Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time
Jul 31, 2026 · 9 min · 10 segments
Every leader’s obsessing over which AI model to deploy. Joseph Michelli argues they’re ignoring the real algorithm: the middle manager who decides whether AI feels like a gift or a threat. Drawing on…
Joseph MichelliHost
I want to tell you about a word I'm hearing in every executive conversation this year.
The word is algorithm, which model, which vendor, which co-pilot we're rolling out to the sales force, the contact center, the clinic, the store.
Almost nobody in these rooms is talking about the actual algorithm that decides whether any of it works, because that algorithm isn't made of silicon.
It's the person who runs the Tuesday huddle, the shift supervisor, the team lead, the middle manager standing right between your beautiful AI roadmap and the people who have to live inside of it.
That manager is the operating system your whole strategy runs on, and brilliant code on a corrupted operating system still crashes.
Right now, most organizations are shipping the most disruptive workplace technology in a generation onto an operating system they've never patched and never enabled.
And today I'm going to try to convince you that it's the quiet variable that separates the AI rollouts that lift your people from the ones that quietly hollow them out.
I want to tell you about a word I'm hearing in every executive conversation this year.
The word is algorithm, which model, which vendor, which co-pilot we're rolling out to the sales force, the contact center, the clinic, the store.
Almost nobody in these rooms is talking about the actual algorithm that decides whether any of it works, because that algorithm isn't made of silicon.
It's the person who runs the Tuesday huddle, the shift supervisor, the team lead, the middle manager standing right between your beautiful AI roadmap and the people who have to live inside of it.
That manager is the operating system your whole strategy runs on, and brilliant code on a corrupted operating system still crashes.
Right now, most organizations are shipping the most disruptive workplace technology in a generation onto an operating system they've never patched and never enabled.
And today I'm going to try to convince you that it's the quiet variable that separates the AI rollouts that lift your people from the ones that quietly hollow them out.
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