It’s clear to everyone that in the AI era, we have a content problem, but I think I have found a solution.
We have been using AI backward this whole time.
Most marketers are treating AI like a content vending machine: drop in a vague prompt, pull out a blog post, post it, repeat. What they get is watered-down AI slop. You can see the difference, so can your audience, and so can AI and other search bots.
Concentrated Orange Juice Theory
It comes up every single time I talk about scalable storytelling because it always lands. The idea is simple: you can’t make good orange juice from weak concentrate. And you can’t make good marketing from a weak prompt. If your source material is generic, your AI-assisted content will just be watered down. If you start with rich, real, high-quality source material, then the AI juice is worth the squeeze.
Your Business Has More Oranges Than You Realize
Here’s what I’ve learned from over 1,000 podcast interviews and working with SMBs across dozens of industries: most businesses are sitting on groves of rich, untouched source material and leaving the fruit on the ground.
Think about what’s already growing in your organization…
The podcast grove. Every interview is a hand-selected varietal. Your perspective, your guests, your questions, and your stories are irreplaceable, because nobody else can grow them.
The sales call grove. This orchard grows organic, natural fruit from real moments with clients. Your salespeople are having conversations every day that carry the exact language your buyers use: their real fears, their honest objections, what ultimately moves them. Most companies let this fruit rot on the ground. Recording, transcribing, and running those calls through the Degenerative AI Method turns your most persuasive existing conversations into scalable content.
The customer service grove. The most overlooked orchard in the entire operation. Support tickets, FAQ threads, and repeat questions your team fields every week are gold. Customers aren’t performing here. They’re telling you exactly what confuses them, frustrates them, and matters to them. That unfiltered language is extremely valuable, and it matters for AEO in ways I’ll get to in a moment.
The client success grove. Case studies and win stories told in the client’s own language are your trophy trees. They take the longest to grow, but one well-harvested success story can become a case study, a sales one-pager, a LinkedIn post, a short video, and a talk track for sales or even investor conversations.
Your job as a marketer is to build the press. Hone the production process with AI so that you can harvest, squeeze, bottle, package, and sell these scalable stories.
The Degenerative AI Method
I call it “Degenerative AI.” The term makes it sound like I broke something. That’s intentional. You work backwards from real conversations, real client stories, and real human thinking before you ever ask AI to produce anything.
Most people use generative AI to create something from a blank page. The Degenerative AI Method starts by focusing on what’s already real. In my Context Engineering process, we break down what already exists into its essential ingredients before rebuilding anything new. It’s concentrated, not watered down and weak.
- Identify the best orange. Choose your source material: a sales call transcript, a podcast episode, a client success story, a support thread, a recorded brainstorm. Real conversation is your raw material. Start here, never with a blank page.
- Squeeze every drop. Feed that source into AI and ask it to extract the core argument, supporting points, key proof, real objections, and the questions actually being answered. You’re concentrating, not generating.
- Make the concentrate. Before asking AI to produce anything new, feed it your brand voice, your audience, and your positioning. This is the context layer. The prompt should sound like “here’s what I said, here’s who I’m talking to, here’s how I sound…. now help me shape and scale this.”
- Bottle and package the juice. One concentrated source becomes a blog, a LinkedIn post, a short video clip, a sales asset, and an email. Every version connected, consistent, and compounding the same real message. Adding the water back in now is okay because you have done the human-first work of defining the strategy.
- Send it out to the distribution channels. Repeat the process to build the perfectly packaged, juicy story for each of your marketing channels from the same original source.
This is what separates Avenue9 and our A9^Factor framework from everyone else’s AI-first automation.
Human-First AI Marketing® means humans create the direction. AI creates the momentum. In my opinion, reversing that order is one of the most expensive mistakes a brand can make, and the research backs that up.
The AEO Angle: The Most Discerning Juice Critics in the Room
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is how your business gets recommended by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude when buyers ask questions in your category. As of 2026, AI searches now outnumber Google searches for prospects discovering your company, including Google’s AI overviews, so this juice is definitely worth the squeeze.
Here’s what most marketers miss entirely….
The way to win AI-powered recommendations is to be unmistakably, specifically, verifiably human.
Ironically, generic AI content gets ignored by AI. It is a copy of a copy that degrades over time. AI can’t effectively train on AI-generated content. It feeds on original human writing and conversations (and a ton of cash and an insane amount of clean, drinkable water).
Answer engines have already read everything on the internet. It knows what slop looks like, what watered-down OJ tastes like, and it’s not going to recommend it to anyone.
But content built from real customer questions, real service conversations, real proof points, and real founder perspective? That’s exactly what humans and AI are looking for. Your customer service tickets, your FAQ responses, and your sales objections answered in your own voice are the high-provenance, OG of answers that everyone needs.
Feed AI real conversations, and you’ll build authority that AI will recommend, and humans will love to consume.
Let’s Press the Point One More Time
You already have the oranges. They’re in your sales calls, your client wins, your support queue, your team’s brains, and every honest conversation you’ve had about what you do and why it matters. The more conversations you capture, the richer the concentrate gets.
The Degenerative AI Method is just the press. It turns what’s already real into something scalable without diluting the thing that made it valuable in the first place…
The AI juice is worth the squeeze, but only if there’s real oranges to squeeze.
What conversation is already happening in your business that your audience actually needs to hear?
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