Agentic AI Must Apply Empathy And Dispassion to Best serve marketers

Agentic AI platforms should be built to help marketers harness the technology’s dispassionate decision‑making without losing empathy. That principle underpins DEPT’s latest product, Deptify — a Chrome extension designed as an orchestration layer that pulls together a marketer’s data, tools and knowledge sources to meet strategic needs.

Developed to help companies adopt agentic AI while still operating with long‑established systems, Deptify reflects a broader shift in the advertising industry: creating solutions that help brands evolve their AI capability without ripping out their existing infrastructure.

According to DEPT’s chief product officer, Roy Armale, its core purpose is simple: to determine when a human should do a job, and when an AI agent is better suited to the task.

The system allows users to gather their working documents and knowledge sources in one place, while automatically selecting the right AI agent for each task — shifting the focus from chasing usage metrics to delivering outcomes. At the centre of Deptify sits D, a persistent AI assistant that reads context across briefs, data, brand history and intent. Its role is to anticipate what teams need, surface relevant insight, and route work to the right people, tools or agents.

Empathy First

DEPT positions this as technology in service of growth, grounded in its ‘Empathy First’ framework — a human‑centred methodology used across design, technology and organisational consulting. It begins with understanding the user’s perspective, emotions and needs, then maps where AI should automate, where it should augment, and where human judgement must lead.

“There are tasks that are better when it's dispassionate, and there are tasks that are better when you add empathy… We use empathy as a proxy for humanity: adding too much of it to data collection introduces bias, so that work must remain dispassionate. But generating insights from that data requires empathy so the work connects,” says Armale.

The belief is that humans introduce unnecessary bias when collecting data, but empathy is essential when turning that data into insight that resonates with audiences.

“There are things where you need absolute truths and methodologies,” he continues, referencing the Placebo Test in medicine. “There are situations where you need contextual capabilities, like the ability to read the room — you will write your pricing model canonically, you will negotiate contextually. So, when you combine these, it gives you a map of the relationships between people and tech.”

This thinking leads Armale to challenge the industry’s reliance on the term ‘Human in the Loop’, which he argues describes only one narrow mode of human – AI interaction — where a human simply checks and approves an AI output. Deptify is built on the belief that the most valuable creative and strategic work happens across a spectrum: human‑led tasks with AI assistance, agents working with human direction, and agents operating under supervision.

“’Human in the loop’ makes this assumption that it's always something that's happening, and ‘we'll keep you in the loop that it is happening’. It always assumes that everything is better with dispassion and canonical truths,” he says.

Deptify instead enables DEPT to sit with clients and map the jobs to be done. The process starts with the client’s vision, objectives and goals, then works backwards to define the specific tasks required — and the people, technology and data needed to deliver them.

Helping Marketers Move from Concept to Scale

On creativity, Armale is clear: AI cannot develop taste or replicate the strange, culturally specific leaps that make great advertising memorable. He points to the surreal humour of CeraVe’s Michael Cera Super Bowl campaign as an example of something AI simply couldn’t originate.

Where AI can help is in scaling creativity — adapting strong ideas across channels, markets and formats. One human‑originated platform can resonate globally, with technology amplifying and contextualising it.

The same applies to content. Content only works when delivered in the right context; the right message at the right moment drives behaviour. As a former strategist, Armale notes that perception, intent and behaviour data rarely aligned — but AI can help bridge that gap by optimising when, where and how a strong creative concept appears.

He sees tools like Deptify helping marketers save time, money and energy by determining where and when content should be deployed to influence behaviour. Instead of constantly generating new ideas, marketers can adapt proven concepts to the specific situation a consumer is in. The system helps balance consistent brand messaging with smart contextualisation, offering guardrails that signal when a message is or isn’t appropriate — while still allowing teams to override them when needed.

“Deptify is what Growth Invention looks like as a product,” Armale adds. “It connects the systems brands already use, removes friction between insight and execution, and helps value compound over time. It is the codification of how we believe modern growth should operate: connected systems, persistent intelligence, human-centered AI, and just-in-time learning embedded in the flow of work.”