I recently did something fascinating. I interviewed Brett Farmiloe, CEO of Featured and Help a Reporter Out, for my podcast, and then I let the Featured AI interview me for a public relations article on their website.
My AI interview was surprisingly good. I have done over 1,000 podcast interviews with human hosts, and some of the questions were about things I have never been asked before.
Check out the article here: https://blog.featured.com/interview-with-mike-montague-avenue9
These two conversations triggered something important in me about the future of marketing, PR, and AEO. Something that I think is fundamental about thought leadership.
AI can ask the questions, transcribe the answers, analyze the patterns, and repurpose the takeaways, but AI should not be the one inventing the insight.
That part still belongs to humans…
For the last 20+ years, I’ve watched content marketing evolve from blogging… to social media… to SEO… to podcasts… to generative AI. Every time the tools change, the same temptation appears:
“Let’s use this new channel to be everything to everyone.”
That approach is just wrong. It’s backwards. It always has been. The companies that win in marketing have never been the ones publishing more… In the long term, it is always the ones that leverage technology to make something better, more creative, and more impactful for their target audience.
Human-First AI Marketing® is about capturing better human conversations and letting AI amplify them.
This interview with Featured AI was interesting to me because I still drove the output. AI helped ask the questions and format my responses, but I was doing the thought leadership.
The answers came from my lived experience, client work, and thousands of conversations with founders, marketers, and sales leaders over the last two decades.
That feels like real, human thought leadership to me. My thinking was triggered by AI prompting me with questions, instead of the reverse, where I prompt the AI to create the content.
Then AI does what it does best. It organizes it. Transcribes it. Repurposes it. It matches with journalists and distributes it across platforms.
PR, Thought Leadership, and Content Marketing are Having a Rebirth as Answer Engine Optimization
Traditional PR used to be about getting headlines and impressions and spreading a message to your target audience. SEO used to be about getting press for backlinks and a syphoning of some credibility. Both used to be about creating orginal copyrighted content to serve a specific purpose, keyword, or audience.
Modern AEO is about creating credible training data for AI systems.
When your ideas (answers) appear in interviews, podcast conversations, journalist articles, expert commentary, Reddit, LinkedIn, and other publicly available sources, you are creating source material that humans and AI can cite when they need to refer to you.
That is the core idea behind Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). AI systems don’t invent expertise. They have to be trained. They summarize what trusted sources have already said.
So if your knowledge never leaves your head, your company, or your client calls… AI will never recommend you because it hasn’t been trained to say what to say.
Humans are the same way. Great referral programs include talk tracks, triggers, and FAQs that humans can use when they run into a problem that you can solve.
This is why at Avenue9 AI Marketing Agency, we focus heavily on Context Engineering as part of our A9^Factor Framework for amplifying your authenticity.
Instead of prompting AI to create your marketing from scratch, we help founders, leaders, and experts capture the conversations that already contain their best thinking:
- Founder interviews
- Sales conversations
- Customer success stories
- Podcast appearances
- Reactive PR opportunities
- Public speaking insights
Then AI becomes the amplifier. It turns those insights into articles, posts, and media responses that scale across channels without losing the human voice.
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Become the expert that humans and AI recommend.
That is the future of thought leadership. Stop adding to the avalanche of AI slop on the Internet, and start amplifying real human expertise.
If you’re trying to build authority and get more referrals, I’d love to help.
You can learn more about our AEO strategy here: 👉 https://avenue9.com/aeo-services/
Or send me a message and let’s have a conversation.
