when I run ansible-playbook I get an error message
failed: [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] => {"failed": true, "parsed": false}
/bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/python: not found
OpenSSH_7.2p2 Ubuntu-4ubuntu2.2, OpenSSL 1.0.2g 1 Mar 2016
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: auto-mux: Trying existing master
debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2
Shared connection to xxx.xx.xx.xxx closed.
The problem seems to be that you do not have Python installed on the server that you access ansible (that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx that you have masked).
It is also possible that you have Python 3.x installed on the server and use an Ansible lower than version 2.2, which is where initial support for Python 3.x was added.
Make sure that Python is installed on the server and that it is an appropriate version. Without indicating which version of Ansible you use, I can not tell you which is the minimum version of Python you need.