The Elephant in the Algorithm
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How to Engage Your Team, Close the AI Profitability Gap, and Get a Return on Your Investment (from Day One)
The AI playbook for leadership teams
By Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD.
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Advance praise for The Elephant in the Algorithm.
Marketing leaders are being told to move faster, cut costs, adopt AI, protect the brand, inspire teams, and somehow not make a mess. This book gives them the leadership framework to do exactly that: make better decisions, protect quality, and use AI to create work that still earns trust.
This book makes the future feel less like a threat and more like a leadership opportunity. Rob Cannon and Matt Perry show that the strongest AI advantage will belong to organizations that build human capability with the same seriousness as technical capability. Better culture, better retention, better decisions, better ROI. That is the play.
Matt & Rob take the AI conversation, typically as much hype as dread, and make it feel fresh, human, and more urgent than ever. And a little optimistic, which is nice. I found myself jotting down insights in preparation to share them with friends (with credit, I promise). Algorithms will keep changing; this book will keep up, because it's built on curiosity and real judgment, not trend-chasing or doom.
This book is extremely timely. Marketing leaders are facing huge challenges thinking about how AI will shape the very future of their companies and sadly no-one has the answers. In this very readable book, Matt and Rob take a clear-eyed, pragmatic look at how company leaders should be addressing AI and its likely impact on their people. The book explains the typical concerns; identifies the questions we should be asking and proposes practical ways ahead for leaders. It gave me plenty to think about.
AI is often framed as a technology transformation, but its greatest impact is on work itself — how organisations create value, how work is redesigned, and how people adapt to new ways of working. What sets this book apart is that Matt and Rob write from inside that transformation, drawing on decades of experience in creative industries and first-hand experience of previous waves of digital change. They recognise that successful AI adoption depends as much on preparing people, exercising good judgement about where AI should be applied and leading through change as it does on the technology itself. The result is a thoughtful, practical and distinctly human perspective on one of the most significant workplace shifts of our time.
Marketing, creative and talent leaders have lived through wave after wave of disruption. AI feels different, not simply because of the technology, but because of what it could mean for the value of human work. Matt and Rob demonstrate a deep understanding of that tension. Drawing on decades of agency experience, they bring clarity, credibility and humanity to the challenge. The writing is sharp and enjoyable, with the focus firmly on what matters most: helping people adapt, lead and create meaningful distinction in a world of limitless output.
Matt Perry and Rob Cannon make the case that efficiency is too small a goal for AI. What I appreciated most was their discussion of taste, trust, purpose and the meaning of work. I hope all leaders approach this technological disruption as thoughtfully as this book recommends.
A plan for AI that starts with your people.
The Elephant in the Algorithm is an AI playbook for the leaders who own what AI returns: CEOs, CMOs, COOs and CHROs. It is about the thing most AI advice skips: your people. The book shows you how to align your AI strategy with your business strategy and your customers, and how to bring your leaders and teams with you, so the technology you have already paid for turns into value.
What is in the book.
- How to prepare your people for the change without losing the ones you cannot afford to lose.
- How to protect quality standards while the work changes underneath you.
- How to align people, processes, and platforms in the order that works.
- How to lead change in a way that builds trust as it goes.
"We wrote this book for people who are smart enough to know something significant is happening, and wise enough to want a plan rather than a prediction."
Meet Matt and Rob.
Rob is an organizational psychologist who has spent more than twenty years guiding people and teams through change, usually the kind that arrives faster than the organization is ready for. His work centers on how people adapt and hold their nerve when the ground under their jobs is shifting. He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and a grounding in coaching psychology that puts building human capability at the center of his practice. He has experienced transition from the inside, including ten years at Sony, across New York, London, and Sydney, as the music industry was remade by new technology and the human cost went almost entirely unmanaged. He is co-founder of Average Robot, co-author of Aha! A User's Guide to Creativity, and co-author of The Elephant in the Algorithm with Matt Perry.
Matt's career in marketing and creative runs through M&C Saatchi in London, WPP in Sydney, Omnicom in San Francisco, and Genero, where he launched and led the North American business. He's worked on projects with companies including Google, Meta, Hilton, L'Oréal, PG&E, Michaels, and Fanatics. He has experienced change through four major technology transitions and has led teams through each of them, and saw every time that the impact on people and process mattered more than the technology everyone was talking about. Without people in the center, technology-led change fails. He studied at the Kellogg School of Management, where he completed the AI for Business Application program, before founding Average Robot, the change management firm that closes the AI Profitability Gap™ for the teams doing the work, so the AI those teams have already bought starts to pay. He co-wrote Marketing Your Creativity, and The Elephant in the Algorithm with Rob Cannon, PhD.
The book's companion
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Want it in print?
If your leadership team has paid for AI and is still waiting for the return, this book lays out the people work that gets you there. Leave your details and we'll email you when the print edition of The Elephant in the Algorithm is out. That's the only reason we'll use your address unless you tell us otherwise.
The Elephant in the Algorithm is out on Kindle November 18, and print follows. Reading on Kindle? Pre-order it on Amazon.
Until your copy arrives, you can read the essays on Substack.
Ask us something.
If you have a question about the book or about anything else, a founder of Average Robot will spend fifteen minutes on it with you. You do not need a project in mind.
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