The one job AI can’t fake

Google has advertised storytelling roles paying up to $274,000. Somewhere, a novelist who has spent a decade earning less than a parking attendant is weeping. Corporate life has a habit of taking a perfectly good word and draining the blood out of it. “Passion” now means turning up. “Journey” means a reorganisation. I assumed “storyteller” would go the same way, a fancy name for the person who writes the press release about the new logo.

Then I thought about Satya Nadella. When he took over Microsoft in 2014, the company had a culture so combative that its organisation chart had been lampooned as rival factions pointing guns at each other. Nadella did not fix this with a slide deck. He told a story: Microsoft had to stop being a company of know-it-alls and become one of learn-it-alls. It was a cheesy line. It also worked, because people could remember it, repeat it, and catch their bosses failing to live up to it.

His best story is personal. In Hit Refresh, he writes about his son Zain, born with severe cerebral palsy, and how fatherhood taught him empathy. I cannot recall a single Microsoft quarterly result. I remember Zain. Ratan Tata understood this too. He liked to say the idea for the Nano came from watching a family of four on a scooter in the rain. As a business case, the Nano was a disappointment. As a story, it was unbeatable; people who have never sat in one can still tell you why it was built.

Jeff Bezos went further and banned PowerPoint from Amazon’s senior meetings, replacing it with six-page narrative memos read in silence before anyone spoke. Bullet points, he argued, let you hide sloppy thinking; a narrative forces you to explain how one thing leads to another. It sounds like an English teacher’s punishment. Amazon seems to have survived it. Why the sudden rush? I suspect artificial intelligence.

Machines can now produce a serviceable press release, blog post, or CEO letter in seconds. The results are grammatical, upbeat, and forgettable, like a hotel breakfast. When everyone can generate competent prose for nothing, competent prose is worth nothing. What becomes scarce is the thing the machine cannot fake: a story that is true, specific, and told by someone who has something to lose. It knows what a story sounds like on average, but good stories avoid averages.

They turn on an odd detail, an admitted failure, an embarrassment the teller would rather forget. A chatbot has never been embarrassed, never waited to be fired, never sat by a sick child’s bed. It can describe these things. It cannot have lived them, and audiences can tell. There is a catch. Companies hiring storytellers often want the stories without the truth. They want the hero’s journey minus the bit where the hero falters.

That is not storytelling; it is marketing, and staff see through it instantly. Nadella’s line worked because it admitted Microsoft had been insufferable. By all means hire a storyteller, but give them something true to tell. No machine can supply that, and nor can a $274,000 salary.