The Elephant in the Algorithm

Kristina Sherk has spent two decades shooting headshots in Washington, DC. When AI generators improved, she built her own app with zero coding experience. If you lead a team that has AI and isn't getting much back from it, start at 32:05, where she explains how a rollout can sound to the people in it: "You cannot incentivize an employee to use AI to make their job obsolete." By her own account she has never had a corporate job, so she comes at it from outside. Her app, GenerAItion Headshots, runs on an 800-word prompt that holds what she knows about lighting, posing and expression. She also talks with Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD about the six-month build contest she would run inside a company and what people still pay for in a studio. Matt and Rob are the co-founders of Average Robot and authors of the book The Elephant in the Algorithm.

Links:

Episode page: https://average-robot.com/ep5/pod

kristinasherk.com: https://kristinasherk.com

GenerAItion Headshots (Her app): https://generationheadshots.com

@shark_pixel (Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/shark_pixel/

Kristina Sherk (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-sherk-a7901060/

Eran Thomson spent his career in advertising, from copywriter to creative director at agencies including BBH and TBWA, and co-founded a Sydney agency that sold in 2014. Then he built PowerProv, which uses the fundamentals of improvisation to teach business teams the things nobody else teaches them: communication, connection, collaboration, creativity, confidence. In Episode 4, Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD talk to him about what AI is doing to those skills. He describes watching a strategy director produce insights at remarkable speed, then being unable to explain any of the thinking when asked a single question. He names what he sees happening as cognitive offload and cognitive surrender, people defaulting to the tools before they do any thinking of their own. And he asks the question that lands hardest: the thing that used to take an hour now takes five minutes, so did you go for a walk, or are you just busier than ever?

Links:

Eran Thomson: https://eranthomson.com

PowerProv (Company): https://powerprov.com.au

Eran Thomson (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/eranthomson/

AI transformation gets sold as a technology upgrade. It isn't. In Episode 3, Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD sit down with Jennifer Erfurth, a four-time Chief People Officer who most recently led the AI transformation at Opswat, on why the hard part of AI is never the tooling. It's the people. Why it's humans that make the difference, not the platform or the technology; how you win hearts and minds when roles are shifting under people's feet; what the future of work looks like as org charts flatten; and why authenticity becomes the whole game.

Links:

Jennifer Erfurth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalhrexecutive/

The people who taught you the job were never just handing you answers. In Episode 2, Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD sit down with Janette O'Neill, an executive-level People and Transformation leader with 30 years of experience, on what happens to judgement, mentorship and tacit knowledge when the answer is always one prompt away. Why expertise and judgement are not the same thing, how remote work and now AI quietly strip out the incidental learning careers are built on, and what leaders can actually put in place so the next generation still builds judgement, not just gets the answer.

Links:

Janette O'Neill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janette-o-neill-a60343/

Everyone is staring at the technology. We watch the people doing the work, because that is where AI at work is won or lost. In Episode 1, Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD unpack why the AI jobs panic points at the wrong target: what the machines genuinely can't do, why the industry's sharpest voices all landed on the same conclusion at Cannes, where the money is actually moving, and the three things a leader should do on Monday morning. Plus the first edition of The Elephant: Natalie Emirzian on lost connection.