Corporate storytelling in the Age of AI
After a long and exhausting day, you sit down in front of the TV and start watching a completely unknown romantic film on Netflix. Well-executed but clichéd visuals, attractive but generic characters, a predictable, boring story. Familiar situation, right? AI-generated corporate stories are exactly like that. They may be technically well put together, but they’re not really capable of holding the reader’s/viewer’s attention, and therefore can’t perform well in building a corporate brand either. This is not a good way of corporate storytelling.
Corporate storytelling: exciting or detailed?
For a long time, the prevailing view held that consumer communication should be built on more emotional foundations, while corporate or B2B communication should lean on rational ones if it wants to be truly effective. Several strategic planning tools that were considered forward-thinking in their time reinforced this view (e.g., the FCB Grid). Not in this exact form or wording, but they essentially suggested that corporate communication calls for longer, explanatory/analytical formats — read: rational, or more simply put, boring overviews — as opposed to the shorter, more emotion-rich (or, if you will, more exciting) materials of consumer communication.
It was only in the last decade that the idea gained momentum that this approach is flawed, and that business decision-making is fundamentally an emotion-driven process too — much like consumer purchasing, it is characterised by emotionally-based decisions followed by after-the-fact justification (post-rationalisation). In other words, corporate procurement of products and services also depends primarily on whether the manufacturer, trader or service provider can capture the buyer’s attention and make them “fall for” them. This realisation should have fundamentally transformed the world of corporate communications. Did it? Click on LinkedIn, browse your feed for a bit, and decide for yourself!
Corporate storytelling and AI
When generative AI burst onto the scene two years ago, the situation didn’t improve — if anything, it got worse. The online world was flooded with corporate blog posts that were even more tedious than mediocre (but compensated with length beyond long), social media posts that would put earlier bullshit generators to shame. The process of “democratising content production,” paired with the skipping of strategic thinking, unfortunately generates industrial quantities of non-recyclable waste. It’s like someone accidentally winning a 3D printer with an infinite supply of raw materials, but having absolutely no idea what they want to do with it or how to use it — yet setting off to fulfil their teenage dream and churning out a variety of utterly pointless plastic gadgets.
Best corporate storytelling is always human
Buyers — whether corporate procurement officers, decision-makers, top executives or ordinary consumers — make decisions emotionally. They have a problem they’re looking for a solution to, and they choose the product or service that somehow manages to grab their attention and that they can connect with. Good corporate stories are precisely capable of achieving this: they make things memorable, build trust, increase value. But only those stories that can capture attention — ones that are unusual, exciting, carry tension or some other element that triggers an emotional response. And the best such stories are not born from statistical analysis, but are the product of human intuition, shaped by many years of professional experience, general culture and human emotion. Such as this and this story, created by the PRBK team.
To avoid any misunderstanding: it’s not the 21st-century Luddite in me speaking out against new technology. AI can genuinely provide significant help in the corporate storytelling process (data gathering, analysis, testing), but it’s not meant to replace thinking. The story and strategy must take shape in our own heads: what we want to say, to whom, and why. And let’s not be faint-hearted: AI may be faster, it may even turn out to be more accurate than us. But we, humans, are the ones who can make a corporate story truly interesting — and therefore truly effective.
