The competitive advantage AI can’t automate

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, Linked In 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 storyt