In a recent appearance on the AI Biz Podcast, Avenue9 founder Mike Montague shared a perspective that cuts through much of the noise surrounding artificial intelligence and marketing:
AI can accelerate content creation, but it cannot accelerate trust.
While many organizations are racing to use AI to produce more content, Montague argues that the real opportunity lies elsewhere. The businesses that win in the AI era will not be the ones creating the most content. They will be the ones creating the most trust.
The Trust and Speed Paradox
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally a tool designed to increase speed.
Trust works differently.
Trust is built through credibility, consistency, relevance, and human connection. These things develop over time.
As Montague explains, there is no AI workflow that can turn a first date into a marriage.
Relationships simply do not move at machine speed.
AI can help businesses ask better questions, personalize communications, and create more relevant experiences. However, no amount of automation can replace the human process of earning confidence and building relationships.
This distinction becomes increasingly important as marketers gain access to tools capable of producing unlimited amounts of content.
More content does not automatically create more trust.
In many cases, it creates more noise.
Why AI Slop Is Becoming a Trust Problem
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is treating AI like a content vending machine.
They enter a prompt, push a button, and expect high-quality marketing to emerge.
The result is often what many marketers now call “AI slop”; generic content that sounds polished but lacks insight, originality, or authentic perspective.
Montague believes the problem is not the technology itself.
The problem is the lack of context.
When businesses ask AI to create content without understanding their audience, customer challenges, unique value proposition, or brand voice, the output becomes indistinguishable from thousands of other AI-generated articles, emails, and social posts.
As AI-generated content floods the market, authentic expertise becomes more valuable, not less.
The Private Chef Approach to AI
Montague often uses a simple analogy to explain effective AI marketing.
Most businesses use AI like a vending machine.
The better approach is to use AI like a private chef.
A vending machine produces the same generic output for everyone.
A private chef starts with questions.
Who is being served?
What do they need?
What are their preferences?
What ingredients are available?
What outcome are we trying to create?
The same principle applies to AI.
The more context businesses provide, the more valuable the output becomes.
Customer interviews, founder stories, sales conversations, testimonials, and internal expertise all become ingredients that AI can organize and amplify.
Without those ingredients, the output remains generic.
Human-First AI Marketing®
At the center of Montague’s philosophy is a framework he calls Human-First AI Marketing®.
The process is simple:
Human First. AI in the Middle. Human Last.
Humans begin by defining strategy:
- Who is the audience?
- What problem needs to be solved?
- What makes the business different?
- What outcome is being pursued?
AI then helps organize information, identify patterns, accelerate research, and improve execution.
Finally, humans review the output, add judgment, refine the message, and ensure the final result reflects reality and authentic expertise.
According to Montague, businesses often reverse this process by asking AI to generate strategies before they have answered foundational business questions themselves.
The result is usually generic content and weak differentiation.
Finding Signal Instead of Creating Noise
One of the most practical ways businesses can use AI today is not to create more content, but to extract more value from existing conversations.
With more than 800 podcast interviews and over 3.7 million podcast downloads across his shows, Montague frequently uses AI to identify patterns, summarize conversations, uncover audience insights, and extract the strongest ideas from large volumes of content.
This approach flips the common AI workflow on its head.
Instead of asking AI to generate more noise, businesses can use it to identify the signal already hidden inside customer conversations, sales calls, interviews, testimonials, and content libraries.
The result is content that feels more relevant, more credible, and more human.
The Future Belongs to Trusted Brands
As AI continues to make content creation faster and cheaper, trust becomes an even more important competitive advantage.
Technology can amplify a message.
It cannot create authenticity.
Technology can increase visibility.
It cannot manufacture credibility.
Technology can accelerate execution.
It cannot replace human judgment.
For Montague, the future of marketing is not about replacing people with AI.
It is about helping people become more valuable through AI.
The businesses that understand this distinction will not simply create more content.
They will build stronger relationships, stronger brands, and stronger trust.
And in an increasingly automated world, trust may become the most valuable asset a business can own.
At Avenue9, we call this Human-First AI Marketing® automation that scales your authenticity, not just your output. If you want help training your first custom GPT, aligning your AI tools with your sales process, or building a marketing system that works as hard as you do, let’s talk.
