Mike Montague: Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator

There are two ways to point AI at a market, and Mike Montague only likes one of them. The Terminator approach builds agents that go out and hunt your leads. The Iron Man approach wraps a human in the technology and sends the human. Avenue9 is built entirely on the second one, and this conversation is mostly an argument for why the first one loses. Key takeaways AI reliably earns a C plus. Genuinely useful, and not the part you were ever paid for. The hard twenty per cent is still human work. Bad strategy plus AI is faster failure. It amplifies whatever you were already doing, in both directions. Your online reputation should mirror your real work exactly. Not an outsized rank. The rank you can evidence. He turns down volume work. His argument is a question: why would a model cite a version of an answer it can already write? Degenerative engineering. His name for using AI to distil what a business already is, instead of generating more of what it is not. On this page The C plus problem A reputation that mirrors real life Degenerative engineering Old school, on purpose Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The C plus problem A C plus is a really good grade. The problem is that other 20% is the hard part. That’s what we needed humans always to do.— Mike Montague His explanation for why smart clients get fooled is the sharpest thing in the episode. If you ask a model about a subject you would fail an exam in, it looks like a genius. The grade has not changed. Your ability to mark it has. Which is what he sells: not the output, but the person who can tell a C plus from an A. He is candid that the C plus is worth having. It is a good afternoon’s work. It is not a strategy. If you have bad SEO strategy or bad marketing strategy, it’s going to allow you to do it faster, which is just gonna get you to fail faster.— Mike Montague Jeremy contributes a name for the failure mode on the client side: Claude hopping, where a client arrives with twenty documents of forty pages each and the announcement that they have solved it. A reputation that mirrors real life I think the goal should be that your online reputation exactly 100% mirrors your in real life work.— Mike Montague This is a quiet rebuke of most of the industry. He thinks SEO has spent two decades trying to win a rank the business had not earned, and that the machinery on the other side is now far too good for that to keep working. The practical instruction is unglamorous and much harder than it sounds. Document every job. Capture real quotes from real customers. One representative case study used to be enough and no longer is, because a single example is now a drop in an ocean. It will give you the ra...