Anthropic recently posted a job opening for a Head of GTM Narrative. Not a content lead. Not a brand director. A go-to-market narrative strategist. The company that has spent years building some of the most capable AI in the world decided that the thing it needed a human to own was the story.
Anthropic isn’t alone. According to The Wall Street Journal, LinkedIn job postings mentioning the term “storyteller” doubled in 2025, reaching roughly 70,000 roles across marketing and communications. Companies including Google, Microsoft, and Notion have all created or restructured teams around narrative and storytelling. Executives mentioned “storytelling” on earnings calls 30% more often in 2025 than in the prior year.
We are two or three years into mass adoption of generative AI in marketing, and the results are not what the pitch decks promised. The information environment has been flooded with what some researchers now call “slopaganda”—mass-produced, low-quality content that overwhelms and manipulates.
Through our advisory work—Jenny as an executive coach and learning and development expert, and Noam as an AI strategist—we see four practices that distinguish organizations building authentic narrative from those producing content that doesn’t land.
1. The Part That Can’t Be Prompted
The most dangerous misconception in AI-era marketing is that imagination is a feature you can dial up with a better prompt. It isn’t. What AI produces is plausible. What humans produce, at their best, is surprising. Those are not the same thing, and audiences know the difference even when they can’t articulate it.
The teams navigating this well use AI to move faster through the work that doesn’t require much judgment—research synthesis, format adaptation, first‑draft scaffolding—and then protect time and space for human judgment on the parts that do: the angle, the entry point, the emotional logic of the argument. This reflects what many practitioners are now seeing—without strong human storytellers, AI‑powered content turns into a noise machine that amplifies the wrong ideas and tone.
The Strategic Move: Before using AI to draft any external communication, write one sentence by hand: What is the one thing we want this audience to believe after reading this, and why are we the right organization to say it? If you can’t answer that without the tool, the tool won’t answer it for you; it will just make the gap harder to see. This aligns with research showing that generative AI is most effective when humans set a clear narrative and strategic intent, and AI is used to adapt and scale that message rather than to define it.
2. Write like a person, not a machine
Authentic narrative is not something you can self-assess. The closer you are to the message, the less you can see how it lands.
Jenny saw this play out directly while leading a workshop—”Communicating With Influence and Impact in the Age of AI”—with senior leaders at a midsize professional services company. When the AI adoption mandate rolled out, leadership tracked usage: by department, by team, by individual. As the saying goes, you get what you measure. Teams optimized for AI usage, not quality of output. The result was polished, well-structured communications entirely indistinguishable from any competitor. Errors were slipping through as ownership evaporated. And, if AI wrote it, who was accountable?
The missing ingredient wasn’t skill or team capacity. It was direction. Leaders were stretched managing quarterly performance targets and competing priorities, and they had no bandwidth to articulate what the brand should sound like. Teams filled that vacuum the only way they could: They let the tool decide.
The exercise that shifted things was simple. Each leader was asked to describe, out loud and without notes, the most important thing they believed about the future of their industry that most of their peers had wrong. Every answer was specific. Every answer was interesting. None of it had made it into the communications their teams were producing, because no one had put it on the table clearly enough for teams to carry it forward.
The Strategic Move: Before any significant communication goes out, ask yourself: Is this ownable? Could this have come from any of our competitors? If the answer to the latter is yes, the problem starts upstream. What specific point of view, earned through your organization’s actual experience, should be guiding this? Find that first and give your team something real to work with before they open the tool.
3. Lead With the Pain Point
Most communications fail not because the message is wrong, but because it arrives before trust does. The instinct is to open with your strongest argument. The more effective move is to open with the clearest evidence that you understand who you are talking to.
Several years ago, Noam was preparing communications for sessions at the United Nations making the case for digital infrastructure investment in lower-income nations. The logic was sound. The data was compelling. And every version fell flat, because the team kept writing for the argument they wanted to make rather than for the people who had to receive it.
The ministers in those rooms were not resistant to progress. They were responsible for populations who had watched foreign-led initiatives arrive with compelling arguments, take credit for outcomes, and leave before the complications started. Once the narrative acknowledged that reality before asking for anything, the dynamic shifted. Questions moved from pushing back on premise to asking about implementation.
The story didn’t change. The entry point did. And that is almost always where narrative succeeds or fails.
The Strategic Move: Write the empathy paragraph first, even if it never makes it into the final version. Draft two to three sentences that name what your audience is carrying right now: the tension, the fear, the unspoken concern already in the room. It will reshape everything that follows, and it will show in the tone of what you publish even if those sentences stay internal.
4. Name the elephant in the room
The highest-value thing a communicator can do is not confirm what an audience already believes. It is to name something they have been carrying but haven’t put into words—a frustration, a fear, an unresolved tension—and to do so before they do.
Recent guidance for leaders in high-stakes situations emphasizes the same principle: Your audience is already holding an unspoken “What’s in it for me?” question, and if you don’t surface and answer it, others will.
The Strategic Move: Before any significant communication, ask: What is the one thing our audience is carrying right now that no one in our industry is talking about? If you can answer that with specificity—not a demographic assumption, but an experiential one—you have the opening of a narrative worth reading.
Anthropic is not hiring a Head of GTM Narrative because they couldn’t find a way to generate narrative with AI. They are hiring one because they understand the difference between content that exists and communication that works.
