The Human Edge
A growth-obsessed agency CEO, raised on Yellow Pages campaigns and now leading DEPT, on engineering growth and rebuilding the journey for humans and agents.
"How do humans and agents interact?"
Dimi Albers is the CEO of DEPT, a global company he describes as around 4,000 people across more than 25 countries, split evenly between marketing services and technology services. He is known for arguing that growth has to be engineered rather than repeated, and for a model that treats marketing and technology as equal partners across the full customer journey.
Albers was drawn to the business early through his father, who was CMO and then chief growth officer of Yellow Pages. Trade press was always in the house and every campaign felt like an event, and his father's obsession with the quality and rigor of growth, and his fight to move it into new media, left its mark. Albers took the same appetite for growth into DEPT.
At DEPT, Albers leads what he calls a partner-led company, with 175 people who hold their own money in the business so that every client and colleague has a personal relationship with an owner. By his account the company runs a deliberate 50/50 split of marketing and technology services with close to 1,000 engineers, structured so it can work across the whole customer journey. He frames the current moment as the AI transformation following two decades of digital transformation, and argues the same discipline that produced early digital winners will decide who wins now.
We've had three years of AI already.
"We believe that if you want to grow faster, than we have to do new things."
Albers rejects the idea that slow growth is simply the economy's fault. He argues most brands stall because they keep running the same playbooks, and that the only way to grow faster is to do new things across the whole journey. He calls this growth invention and treats it as the core of what DEPT sells.
"We are a big proponent of humans"
For all his enthusiasm about agents and automation, Albers insists the human element is permanent. He argues time and material work will never disappear, that empathy and context are where humans keep the edge, and that people will always look for people who deliver. Technology, in his telling, extends humans rather than replacing them.
"A place like Reddit, which you could call the most human place on the Internet"
Albers describes AI as taking a brand's facts from its own channels and then verifying them elsewhere, the way a stranger at a bar confirms or doubts a story. That, he argues, is why the most human corners of the internet carry so much weight, and why brands now have to make the wider world reflect how good they really are.
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