Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

Discover how to harness the power of AI without losing the human touch. Hosted by Mike Montague, Founder of Avenue9, this podcast delivers actionable insights to help small and mid-sized businesses market like big brands. With expert interviews, relatable success stories, and practical tips, we show you how to amplify your marketing efforts with AI tools that enhance—not replace—human creativity and connection. Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or curious about the future of AI, this is your go-to guide for building smarter, more authentic marketing strategies. Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1738519089289300a62eab036

Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9 is a business podcast hosted by Mike Montague, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mike Montague hosts Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9, a business show with 100 episodes published.

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  Episode #100

  AI Doesn't Belong in the C-Suite with Mike Montague EPISODE #100

  Aug 15, 202625 minS2

  Send us Fan Mail A couple of weeks ago, a politician read his chatbot's instructions out loud into the official record of his legislature. Everybody laughed at him. That same morning, a CEO somewhere forwarded a giant AI strategy document to their team with the same tells buried in it, and nobody laughed at them. Their staff just quietly lost the afternoon. For episode 100, I'm going solo to make the argument I most want on the record: AI does not belong in the C-suite. I run an AI marketing agency, and I still believe it. AI can be a gift to your frontline experts, a real advantage for your middle managers, and a liability in the hands of senior leadership. Asking AI is not a leadership skill. Anyone can do it. A prompt is not an insight, and a printout of the response is not a point of view. In this episode: The five reasons executives need to be careful with AI, starting with OpenAI's own benchmark showing their best model matches a human expert a little under half the time. As a letter grade, that's a C. The thirty-second test that exposes the C-student bias. Ask AI a hard question inside your own discipline and grade the answer honestly. AI sounds like a genius doing somebody else's job and like an intern doing yours. Why AI can't do strategy. Harvard Business Review published research covering 15,000 simulations where simply flipping the order of two options flipped about 19% of the recommendations. What workslop costs you. Stanford and BetterUp found colleagues rate the sender 54% less creative and 42% less trustworthy after receiving it. The ABCs of AI: A players use it to solve, bosses use it to sharpen, and the C-suite uses it to prepare. And the one policy I think every company should adopt this year: nobody gets to quote AI. I also want to thank the incredible guests from the first hundred episodes and share what a Silver Creator Award from YouTube actually took. Read the full written version: https://avenue9.com/blog/the-abcs-of-ai-for-executives-why-ai-doesnt-b-long-in-the-c-suite/ Follow the show so you're here for the next hundred: https://podcast.avenue9.com/2435068/follow Learn more about Human-First AI Marketing at https://avenue9.com The Human-First AI Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Avenue9 . We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. Explore new avenues available with AI marketing at Avenue9.com. No matter where you’re starting from or how big your goals are, we turn modern marketing challenges into exciting opportunities. Let's get started with a discovery consultation! Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.

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  Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

  The Future of AI: Predictions from Marketing and Artificial Intelligence Experts

  Aug 12, 202613 min

  Send us Fan Mail For our 99th episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, we’re celebrating with a special compilation: The Future of AI: Predictions from Our 2026 Experts . This episode brings together highlights from this year’s guests as they share where they believe AI is headed, how it will reshape work, marketing, leadership, creativity, and customer trust, and what business owners need to understand before they chase the next shiny tool. Across these conversations, one theme comes through clearly: the future of AI will belong to the leaders who combine smarter technology with stronger human judgment. You’ll hear predictions about AI agents, automation, content, search, strategy, personalization, and the growing importance of human-first thinking. This episode is a fast-moving look at what experts are watching now, what SMB leaders should prepare for next, and how to use AI as a practical amplifier for better decisions, better systems, and better relationships. Key Takeaways: AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure. The experts see AI becoming part of everyday workflows, decision-making, content creation, search, customer service, and internal operations. Human judgment becomes more important as AI gets more capable. As tools get faster and more autonomous, leaders will need clearer strategy, stronger quality standards, and better decision-making processes. AI agents will change how work gets delegated. Businesses will increasingly use AI to complete multi-step tasks, but success will depend on giving agents clear goals, context, boundaries, and human oversight. The future of marketing will depend on trust. More AI-generated content will make authentic voice, real expertise, customer proof, and credible storytelling even more important. Search is shifting from keywords to answers. Buyers are increasingly asking AI tools for recommendations, so brands will need to create content that is clear, useful, trustworthy, and easy for answer engines to understand. Small businesses can compete with bigger brands. AI gives SMBs access to tools for strategy, content, personalization, automation, and analysis that used to require much larger teams and budgets. Generic AI output will become easier to spot. As more companies use the same tools, the advantage will go to businesses that train AI on their own voice, customer conversations, frameworks, and expertise. AI will reshape roles instead of simply removing work. The strongest teams will redesign responsibilities around what humans do best and what AI can support, accelerate, or automate. Creativity will become more collaborative. AI can help generate options, remix ideas, and speed up production, while humans provide taste, meaning, empathy, and final direction. Context will be the new competitive advantage. The businesses that capture their stories, sales calls, customer insights, processes, and brand knowledge will get better results from AI than those using generic prompts. Leaders need to build systems, not just test tools. The experts point toward a future where AI success comes from repeatable workflows, shared knowledge bases, training, governance, and clear use cases. Human-first companies will have the edge. AI will create the most value for businesses that use it to improve relationships, empower employees, and serve customers with more clarity and consistency. The Human-First AI Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Avenue9 . We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. Explore new avenues available with AI marketing at Avenue9.com. No matter where you’re starting from or how big your goals are, we turn modern marketing challenges into exciting opportunities. Let's get started with a discovery consultation! Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.

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  Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

  Creating Rockstarr AI with Rachel Minion

  Aug 2, 202628 min

  Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague welcomes back Rachel Minion to talk about Creating Rockstarr AI and what it really takes to build AI systems that can support a small business without stripping away its voice, values, or strategy. Rachel shares how she starts with the essentials: defining the ideal client profile, clarifying the offer, capturing brand voice, and turning that context into a knowledge base that makes AI outputs sharper, more useful, and more aligned over time. Mike and Rachel also explore the practical side of building AI-powered workflows, from using call transcripts and meeting notes to uncover customer patterns, to creating Claude skills, automating project management, improving reporting, and building a “marketing department in a box.” The big takeaway: AI gets better when you feed it real conversations, clear strategy, and human review. For business owners and marketing leaders, this episode is a grounded look at how to use AI to reduce bottlenecks, scale authentic storytelling, and build systems that keep working while you finally take a vacation. Takeaways: Start with the ideal client profile. Rachel says AI marketing systems work best when you first define who you are talking to, how they like to be spoken to, what they care about, where they feel pain, and where they go for help. Clarify the offer before building the system. Once the audience is clear, the next step is shaping an offer that feels differentiated, compelling, and urgent enough for that buyer to care. Build a knowledge base around voice, strategy, and context. We explain that audience, offer, and brand voice become the foundation for everything AI creates, because the system needs real context to produce useful work. Use AI to find the work worth automating first. Rachel plugged her time and task data into her project management system to identify quick wins, bigger bottlenecks, and tasks she should remove from her own plate. Start with operational bottlenecks. Her first AI system focused on project management, including workload balance, task creation, strategy notes, and making sure the right reference material was connected to the work. Keep human approval in the workflow. Rachel emphasized that AI-generated tasks still need review because the system can create work that sounds plausible but does not actually exist. Capture conversations because they hold the real marketing gold. Rachel uses sales call transcripts to check whether marketing matches real customer pain, discovery language, and patterns prospects are actually using. Let AI reveal patterns humans miss. Rachel’s biggest insight from transcript analysis is that AI can quickly surface repeated language, objections, and themes that are hard for people to spot manually. Create process documents for AI skills and workflows. Her pro tip is to have AI generate a plain-English process document alongside each skill so the team can understand what it does and choose the right workflow. Expect the early stage to feel messy. Rachel says the beginning can feel frustrating because the outputs are wrong at first, but the system gets sharper as the knowledge base grows and the workflows improve. The payoff is removing the founder as the bottleneck. After building her systems, Rachel was able to take a real vacation while production kept moving, with work waiting for her review instead of stopping at her desk. Rockstarr AI is built as a marketing department in a box. Rachel describes the goal as giving clients a system built on her strategy, frameworks, and the client’s own knowledge base so marketing can keep rolling in their voice. Read the episode recap Visit Rockstarr AI Connect with Rachel Minion on Linkedin The Human-First AI Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Avenue9 . We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. Explore new avenues available with AI marketing at Avenue9.com. No matter where you’re starting from or how big your goals are, we turn modern marketing challenges into exciting opportunities. Let's get started with a discovery consultation! Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.

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  Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

  Overcoming Identity Fracture and Unleashing Influence with Dr. Angela Mulrooney

  Jul 26, 202633 min

  Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague talks with Dr. Angela Mulrooney, Founder of Unleashing Influence Inc . and author of Own Your Genius , about what it really takes to stay relevant, trusted, and influential in the age of AI. Their conversation explores identity fracture, the pressure to reinvent yourself, and the importance of defining your “niche of genius” before using AI to amplify your voice, content, or business. Angela and Mike unpack why AI can make generic expertise louder, how leaders can avoid becoming “Swiss cheese” experts, and why influence starts with self-awareness, discernment, and original thinking. You’ll hear practical takeaways on owning your recommendations, building an audience before launching an offer, applying knowledge instead of collecting answers, and using AI as a tool to scale authentic human insight. Visit unleashinginfluence.com Check out her book: Own Your Genius Connect with Dr. Angela Mulrooney on LinkedIn Key Takeaways: Define your niche of genius before using AI. Angela shared that AI can amplify your work, but your relevance comes from knowing what you uniquely bring to the market first. Use discernment with AI outputs. She warned that AI can be convincing and sycophantic, so leaders need to question whether the ideas actually fit their voice, strategy, and audience. Avoid becoming a “Swiss cheese” expert. Angela pointed out that AI can help people look polished on the surface, but shallow expertise gets exposed quickly when real questions come up. Identity fracture happens when professionals lose their place in the world. She explained that seasoned professionals often struggle less with losing work itself and more with losing their sense of contribution, impact, and community. Your expertise needs to become a system. Angela described helping people uncover how their brain creates answers, document those patterns, and turn their intellectual property into products or programs. Influence still matters when information is everywhere. She shared that many people build products without knowing how to get sales, which makes thought leadership, buyer psychology, and audience-building essential. Start marketing before the product is finished. Angela advised founders to begin building interest and gathering feedback early instead of waiting until launch to find an audience. Talk to the market before falling in love with the idea. Before writing her book, Angela had 500 conversations with sidelined professionals so her methodology was based on real needs instead of assumptions. Show substance through live interaction. She uses weekly workshops so prospects can ask questions, experience her thinking, and see that there is real depth behind the offer. Use AI to improve thinking and execution. Angela shared that she uses tools like Whisperflow, Claude critiques, data analysis, and team research workflows to move faster while keeping human judgment in charge. The Human-First AI Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Avenue9 . We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. Explore new avenues available with AI marketing at Avenue9.com. No matter where you’re starting from or how big your goals are, we turn modern marketing challenges into exciting opportunities. Let's get started with a discovery consultation! Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.

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  Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

  The Polymath's Place in AI with Dr. Angela Meyers

  Jul 19, 202634 min

  Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast , Mike Montague talks with Dr. Angela C. Myers, author of Versatile: Human Intelligence in an Artificial Age , Founder of Polymaths Place, LLC , and creator of The Polymath Place. Together, they explore why polymaths, multidimensional learners, and curious generalists may be especially well-suited for the AI era, where adaptability, creativity, and connected thinking are becoming essential business skills. Angela shares why the age of narrow specialization is giving way to broader human intelligence, how AI can free us from routine mental drudgery, and why SMB leaders should encourage learning, experimentation, and play inside their teams. AI can help businesses move faster, but human judgment, curiosity, and cross-disciplinary thinking are what turn that speed into meaningful progress. Takeaways: We are leaving the age of narrow specialization. Dr. Angela C. Myers explained that routine, stable, predictable knowledge work is increasingly easy to automate, which makes bigger-picture thinking more valuable. Polymaths are built for the AI era. People with multidisciplinary experience can connect ideas across fields, spot patterns, and bring a unique combination of knowledge to their work. AI is inherently generalist. Because AI can operate across many domains, the strongest AI users will likely be broad thinkers who can learn across disciplines and guide the tool with better context. The new career safety net is adaptability. Myers shared that being multi-capable and committed to continual learning helps people stay relevant as work changes around them. AI should free humans from mental drudgery. She emphasized that AI can move people away from routine grunt work so they can focus more on creativity, judgment, connection, and other human capacities. Play and exploration make people more creative. Myers pointed to research on Nobel laureates showing that outside interests, hobbies, and creative exploration often give top performers a more original edge. Old metrics can make leaders think too narrowly. She warned that measuring success only by inherited industry standards can cause teams to miss creativity, connection, originality, and changing market realities. Learning is how we update our mental software. Myers framed learning as the method for staying current, especially as AI advances exponentially and changes work faster than most people expect. People should experiment with AI even if they are “not techy.” Her advice was to stretch into AI through trial, practice, and small experiments because AI is reshaping work and is here to stay. Organizations need to understand and support versatile humans. Myers wrote Versatile to help leaders, managers, HR professionals, and executives better support multidimensional people in the workplace. The Human-First AI Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Avenue9 . We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. Explore new avenues available with AI marketing at Avenue9.com. No matter where you’re starting from or how big your goals are, we turn modern marketing challenges into exciting opportunities. Let's get started with a discovery consultation! Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.

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