Media Maven: In Conversation With Karla Congson

There's a lot of noise in the AI space right now, but Karla Congson is the kind of voice that cuts through with clarity and a people-first approach. With 25 years in marketing and a track record of building businesses rooted in human connection, Karla is now pioneering how we use digital twins and generative AI to work smarter— not just faster.

In this conversation, she opens up about scaling expertise through AI, the real risks of deepfakes and misinformation, and why she believes the future of work depends on authenticity as much as it does on automation. Plus, she shares her go-to tools, her take on where social media is headed, and the analog ritual that keeps her grounded.

Whether you're AI-curious or already deep in prompt engineering, this interview is packed with refreshingly real insight. 

Cleo: What made you interested in working in AI and the future of work?

Karla: Great question. Maybe I’ll start with a bit of background. My experience spans 25 years in marketing. I’m not a coder or a tech person—I’ve always been more on the management side, leading people, systems, and organizations. In 2016, I started my own business focused on people, and it’s gone really well. Our core team grew from 40 people, to an extended team of 200.

Then, in 2022, ChatGPT emerged as a sort of experimental chatbot. As I started hearing more about it, I began to wonder if there was a “best before” date on my people-focused business. That curiosity led me to double down—I started training my team by bringing in guest speakers and dove deep into prompt engineering and generative AI myself. I quickly realized how powerful it could be in helping small businesses and teams scale.

Cleo: As an AI consultant, what does your work actually involve?

Karla: At Agentiiv, we create digital twins of experts. As I got deeper into prompt engineering, I realized it went way beyond just typing into ChatGPT or Claude. In the fall of 2023, we started building agents. I worked with our top 25 people—our best creative director, our top social media strategist, our best creative brief writer—and we deconstructed their process.

We mapped out how they go from research and analysis to cracking an insight and delivering a great creative brief. What books do they reference? What frameworks do they use? What formats work best? Then we built agents based on their task expertise.

So from those 25 people, we created about 50 digital twins—because one person can be represented by multiple agents based on their different areas of expertise.

The platform was originally just for our internal team—to elevate their work and give them a co-pilot that understands their domain. But clients started asking, “How do I get access to this?” We partnered early on with a couple of key clients for beta testing, and it grew from there.

Now, we’re building digital twins in HR, procurement, tech, and even scenario planning. We’ve got over 100 agents on the platform—each one based on a real person with deep domain knowledge.

Cleo: How do those digital twins—or your services more broadly—help businesses move into the future?

Karla: We talk about it as scaling time. Imagine you’re an expert in social media or content creation—you’ve built this incredible skillset, but 30% of your day is probably spent on tasks you didn’t wake up excited to do. Things like writing contact reports or building timelines—necessary work, but not your genius zone.

If you had a million dollars and 100 interns, those would be the first things you’d delegate, right?

That’s where AI comes in. It lets small teams punch way above their weight—your team of 10 can produce like a team of 200 in terms of quality and impact. It eliminates the noise and gives you the space to focus on what you do best. And it helps you do more of that genius work—faster and with better energy—because you’re not hitting it at 8 p.m. when you’re already exhausted.

That’s the core benefit we offer: time, scaled. When you use AI to offload the busywork, you can hit those creative tasks fresh at 10 a.m., energized and ready. And not only are you fresh, you’ve also got 100 “collaborators” helping you move faster. It’s a game changer.

Cleo: What role do you think AI will play in shaping the future of marketing, especially in areas like social media?

Karla: Like all powerful tools, AI has both a light and a dark side. Starting with the risks—especially in social media, which is increasingly shaping public opinion and culture. The rise of deepfakes is a huge concern. All I need is five seconds of someone’s voice and I can recreate it using an app that costs just $5 a month. It’s shockingly easy. Same goes for visuals. I recently created a keynote using six selfies of a client who agreed to be deepfaked. I could’ve just as easily pulled those images from his public profiles.

In under a minute, I had a fairly convincing video of him saying something he never said. It’s short, so it holds up. Longer clips break down a bit, but even 10 seconds can do damage. So misinformation and disinformation are real threats, and as marketers, we have a responsibility to protect our brands and be transparent about when and how AI is used—via watermarks, disclaimers, whatever it takes.

But on the positive side, AI can help us understand our audiences better and faster. Marketing is all about delivering value and building communities—and AI makes that easier. It helps analyze trends, generate personalized content at scale, and streamline campaign creation.

Another big trend I see is the rise of federated communities. We’re moving beyond just the big platforms like Meta or TikTok. New platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are gaining traction, and we as marketers need to understand not just how to create content, but how to build trust and community in these smaller, decentralized spaces.

Cleo: What other tools (besides Agentiiv) are part of your daily marketing stack?

Karla: We’ve deconstructed NotebookLM, so I can upload a complex report and get an audio summary in podcast format. It’s a great way to absorb dense material on the go.

For research, I love Perplexity—it has the depth of OpenAI and Google combined, and it’s only $20 a month. I’m a Perplexity Business Fellow and a big fan.

Of course, I also use standard chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—they all have different strengths. It just depends on what you prefer.

We also created a video avatar of one of our team members, Avi, using a platform called HeyGen. Avi appears in many of our LinkedIn videos and even voices our certification course through the CMA's Chartered Marketer program. The course includes eight modules, each with video, audio summaries, and playbooks—and it took me a quarter of the time to produce compared to the last course I recorded myself.

And, for content creators, I recommend Originality.ai. It fact-checks your content and gives you an AI detection score, which is helpful if you're using generative tools but want to stay transparent and credible.

Cleo: Lastly, what’s your favorite way to take a break from work?

Karla: I go fully offline and off-digital. I live by the beach, so every day I take a one-hour walk with my two big dogs. I also love photography—sunrises, beach shots, random moments—while my two big wolfhounds drag me along looking for squirrels. It’s the perfect reset.