05/18/2026
At last week’s IDSA DFW panel "Who is designing now - you or the machine?" Groove Jones co-founder Dale Carman went in with one specific mission: to be the "use-it-boldly" voice in a conversation that desperately needed one.
For Dale, the journey to this stage actually started 24 years ago.
While serving as the VFX supervisor on Spy Kids 2, his team built an on-set compositing system called Outpost. Dale coined a motto for it: creative at the speed of thought. Ten months later, that exact phrase became a Cinefex cover story headline. It had traveled from a studio floor in Dallas straight to the industry trade press, and Dale spent the next two and a half decades chasing that reality.
Last night, he showed a packed room why the industry has finally arrived.
Dale introduced the audience to Chip (yes—Chip and Dale 🐿️), an AI agent he built that lives on a Mac mini under his desk. Calling Chip "the most relentless collaborator" he has ever worked with, Dale shared how the duo co-designed an impossible optimization: packing three 1.6-million-polygons inside the Apple Vision Pro at a flawless 90 fps.
While Apple's team suggested cutting it down to 500,000 polygons, Dale and Chip crushed the efficiency metrics, dropping GPU draw calls from 1,074 down to just 142. Same 3D model. Same silhouette. A seventh of the processing work. Dale gave the creative direction, and the AI made it appear.
But as Dale pointed out, AI isn’t just about rendering pretty pictures; it’s about protecting human attention. By handling the heavy lifting and distilling complex business reports into clear, one-page weekly memos, the tech hands back hours of deep focus. The core creative pillars, taste, judgment, and point of view remain entirely human.
Dale noted that he has seen this exact movie play out three times now: first with desktop publishing, then the shift from film-to-digital, and now with AI. In every single wave, the people who got flattened were never the ones actively using the tools.
They were the ones standing on the beach, yelling at the tide.
His advice to the crowd? Don't be on the beach. Pick it up. Open it. Try it.
Huge congratulations to IDSA DFW for hosting an unforgettable night, to the panelists for an incredibly sharp conversation, and to the audience who stayed late to dig into the real questions. After 25 years of chasing a phrase, last night felt like proof.
