MEET

Carmel Dibner

Principal

Education

B.A., Psychology and Sociology, Business & Organizations Concentration, Cornell University
MBA, Marketing and Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Affiliations

2021 Women in Research (WIRe) Mentor
2023-24 Informa FEI Steering Committee Member

Recognition

2023 Quirk's Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award: Health Care / Pharmaceutical Research Project (Account Lead)

Introduction

Carmel Dibner is a principal in the Insights for Innovation practice at Applied Marketing Science (AMS) where she is responsible for client relationships, client service delivery, and business development.

Since 2007, Carmel has helped dozens of companies uncover critical customer insights to improve products, services, and customer experiences. Carmel has extensive experience managing traditional qualitative and quantitative research engagements in business to business and consumer markets.

She has worked closely with researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management to experiment with new AI techniques and has successfully applied machine learning to answer her clients’ most difficult research questions. These techniques became the basis for a research study for Boston Children’s Hospital that was awarded a 2023 Quirk’s Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Award in the Health Care/Pharmaceutical Research Project category.

Carmel regularly presents at leading industry conferences such as the Front End of Innovation Continued and The Market Research Event Continued. She has presented on the Boston Children’s Hospital machine learning case study, and topics such as serial innovation and customer-centric innovation.

Carmel holds an MBA in marketing and management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Palmer Scholar. She also holds a B.A. in psychology and sociology with a Business and Organizations concentration from Cornell University. Over the course of her career, Carmel has worked both as a consultant and on the corporate side in brand management at Unilever for the flagship brand, Dove®.

Speaking Engagements

Intelligence and Insights Leadership Forum 2025

Supercharge Your VOC: How Supervised Finetuned AI Models are Changing the Game

Carmel spoke at this year's Intelligence and Insights Leadership Forum on how AMS's cutting-edge supervised, finetuned AI model goes beyond replicating human analysis: it amplifies it, helping to uncover hidden insights and redefining the way we understand customer needs. Her session explored how the LLM identifies customer needs with unmatched depth, specificity, and solution-agnostic precision, significantly outperforming the generic responses that publicly available LLMs (such as ChatGPT) typically yield.

Supercharge Your VOC: How Supervised Finetuned AI Models are Changing the Game [Webinar]

Understanding customer needs is becoming more challenging—and more critical—by the day. Traditional Voice of the Customer (VOC) research can be limited by time, resources, and the sheer volume of data. What if AI didn’t just help, but fundamentally transformed how we uncover customer needs—surfacing hidden patterns, eliminating blind spots, and augmenting human expertise to drive innovation? Carmel and Dr. Artem Timoshenko introduce a groundbreaking approach to VOC research in the form of a supervised finetuned large language model (LLM) that identifies customer needs with unparalleled precision, efficiency, and contextual nuance.

Product Mastery Now Podcast

529: Is this the best AI-powered market research approach? – with Carmel Dibner

Carmel explores how artificial intelligence is transforming Voice of the Customer (VOC) research for product teams. The collaboration between AMS and MIT researchers has yielded impressive results, with AI tools not only matching human analysts in identifying customer needs but often exceeding them—especially for emotional needs that humans might overlook. Rather than replacing human researchers, this supervised, finetuned AI model serves as a copilot, helping product teams uncover twice as many unique needs while reducing analysis time and eliminating bias. This hybrid approach offers tremendous potential for innovation, particularly in the early stages of product development.

FEI Continued 2023

Leveraging AI for Customer Journey Mapping Success: Boston Children's Hospital Case Study

AMS and Boston Children’s Hospital shared an example of how they jointly used machine learning to map the journeys of pediatric complex care patients. They also discussed how attendees can leverage AI to develop a highly detailed journey map to better understand their customers.

TMRE @ Home 2023

How Boston Children’s Hospital Leveraged AI for Customer Journey Map Success

Applied Marketing Science (AMS) and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) explored how leveraging AI enabled the #1 pediatric hospital in the US to develop a highly-detailed journey map. The resulting journey map enabled BCH to better understand the experiences of pediatric complex care patients.

TMRE Continued 2022

What's Cooking? Spectrum Brands' Revolutionary Approach to Customer Insights

Carmel was joined by Cassandra Maktabi, Senior New Product Manager at Spectrum Brands, to explore how Spectrum Brands has made deep understanding of customer needs central to their innovation strategy. They explored the multitude of ways identifying a full range of customer needs had paid dividends for Spectrum Brands’ air fryer category and beyond. Specifically, they addressed how aligning on customer needs was a critical tool in the successful reorganization of their portfolio after their 2021 acquisition of Tristar Products.

Product Mastery Now Podcast

Episode 405: Create serial innovation product teams – with Abbie Griffin, PhD, and Carmel Dibner

Carmel Dibner and Dr. Abbie Griffin discussed serial innovators and how they can greatly improve the innovation results of an organization. Abbie and Carmel defined the term ‘serial innovator’ and explained how carefully structured and developed teams results in exponential innovation success. They shared insights related to personalities, skills and attitudes to help listeners start building in-house serial innovation teams.

TMRE @ Home 2022

Secret Strategies for Creating Serial Innovation Teams

Carmel Dibner and Dr. Abbie Griffin discussed how to structure your internal teams for successful innovation, covering insights related to personalities, skills, and attitudes that predict innovation success. They also discussed team size, how to stay on task during the early stages of innovation and strategic tips to contribute to team success.

FEI Presents: Leading Innovation in a Digital World 2020

Machine Learning: Finding Sticky Innovations in the Age of Stuck at Home

Carmel Dibner and Kristyn Corrigan discussed how machine learning can be leveraged to gather unique and actionable customer insights during the transformative time of the pandemic.

TMRE: The Market Research Event Virtual Digital Summit 2020

Machine Learning: Unmasking Insights in the Masked Era

Carmel and Kristyn discussed how researchers can utilize machine learning to gather deep, transformative insights, even without being face-to-face with customers.

Quirk’s Event Brooklyn 2020

Unearthing the Unexpected: The Power of Machine Learning

Carmel discussed advances in machine learning technology that allow researchers to gain insights for innovation much quicker and less expensively than ever before. The technology, developed in collaboration with researchers in MIT, enables companies to collect insights from existing text-based content – whether public or private – in a matter of a few short weeks.

Front End of Innovation (FEI) 2019

“The Future of Innovation: Faster, Better Insights with AI”

Carmel Dibner and Kristyn Corrigan discussed how machine learning continues to transform innovation, and how powerful customer insights can be uncovered from the data you already have.

Front End of Innovation (FEI) 2018

Machine Learning: When Primary Research Becomes Secondary

Carmel Dibner and John Mitchell shared the latest advancements in machine learning for market research, including how it can help uncover customer insights faster and cheaper from existing user-generated content.

Guest Lecture | Northeastern University, 2017

Carmel Dibner guest lectured at Northeastern University as part of a market research course (Marketing 6210). Carmel discussed the characteristics of a successful researcher, applicable academic disciplines and courses outside of the market research field that are valuable for a career in insights.