What does it take to tell a winning story? Through my experience working in public relations, insights management, and tech entrepreneurship, I’ve come to see that storytelling isn’t a soft skill. In 2026 and beyond, it’s analytical output.
The big companies know this. Job listings mentioning “storytelling” as a skill or headlined with titles like Head of Storytelling or Narrative Strategist now feature on Indeed at a growing rate, instead of the traditional communications manager or head of marketing titles. Job postings featuring the word “storyteller” have grown significantly.
Rapid growth of AI content has shifted messaging into a new territory: one where good-quality messaging has a chance to stand out in a pile of ever-growing AI slop.
Through my own successes and failures in business and entrepreneurship, I’ve realised that to communicate persuasively, to investors, customers, or partners, you cannot rely on surface-level messaging. When many businesses compete in trying to tell the same story, sell similar products, and stand out in a cluttered market, my advice is to follow one simple rule: be the most reliable.
For SMEs and startups, this can seem challenging. How can a small business seem more reliable than a large player?
How do we stand out in the noise of everyone yelling, “I’m the best!”?
The rise of AI sloppytelling
The harsh truth is that most businesses were not strong communicators to begin with, so many of us now turn to AI to write a convincing pitch deck, transform our slide headlines into winning mantras, or write our business plans for us: the one-click-win. We’ve come to depend on it because AI messaging is better than no messaging, right?
As a result, inauthentic AI-devised content is taking over. Much of this output lacks focus and conviction to make audiences feel at ease. A generic story doesn’t do the job of putting prospective customers at ease, especially when your competitor is larger, has bigger teams, a longer runway, or more experience.
Using AI to write your story will not make you reliable or convincing. It will make you unremarkable. I call it Sloppytelling!
AI produces stories that often lack impactful key messages. The one-liners that make people stop and think, evoke nodding heads, and build confidence in your offer. This is because AI is based on analysis of past collections of vast generic data sets, and your story is based on your data and yours alone. It comes from the conversations you’ve had with clients who signed on the dotted line, and from those who opted not to.
Also Read: The storytelling myth: Why narrative-first leadership is overrated
AI is also not a replacement for real stakeholder or customer feedback. The actual data about your product or service shapes the story you tell. Remember: storytelling is analytical.
Finally, I argue that you should not use AI for developing well-structured responses to tough questions. Tough questions almost deserve their own section here, but we know them well from job interviews, investor meetings, and our business development presentations. It’s the questions that broke us.
Strong storytelling is as much about creating those powerful one-liners as it is about building our defensive comebacks, the fortress of words that protects our business from scrutiny.
A framework for analytical storytelling
Storytelling that can change minds or close deals is usually built on lessons accumulated over time, often through difficult experiences with customers and stakeholders. We start to form an idea of the optimal story through our repeated encounters with the word “no.”
After nearly two decades in business, listening and learning from strong storytellers, my consultancy focuses, among other things, on helping SMEs learn to tell their stories well and build lasting connections through their words and messaging. I argue that there are ways to bypass the painful rejections, the time spent hearing our least favourite word, through approaching storytelling in a structured and analytical way.
As mentioned earlier, the first part of this is to focus on insights, specifically around answering three questions about your business:
- What makes our proposition unique?
- Why do we do this better than others?
- Which questions will kill our business?
While most companies focus on the first two questions, many fail to focus on the final question. This one is complicated because there are many questions that can kill us, and our stakeholders ask different questions based on their needs or concerns. You have strong storytelling when your pitch incorporates the answers to these questions, not just once, but repeatedly, until this is what your audience remembers.
How AI can support your storytelling
You should certainly use AI to build your story! The tools are there to make our work more efficient and save us time. The strongest value AI can provide is to support the analytical work and insights generation that feeds your story, the legwork you need to do before formulating your winning pitch. It can also help dot the i’s and cross the t’s after your story is written.
Also Read: How brands are crafting communities through the art of visual storytelling
Here is how I propose you use AI in your storytelling process:
- To get clarity into your business and support analytical insights
- To filter your content and spot patterns behind your key messaging
- To devise questionnaires for stakeholders or customers to uncover weaknesses
- To clean up grammar and phrasing
AI can save you time and handle some of the legwork, but it can’t get you all the way there in answering the three core questions.
The takeaway
Many people still think of storytelling as something soft, artistic, or nostalgic: a campfire, a childhood book, a good writer’s craft. But in business, storytelling is not a cosy blanket. It is the bare-bones framework that holds your relationships with stakeholders, customers, and prospective clients in place. For SMEs and startups, it can be one of the most powerful tools for competing with larger players.
In a market saturated with generic, AI-assisted messaging, the winners will not be the companies producing the most content. They will be the ones whose stories make a lasting impact. That starts with investing in analytical storytelling today.
—
Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.
Join us on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn to stay connected.
The post Why storytelling is no longer a soft skill but analytical output appeared first on e27.