When I lost my job as a high-profile journalist, I mistakenly asked the same question most people do when looking for a new role: ‘What can I do that people want?’ I soon landed on a better, more entrepreneurial question: ‘What can I do that people don’t yet realise they need.’ 

I found the answer by embedding myself within the insights industry – creating storytelling newsrooms for organisations so they can translate data into journalistic stories, to make better and faster decisions.  

Now the entire industry is frantically trying to answer another wrong question as it seeks to redefine itself in the age of AI: ‘What are we going to do now?’ 

Based on my own experiences these past few years, there is a more empowering question to ask: ‘What skills or jobs will leaders and their organisations not want AI to do?’ Or, ‘What is it people will start to miss the more they use AI – and are already starting to miss?’ 

Here’s my one-word answer. Storytelling. 

The more things become automated, the more this innately human skill is becoming invaluable. 

That and critical thinking, empathy, agility of mind, a gut instinct honed from success and failure, thinking strategically and shifting when circumstances change, persuading and influencing individuals with tailored communication, asking questions, and being bold rather than just emulating everything that has come before. 

All of those things, and more, are facets of great storytelling. AI can do so many things brilliantly but it can’t tell stories as brilliantly as we can. 

Obviously I’m biased, so let’s take the opinion of one of Britain’s most high-profile AI entrepreneurs, Synthesia’s CEO Victor Riparbelli. In a recent memo to staff, he berated them for relying on AI to create content because the video-generation company is now awash with AI-sloppification: “Now that we’re all using AI to write, I’m seeing an increase in overly-verbose documents. Large language models are great tools for pushing our thinking and helping us write faster… but AI will make great human communicators even more valuable than before.”

What Victor has accidentally stumbled upon is the realisation that storytelling is not really about telling stories, it’s about analysing data to create a meaningful, decisions-focused narrative. Then, packaging it up into a uniquely human communication style that deliberately activates people’s neurological pathways. 

As AI usurps the industry’s traditional roles, being able to find, make and tell great data-fuelled stories – at speed, with concision and in a compelling way – will make us more valuable, influential and trusted.  

AI is great at replicating others’ work and ideas and, through that, suggesting opportunities or identifying trends, but the originality of thought that humans have, and which is the basis of all storytelling, is beyond it. It’s why so much of AI’s work is often soulless and inauthentic. 

The Guardian recently reported on a new survey of 5,000 white-collar US workers which found “40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive”. Productive maybe, but better? 

If you want to reach humans, use humans. Be more human. Express real human stories and emotions. Use storytelling to make fellow humans care. Really care. AI can’t do that. 

It’s why storytelling has become such an industry buzzword. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the “percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term ‘storyteller’ doubled last year, to include some 50,000 listings under marketing that mentioned the term”. 

To capitalise on this new storytelling-world of work, we need to bring to the fore skills that have yet to be commoditised by machines. Here are a few for starters: 

• Slow things down: The ability to step away from the material, reconsider the contexts that matter and simplify everything. The faster technology gets, the more complex its answers. Our role is to slow things down, be more thoughtful and critical to make things sharper. 

• Look to the future: Emulate the journalist’s instinct to focus on what is going to happen, not simply what has happened. The past matters but not as much as the implications, actions we can now take based on the data. All data is set in the past. Storytelling bridges the gap between analysis and action. 

• Be more human: Double-down on what has always made this industry so essential. Utilise more human understanding, not simply more data sources. This is how you will generate sharper narratives because you understand people not just numbers. AI – no matter what the tech bros tell us – understands numbers but it is only guessing at people.  

Building a storytelling culture also has significant side effects. For instance, much research work is done in isolation, but when you bring that work into a storytelling forum, it results in intense collaboration. People improve, question, push and get to a better place because they all feel part of the storytelling process. They connect with each other, in a society that feels increasingly disconnected. 

In addition, the struggle of the blank page brings immense benefits. Every dead end leads to a new thought, every idea leads to a better one, every headline works until you realise there is a far more insightful one that emerges through trial and error. 

These relational, human, storytelling skills are for life. Work on them, finesse them, and find ways of connecting to other humans in a way that makes you look good and them feel as if you’ve helped them. Maximise the talent that you were born with and against which AI cannot compete: The way you tell stories. 

Grant Feller is the Founder of Every Rung, a storytelling consultancy. He writes about the industry on Substack at The Storytelling Newsletter.