
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Send us Fan Mail
Is AI-generated content, automated outreach, and an increasingly unpredictable algorithm ruining LinkedIn? In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing® Podcast, host Mike Montague sits down with Daniel Disney, social selling expert and founder of The Daily Sales and Social Selling 365, to explore the future of LinkedIn, personal branding, and B2B sales in the age of AI. They discuss the rise of AI slop, changing LinkedIn algorithms, declining engagement, and the growing frustration with automated connection requests and generic sales pitches. Daniel shares why authentic conversations, relevant content, and genuine personalization are becoming essential for standing out and building trust in an increasingly crowded feed.
Mike and Daniel also explore practical ways AI can help salespeople and marketers research prospects, generate content ideas, improve their skills, and grow their businesses while preserving the human touch. From voice and video messages to AI-powered sales assistants and the potential future of autonomous agents, they examine what social selling could look like over the next five years. The biggest takeaway: the future belongs to people who combine strong selling skills, authentic relationships, and AI capabilities to create meaningful connections. Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn and explore his social selling resources at The Daily Sales and Social Selling 365.
Key Takeaways:
• LinkedIn still has a human future. Despite the flood of AI-generated posts, comments, and messages, Daniel believes LinkedIn is moving toward a healthier balance of authentic human content.
• LinkedIn's algorithm is constantly changing. Users are seeing more content from strangers and older posts, making it important to focus on meaningful engagement with your network.
• Social selling happens across the entire LinkedIn experience. Your profile, content, comments, connections, and direct messages should work together to build trust, generate leads, and create sales opportunities.
• Prioritize conversations over content creation. Daniel ranks direct messaging first, content second, and commenting and personal branding third for salespeople looking to generate business.
• Use AI as your social selling assistant. AI can help with research, brainstorming, drafting content, and developing sales skills while keeping your expertise and personality at the center.
• Quality beats quantity in B2B outreach. Mass automation and generic connection requests rarely create the meaningful relationships needed to close significant sales opportunities.
• Authentic personalization requires relevance. Effective outreach connects a prospect's specific situation with something genuinely valuable, which Daniel believes AI-generated personalization often struggles to accomplish.
• Voice and video messages help you stand out. Personalized audio and video messages communicate sincerity, personality, and attention in ways that cut through automated LinkedIn outreach.
• AI gives small businesses powerful new capabilities. Daniel uses AI to create content, develop ideas, build websites, and grow his business as a solopreneur with limited resources.
• AI agents could reshape the future of social selling. Daniel envisions a future where AI agents handle prospect research, meeting scheduling, and sales coaching, while human relationships continue to play a central role.
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
How do you grow your business with AI and automation while preserving the human connections that make your brand special? In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing® Podcast, Mike Montague sits down with Noah Fleming, author of Soul at Scale, to explore how businesses can maintain their human edge in an increasingly automated world. From the Savannah Bananas' remarkable success to the power of personal customer experiences, they discuss why doing things that don't scale can create extraordinary growth, loyalty, and long-term competitive advantages.
Mike and Noah explore practical ways to simplify your business, strengthen customer relationships, and use AI to amplify what makes your company unique. They discuss the importance of getting closer to your customers, eliminating unnecessary complexity, measuring the value of memorable experiences, and knowing where human judgment and AI capabilities work best together. You'll discover why making every customer interaction meaningful, memorable, and personal is a powerful strategy for building trust, creating organic growth, and scaling your business without losing its soul. Connect with Noah Fleming on LinkedIn to follow his work and insights.
Key Takeaways:
• Do things that don't scale to build a business that does. Personal phone calls, direct customer conversations, and small acts of care create the loyalty and word-of-mouth that fuel organic growth.
• Stay close to your customers and employees. Leaders who spend time on the front lines gain firsthand insights into customer needs, employee challenges, and opportunities to improve the business.
• Protect the human moments in your customer experience. Identify the touchpoints where personal attention, empathy, and genuine connection make the biggest difference before introducing AI automation.
• Simplify your processes before automating them. Fix broken processes, remove unnecessary complexity, and eliminate customer frustrations before using technology to scale your operations.
• Make every customer interaction meaningful, memorable, and personal. Evaluate your customer experience through these three qualities, including how your business handles difficult conversations and delivers bad news.
• Focus on existing customers to create compounding growth. Investing in customer retention, repeat business, and referrals creates sustainable growth while reducing the constant pressure to acquire new customers.
• Turn customer feedback into meaningful conversations. Use surveys, reviews, and customer data as opportunities to personally follow up, solve problems, and show customers that their opinions matter.
• Empower employees to create memorable experiences. Give your team the freedom, tools, and confidence to surprise customers through thoughtful, unexpected acts of service that generate lasting loyalty and word-of-mouth.
• Make your company's soul a competitive advantage. As automated interactions become increasingly common, businesses that preserve authentic human connections can stand out and build stronger customer relationships.
• Use AI to amplify your expertise and creativity. Noah shares how he uses AI to build custom tools, improve productivity, develop ideas, and support his writing while maintaining his personal voice, experience, and professional judgment.
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
What happens when digital marketing gets so crowded that physical experiences start feeling fresh again? In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing® Podcast, Mike Montague sits down with Kirby Hasseman, author of Hybrid Marketing and founder of Hasseman Marketing, to explore why the strongest marketing strategies blend digital reach with real-world human connection. They dig into the comeback of promotional products, direct mail, events, and face-to-face experiences; why useful, high-quality branded merchandise can create lasting impressions; and how marketers can stand out as digital channels become increasingly crowded.
Kirby also shares lessons from building Hasseman Marketing and hosting the Delivering Marketing Joy podcast, including the value of consistency, experimentation, relationships, and creating marketing people genuinely enjoy receiving. The conversation offers a practical reminder for marketers navigating AI and automation: technology gives us more ways to reach people, while memorable brands still earn attention through creativity, generosity, and human connection. You’ll leave with ideas for building a hybrid marketing mix that connects online and offline experiences, creates more memorable customer touchpoints, and delivers a little more joy along the way.
Read the episode recap here.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
AI is changing how people search for local businesses. Longer, more conversational searches give tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI-powered search more context to understand what someone actually needs and recommend businesses that are genuinely relevant.
In this episode, Mike Montague talks with local SEO expert Tyler Henn of Henn House about what this shift means for local businesses and how reputation, reviews, third-party validation, and a strong Google Business Profile are becoming increasingly important signals for both traditional and AI-powered search.
Tyler shares practical strategies for improving local visibility, including building service-specific website pages, creating clear connections between your services and locations, and giving search engines enough context to understand exactly who you serve and what makes your business unique.
They also explore a refreshingly simple idea for the AI search era: build the online reputation your business has earned in the real world. AI can help capture customer stories, reviews, expertise, and other trust signals so great local businesses become easier for humans and AI to find, understand, and recommend.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague talks with David Levine, author of Old School Service, New School Tools, about how small businesses can use AI without losing the personal touch that keeps customers coming back. David shares lessons from nearly 20 years of running a brick-and-mortar business, where strong relationships, genuine conversations, and memorable service helped him compete without the biggest budget or the lowest prices.
Together, they explore how AI can act as a multiplier for customer service, marketing, and follow-up, freeing business owners to spend more time shaking hands, picking up the phone, listening to customers, and building trust. The big takeaway: technology changes, but human nature does not. The businesses that win will use new school tools to make old school service easier, more consistent, and more scalable.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of the Human-First AI and Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague sits down with Francis Brero of HG Insights to explore how AI is changing go-to-market strategy across sales and marketing. They unpack the growing complexity of B2B buying committees, the shifting role of SDRs, and why better data, intent signals, and account insights can help sellers show up with more relevance, preparation, and trust.
Francis shares a practical view of where AI creates real leverage: capturing the playbooks of top sellers, turning scattered research into repeatable workflows, improving CRM data, and helping teams separate simple “$5 tasks” from high-judgment “$5,000 decisions.” The big takeaway: AI works best when it helps humans have better conversations, build stronger buyer experiences, and avoid the growing pile of generic work slop nobody asked for.
Top takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of Human-First AI Marketing, Mike Montague talks with Sherif Higazy, Founder of Megaton AI, a benchmarking and advisory firm for generative media, about one of the hardest questions in AI right now: how do you evaluate which models are actually useful when everything is changing so quickly? Sherif shares what Megaton is seeing across AI video model leaderboards, why Chinese video models are currently pushing the creative frontier, and how marketers can think more clearly about model quality, cost, privacy, and real-world use cases.
The conversation explores the future of AI-generated video, music, animation, visual effects, real-time generation, world models, and immersive experiences that may soon feel closer to a Holodeck than a traditional editing suite. Mike and Sherif also unpack the “attention tax” of AI slop, the role of human authorship, and why the best creative results still come from people who know what they want to say before they ask AI to help make it.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague talks with Keith Perhac, founder of SegMetrics, about the changing world of marketing attribution, AI analytics, and zero-click buyer journeys. They explore why traditional tracking is getting messier as bot traffic, AI answers, and platform-controlled experiences reshape how people discover, research, and decide before ever visiting your website.
Keith shares practical ways marketers can rethink attribution by focusing on real human behavior, first-party data, CRM insights, funnel performance, and the signals that actually help teams make better decisions. The conversation also covers how AI can help uncover conversion outliers, improve segmentation, and turn analytics from a confusing spreadsheet swamp into a clearer map for smarter marketing decisions.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of the Human-First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague talks with John Sampogna, CEO and co-founder of Wondersauce, about one of the most important AI questions marketing leaders can ask: where should AI stay out of the way? John shares why AI experimentation can quickly become a time suck, how teams can avoid building flashy workflows that solve no real business problem, and why the best use cases often start with repeatable tasks that happen daily, weekly, or monthly.
Mike and John also explore the difference between using AI as an efficiency unlock and handing over the creative work that makes a brand valuable. They discuss AI’s role in design, strategy, production, outreach, leadership, and client relationships, with a clear takeaway for SMB leaders: AI can help creative people, technologists, and strategists move faster, but human judgment still needs to guide the ideas, relationships, and decisions that make a business different.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
Send us Fan Mail
In this episode of the Human First AI Marketing Podcast, Mike Montague talks with Reverend Dr. Christopher Benek, a techno-theologian and author of The Church Leader’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence. about AI ethics, spiritual questions, human identity, and how leaders can think more clearly about the role of technology in our lives.
Christopher brings a refreshingly optimistic perspective. He argues that AI is still in its early “fiddling” stage, and the real leadership challenge is learning how to use it with wisdom, context, and conscience. The conversation moves from practical questions about using AI ethically to bigger questions about sentience, faith, resurrection, justice, human dignity, and what it means to stay grounded as technology speeds up.
The big idea: AI ethics starts with asking better questions about who we are, what we believe, and how we want to act.
Key Takeaways:
At Avenue9, we capture your expertise and turn it into content, conversations, and client testimonials, building trust with humans and AI at the same time.
Get your free Human-AI Trust Score report.
Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.
From the publisher's feed
Turn your expertise into content, conversations, and clients with Human-First AI Marketing. Learn how and where to leverage AI without burning bridges, burning cash, or burning out your…