative AI, the technology is still maturing, lacking the level of control and predictability required by organisations. Without proper guidance, business value can be hard to define, and I have seen (badly) articulated KPIs as ‘let’s see what it can do.’
A large part of my job is focused on identifying how to bring value to the organisation by leveraging technology, which is both an exciting and extremely complex topic.
What advice would you give to someone looking to start a career in AI and digital transformation?
Learn by doing. Get your hands dirty and try everything at least once: train a model, learn how prompting works to generate images, try to break ChatGPT at least once, join hackathons and communities both as a participant and as an observer. Then take a step back, forget the technology and ask the real questions: ‘What problem is your organisation trying to solve? ' and 'How will solving this problem delight your users or customers?’ Once you know where you want to go, you can figure out the steps to get there (I love backcasting!).
Marco Morales
QUT degree - Bachelor of Arts (Honours) (Communication Design), 2001
Have a question for Marco? Connect with him on LinkedIn.