Alexander J. Perrin/ Working Theory

Personal archive · 2017-2025

Working Theory.

Ideas I chose to work through in public. These are not commissioned articles, company case studies, or the practitioner publications cataloged elsewhere on this site. They are personal arguments about technology, markets, and what progress should give back to people.

Legacy LinkedIn articles · Original timestamps preserved AI · Innovation · Measurement · Human capability

01 · Recent thinking

Trust after the black box.

The 2025 essays return to questions first raised years earlier: what the machine is actually optimizing, what evidence deserves belief, and where human judgment still matters.

Halftone and outlined evidence fields divided by an orange calibration mark

Building Trust in Digital Measurement

Why experimentation, transparent incentives, and evidence-based decisions matter more than another attribution model.

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Three connected fields representing input, objective, and environment

Beyond the Hype

AI performance depends on three choices advertisers still control: training data, business objectives, and the environment where decisions are deployed.

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02 · Earlier questions

What should innovation give us?

Three consecutive essays from July 2017 follow one question from the manual transmission to marketing AI: if technology removes the task, does it also remove the skill?

How Predictive Marketing Creates Optimal Travel Experiences

A 2017 view of self-learning systems, connected customer data, and the travel experience that emerges when fragmented decisions become one journey.

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A dotted journey path resolving into an orange experience signal

Why preserve them

The dates matter. They show the questions before the answers became obvious.