Field note

Everyone automated the brand. Now they're hiring storytellers.

For about two years, the easiest cut in a marketing budget was the story. Messaging went to a prompt and creative went to a pipeline. The copywriter, the brand designer, and the agency were the first line items to go, because a model could turn out the same deliverables for a fraction of the cost.

The deliverables showed up. The returns didn't.

The automation bet didn't pay

In 2025, MIT's Project NANDA studied enterprise generative AI and found that 95% of organizations were getting no measurable return on it. The detail that matters for marketers: more than half of generative AI budgets went to sales and marketing tools, while the biggest returns came from back-office automation. Companies spent the most where AI helped the least.

Inside companies, the output got a name. A Stanford and BetterUp survey of 1,150 U.S. desk workers found that 40% had received "workslop" in the past month: AI-generated work that looks polished and says nothing. Each instance took almost two hours to clean up, and half of the people who received it rated the sender as less capable afterward.

Outside, the public named it too. Merriam-Webster made "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, defined as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." Coca-Cola remade its 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" ad with generative AI two years running, and got roasted both times.

When Klarna walked back its AI-first customer service and started hiring people again, its CEO didn't call it a cost decision. He called it a brand one: "From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want."

Trust is now a purchase criterion

Edelman's 2026 brand research, covering 17,688 people in 15 countries, found that 88% call trusting a brand an important or critical reason to buy. That's level with quality (89%) and value (88%). The same research found that customers, peers, and unpaid advocates build more trust than anything a brand says about itself.

Put those together. When every company can generate unlimited content, content stops being the signal. What's left is whether people believe you. Features get copied in a quarter, and models become commodities in months. How a company makes people feel, and whether that feeling turns into belief, is the one asset a competitor can't prompt its way to.

The storytellers are back

The market has noticed. In December 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that LinkedIn job postings mentioning "storyteller" had doubled in a year, to about 50,000 in marketing and more than 20,000 in media and communications. Executives said "storyteller" or "storytelling" 469 times on earnings calls in 2025, up from 147 in 2015.

The loudest signal comes from the companies building the models. Anthropic has posted roles for a Head of Copy & Content ($320,000 to $400,000), a Video Storyteller, and a GTM narrative lead. OpenAI has posted communications leadership roles paying around $400,000, and a copywriter and creative director for its design studio ($240,000 to $295,000). The companies selling AI that writes are paying top of market for people who write.

That isn't hypocrisy. It's the clearest read available on where the value sits. The labs know better than anyone what their models can do, and they still want a person deciding what the company says.

Why I started Needle Space Labs

I've worked both sides of this. I started as a reporter at CNN, PBS, and The Wall Street Journal, where the job was finding the true story and telling it so people understood. Then I spent years doing the same thing inside technology companies at their inflection points: Splunk, Expanse, Spire Global, and Eightfold. And I've built with generative tools since before most brand teams tried them.

From the inside, the pattern was clear. The companies getting it right weren't choosing between people and machines. They put people on the story, the judgment, and the final call, and put machines on the volume. The companies getting it wrong did the reverse: they automated the part that needed a person and kept people busy with the part a machine could do.

Needle Space Labs is built on that split. A founder who just raised gets a senior storyteller who reports the story from the inside, plus agentic workflows that handle the volume behind it. Made by people. Sped up by machines.

The companies that pull ahead won't be the ones that produce the most. They'll be the ones people believe.

Sources

• MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide, via Fortune/Yahoo Finance and Virtualization Review
• AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying Productivity, Harvard Business Review; figures via Axios
• Merriam-Webster 2025 Word of the Year: slop
• Coca-Cola Sparks Backlash With AI-Generated Christmas Ad, Again, Forbes
• Klarna is hiring customer service agents after AI couldn't cut it, Entrepreneur
• 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World
• "Companies Are Desperately Seeking 'Storytellers'," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2025, as summarized by Standard Advertising
• Anthropic creative roles: The State of Brand, Video Storyteller listing, GTM narrative listing
• OpenAI communications roles: Entrepreneur