How to get ahead with storytelling in a world of AI slop
As artificial intelligence takes over more of our operational process, rewards will come for those who focus on the one thing that machines are really bad at: articulating a story that humans and algorithms both trust. Storytelling is back, according to Simon Murphy, founder of Indigo Murphy.
Simon Murphy - author
Globally, white-collar work has become the next cost base driving wild market swings, with Wall Street acting like “a mob with bats”, indiscriminately searching for the next industry to be hit by AI automation.
This is a familiar theme being felt across the communications sector right now, especially in holding company land where consolidation is both a cost and capability play. The Omnicom–IPG merger, for example, has focused on an estimated US$750 million in annual cost savings tied to severance and “structural expense savings” that will be reinvested in data and AI.
On the surface, it’s about productivity: AI taking on junior production, research and reporting so networks run leaner. Take a look underneath though, and something more interesting is happening. As generative models flood the world with cheap content (aka “AI slop”), brand leaders are rediscovering that what still differentiates isn’t volume, but the human ability to frame a story that clients, regulators, employees and machines recognise as credible.
Key to this according to Professor Scott Galloway are three human skills make you “irreplaceable in an AI world” and should sit within the DNA of any good PR consultant: namely curation, curiosity and connectivity. In a recent episode of his Pivot podcast, Galloway even singles out strategic communications as one of the few jobs he’d bet on being not just safe, but even more important in the AI age.
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This is encouraging for current and aspiring storytellers, and it is a signal that is being validated elsewhere. Business Insider recently noted that the hottest job in tech right now isn’t a coder, it’s a storyteller.
Netflix advertised a director of product and technology communications role paying a staggering US$775,000, median Fortune 500 CCO pay rose by US$50,000 in 2025 to between US$400,000 and US$450,000, and Linkedin posts mentioning “storyteller” doubled over 12 months.
The double-edged truth here is that as agencies cull their juniors in a brutal quest to maintain profit, the market is paying a premium for storytellers who can set and defend the narrative.
Three AI-related forces explain this return to vogue.
First, generative AI has created a flood of verbose, generic content (the current state of “thought leadership” on LinkedIn is a moot point in my opinion). Not everyone should presume they can write, which is why former journalists often make the Chief Storyteller transcendence so capably.
Second, AI has changed where trust is formed. Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse study found that 94% of sources cited in AI answers are non-paid third-party sites: journalism, industry outlets, government databases and niche publishers. Half a brand’s AI citations typically come from just 20 outlets, and those outlets vary sharply by brand, even within a category. Visibility is now a rapid precision target game, as citation velocity peaks in the first seven days after publication then just as quickly falls away.
Third, AI has changed when stories matter. Monthly chatbot visits now sit over 7 billion globally, approaching 10% of traditional search traffic. This means that AI writes the first draft of your crisis narrative and your first sales call, using whatever operational stories, filings or activist content it can find. Being ahead of the story is now more paramount, and challenging, than ever.
In a world of AI slop, effective storytelling may be the only thing that makes you stand out from the robots
In this always-on-gorge-everything world, chief storytellers can do three things that AI cannot: they can build a coherent explanation of who the organisation is and ensure it survives contact with sceptics; they can translate operations into “reputation infrastructure” (safety, governance, customer outcomes and proof points) that humans and engines can interrogate and trust; and they can strategically orchestrate story distribution across journalists, Linkedin, Reddit, press wires and owned content so that generative AI accurately treats the organisation as a trusted source, not a blind spot.
Ultimately, in an age optimised for competence, connection is the real premium, and those of us who can communicate, build trust and manage complexity across multiple constituencies will be hardest to automate. In other words, professional storytellers aren’t on the fringes of the AI story; they’re one of the few groups the future is actively tilting towards.
However, with advertising now taking a foothold within generative AI, traditional earned PR and marketing folk are soon going to be rubbing elbows within the same generative environments. It’s time to make nice with our marketing colleagues, or at the very least learn from and emulate them. We cannot afford to be allergic to funnels, attribution or media economics.
In a world of AI slop, storytelling may be the only thing that makes you stand above the crowd
Today’s chief storyteller must understand how stories travel and how the media business around those stories now works, paying heed to five skills in particular.
Earned visibility through Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Influence brand visibility inside generative AI through earned channels. This demands a precise, high-cadence earned programme aimed at the specific journalists, wires and platforms that AI trusts for your category.
Narrative architecture and explanation design
AI is optimised for explanation, framing and recommendation, not just discovery. Design “explanation layers”: clear, consistent narratives about what you do, who you serve and why you’re credible that hold up across thousands of prompts.
Operational fluency and reputation infrastructure
Get close to the business. Winning storytellers understand supply chains, product, compliance and safety deeply enough to turn them into stories about traceability, resilience and outcomes, ensuring those stories are documented and structured so AI has something solid to work with.
Cross-disciplinary marketing literacy
As generative AI compresses discovery, consideration and purchase into a single interface, communicators need to also be able to speak marketing. Marcoms in its truest AI-led sense has arrived. Know how retail media, performance, loyalty and brand safety behave when the “storefront” is a chatbot and align with marketing so that paid, owned and earned stories line up inside AI environments.
Critical thinking and sniffing out the BS
AI is prolific, not wise. The tech companies leading the charge on communications investment do so because they value storytellers as “BS detectors” who can spot cliché, bias and over-claim and design more tactile, grounded storytelling. This requires classic why, what, how storytelling that is sharpened with data: structured thinking, skepticism and the willingness to kill a neat story that isn’t actually true.
AI won’t take the job of a great communicator any time soon. It will, however, make good storytelling the scarce resource that talent, capital and algorithms are all competing to capture.
Good luck to all the current and future storytellers out there.
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