Growth is engineered, not executed. The journey is being rebuilt for humans and agents at once. And empathy is the human edge that stays.

Albers was caught young. His father was CMO and then chief growth officer of Yellow Pages, the big yellow book of companies and telephone numbers that people searched the way they use Google now. Trade press was always around the house, every new campaign felt like an event, and Albers was mesmerised. His father was obsessive about the quality and rigor of growth and sales training, and fought hard to bring it into new media like Videotel and Infoboxes, though the business missed the boat.

DEPT is a global company of around 4,000 people across more than 25 countries, split 50/50 between marketing services and technology services, right down the middle on revenue and headcount. Albers keeps it that way because working across the full customer journey means understanding both equally, with neither a second class citizen. Marketing covers creative, media and content, connecting into a technology ecosystem with close to 1,000 engineers working on experience, strategy, data infrastructure and backend systems.

Most brands grow only 3 to 8% at the moment, partly because the world economy is flat, partly because the marketing playing field is complex, but mainly because people keep repeating playbooks. Albers believes faster growth comes from doing new things, understanding technology across the full customer journey and finding fresh routes to growth, which DEPT calls growth invention.

There is plenty of talk about outcome based billing but nothing at scale, as any run through the quarterly reports shows. At DEPT, output based work has long been a staple on both the technology and creative sides. Outcome models get more interesting as you cover more of the journey, though procurement remains a challenge, and because Albers is a big proponent of humans, time and material work will always be part of the mix.

DEPT is partner-led, 175 people with their own money in the business, so every client and every employee has a personal relationship with an owner. Albers says that keeps it boutique, direct and personal, and builds longevity.

The essence is two things: you spend some time here to do the very best work of your career that helps clients grow faster than the competition, and you do it with really good people you hopefully still know in 20 or 30 years. That gives you memories and relationships for a lifetime.

Clients are all on the journey and more advanced than a year ago; the challenge is making sense of the chaos and making the technology work together. Albers frames every change the same way: 20% win, 20% lose and go out of business, and 60% are slow. After 20 years of digital transformation, the task now is to jump on the AI transformation and apply the earlier lessons to land in the top 20%, remembering this is a transformation of people and processes, not a purchase.

It is finally a boardroom conversation because CEOs can see they have lost 5 to 50% of direct traffic in the past 6 to 12 months and cannot buy their way out. But that, Albers stresses, is only the first touchpoint.

Pull the effect through the whole journey: around 71 consideration points before a purchase, a human or an agent pressing the button, then delivery, support, loyalty and churn all as impacted. DEPT grounds a roadmap in its digital transformation experience and its empathy first framework, mapping each touchpoint as human, agentic or in between, then applying a cost and value model to find where the value sits at low cost. Then, as Albers says in Dutch, you make chocolate of it, working out where to invest in 2027 for outsized growth.

For 100 years, if you had a brand you were making things for humans, from a TV commercial to an app. Commerce teams spent a decade tuning a button to squeeze 0.2% on conversion, all for a human. Now the same work has to convert for the different agents people use, and the question becomes when the human is in it and when the agent is fully in it.

Albers believes consumers will trust ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude as much as they trust Google now. He understands the scepticism and Anthropic's refusal to run ads, but says there is no evidence in a century of advertising that people will shut it out. As the journey connects, advertising becomes a utility, and the sophistication of a brand's ad ecosystem signals the quality of its customer experience.

The AI takes the first facts from your own channels, assuming the product data is right, then verifies them elsewhere, like the person at the bar who has used the product before. That, Albers says, is why Reddit, the most human place on the internet, is still the most quoted platform in the world. The task for a brand is to make the wider world reflect how good it really is.

Humans are good at empathy and context, reading a tone or a room; AI is good at the canonical and at dispassionate volumes we could never comprehend. Map any customer journey, or the 28 things you do to make a podcast, onto those two axes and it tells you where humans stay essential and where agents take over, which is how you transform teams and understand the consumer.

The brands getting it right are investing in offline cultural experiences, because as behaviour becomes more agent driven the importance of those offline human moments will increase. And the brands that understand where their facts are checked and how humans speak about them, and manage to influence both.

Albers finds inspiration taking his kids to the football, at San Siro and beyond, where you see consumer behaviour in its rawest form, how brands run their journeys and use their channels, and where you build memories with your children that never go away. Work, the personal and the unforgettable come together in one place.

Two things. Be as progressive as you can with AI and technology, because it helps monumentally. And be the person in the room who delivers: say you will do A and come back having done A, because no matter how many agents and machines we have, people will always look for people who deliver.