AI Doesn't Belong in the C-Suite with Mike Montague EPISODE #100 Artwork

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Human-First AI Marketing Podcast by Avenue9

AI Doesn't Belong in the C-Suite with Mike Montague EPISODE #100

August 15, 2026 • Mike Montague • Season 2 • Episode 100

0:00 | 24:54

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A couple of weeks ago, a politician read his chatbot's instructions out loud into the official record of his legislature. Everybody laughed at him. That same morning, a CEO somewhere forwarded a giant AI strategy document to their team with the same tells buried in it, and nobody laughed at them. Their staff just quietly lost the afternoon.

For episode 100, I'm going solo to make the argument I most want on the record:

AI does not belong in the C-suite.

I run an AI marketing agency, and I still believe it.

AI can be a gift to your frontline experts, a real advantage for your middle managers, and a liability in the hands of senior leadership. Asking AI is not a leadership skill. Anyone can do it. A prompt is not an insight, and a printout of the response is not a point of view.

In this episode:

The five reasons executives need to be careful with AI, starting with OpenAI's own benchmark showing their best model matches a human expert a little under half the time. As a letter grade, that's a C.

The thirty-second test that exposes the C-student bias. Ask AI a hard question inside your own discipline and grade the answer honestly. AI sounds like a genius doing somebody else's job and like an intern doing yours.

Why AI can't do strategy. Harvard Business Review published research covering 15,000 simulations where simply flipping the order of two options flipped about 19% of the recommendations.

What workslop costs you. Stanford and BetterUp found colleagues rate the sender 54% less creative and 42% less trustworthy after receiving it.

The ABCs of AI: A players use it to solve, bosses use it to sharpen, and the C-suite uses it to prepare.

And the one policy I think every company should adopt this year: nobody gets to quote AI.

I also want to thank the incredible guests from the first hundred episodes and share what a Silver Creator Award from YouTube actually took.

Read the full written version: https://avenue9.com/blog/the-abcs-of-ai-for-executives-why-ai-doesnt-b-long-in-the-c-suite/

Follow the show so you're here for the next hundred: https://podcast.avenue9.com/2435068/follow

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Want to be a guest? Send Mike Montague a message on PodMatch here.