AI Can Write Your content, but it Can’t Tell a Story People Care About

AI has made it incredibly easy to create content. Give it a few prompts and within seconds you can have a LinkedIn post, an article, a presentation, a newsletter or a press release.

This raises an interesting question: if everyone can create content, what makes yours worth paying attention to?

Increasingly, I think the answer is storytelling. And I'm not alone. LinkedIn data reported by PRNEWS found that job postings mentioning “storyteller” doubled between 2024 and 2025. Companies are recruiting for roles that combine communications, content, social media and storytelling.

It makes sense. AI can help us produce the words, but the difficult bit of communication was never really producing the words. It's knowing what is worth saying and to whom.

The difference between creating content and communicating

As a former journalist, I've spent a large part of my career looking for stories. One thing journalism teaches you very quickly is that having lots of information doesn't mean you have a story.

You can have pages of facts, statistics, research and corporate messaging and still have absolutely nothing that anyone wants to read. The skill is finding the interesting bit. What's changed? What's at stake? Who does this affect? Where's the tension? What's surprising? What does this actually mean for a real person? And why should anybody care?

Those questions matter whether you're talking to a journalist, standing in front of employees, giving a presentation or explaining what your organisation does.

Good storytelling isn't about becoming a great raconteur

When I talk about storytelling in communications, I don't mean beginning every presentation with, “Let me tell you a story…”.

Storytelling is often much simpler than that. It's taking something abstract and making it concrete. For example, you could say: “We were under enormous pressure to deliver the project on time.” Or you could say: “It was 5.47pm. The deadline was 6pm and we still hadn't solved the problem.”

Immediately, there's tension. You want to know what happened. The basic information hasn't changed, but the way you've communicated it has.

That's storytelling.

Organisations are surrounded by stories

One of the things I often see when working with organisations is that they believe they don't have enough stories. Usually, the opposite is true. They're surrounded by them.

The stories are in customer conversations, in the reason somebody founded the organisation, in a team solving a problem nobody thought they could solve and in a client whose life or business changed because of the work. They're in failures, difficult decisions, turning points and lessons learned. They're in the people doing the work every day.

The problem isn't usually a shortage of stories. It's recognising them.

Storytelling is a skill you can teach

This is the part I find particularly interesting. You don't have to be a “natural storyteller”. There are techniques you can learn.

You can learn how to spot tension, find the human element in a complicated subject and use specific details rather than vague language. You can learn how to structure a story so people want to know what happens next, turn statistics into something people can picture and find stories across an organisation rather than relying on the communications team to manufacture them.

And importantly, you can learn how to do all of this without making your communication sound scripted, cheesy or overproduced.

These skills are useful far beyond marketing. Leaders need them. Spokespeople need them. Communications teams need them. People delivering presentations need them. Anyone trying to explain an idea, influence an audience or make complicated information understandable can benefit from them.

AI makes these skills more valuable, not less

I'm a fan of using AI to help with communications. It can be enormously useful. But when everyone has access to the same technology, simply producing more content isn't much of a competitive advantage.

Judgement is. Knowing your audience is. Finding the detail everyone else overlooked is. Recognising the story buried inside a page of information is. And knowing how to tell it so another human being actually cares is. Perhaps that's why we're seeing the rise of the “corporate storyteller”. AI hasn't killed storytelling. It may have reminded us just how valuable it is.