Gary Goldhammer –author and storyteller.

Johannes Kepler wrote about lunar travel in the 1600s. Jules Verne put men in a capsule launched from Florida more than 100 years before Apollo 11. H.G. Wells gave a young Robert Goddard nightmares about Martian invaders, and that kid grew up to build the first liquid-fueled rocket.

Technology didn’t take us to the moon. Stories did.

At PwC we believe that “R&D makes emerging tech possible, but storytelling makes it real.” Or as NASA’s chief economist, Alexander MacDonald, said in 2023: “We don’t go to space because we have the machines. We go to space because we have a culture of people who are inspired to build the machines. The narratives create the future.”

Stories are the spark

The evidence is everywhere. Martin Cooper invented the mobile phone because he watched Captain Kirk flip open a communicator on Star Trek. The iPad is a PADD from The Next Generation (Steve Jobs never confirmed it, but hey he never denied it either.) Elon Musk has said publicly that Asimov’s Foundation series shaped his vision for SpaceX.

This is how the future gets built. A storyteller imagines a world. An engineer sees it and says, I can do that. An investor hears it and says, I’ll fund that. And a public that’s already been primed by decades of narrative says it’s about time you made that.

Stories are the spark of innovation. The story always comes first.

Why story matters (and why leaders should care)

Stargate SG-1 ran for ten seasons. The show depicted drone swarms years before DARPA launched its Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program. It showed AI voice assistants managing homes long before Alexa existed. It imagined memory manipulation tech that neuroscientists are now actively pursuing.

Now decades later, OpenAI named its $500 billion data center initiative, the largest AI infrastructure project in history, “Stargate.” A bit too on the nose, perhaps, but memorable nonetheless.

The truth is every major AI company is running a storytelling operation. OpenAI tells a story of inevitable progress toward artificial general intelligence. Anthropic tells a story of safety and moral seriousness, engaging with questions about machine consciousness that sound ripped from a Black Mirror episode (though to be fair most of life today feels like it’s been ripped from Black Mirror.) Neuralink tells a story first imagined in novels, now being implanted in human skulls.

Each of these narratives does the same thing: it shapes how you feel about the technology before you’ve had time to think about it. And each organization knows exactly what it’s doing.

AI enterprises may be at the forefront of the future, but they didn’t invent this approach. Microsoft had a Chief Storyteller (Steve Clayton) who led a team of 40 people shaping everything from CEO keynotes to the company’s AI communications strategy. I’ve created and run countless storytelling programs for the Fortune Fill-in-the-Blank, from Ford and GE to Target, Dow, Bank of America and others. For these companies, storytelling was not an add-on but embedded in the org chart.

The reason is because it works. Real human stories always work.

While lectures put people to sleep and press releases make people want to throw up, narratives move people to action. When people are exposed to a brand’s story, they describe the brand in significantly more positive terms and are willing to pay more. National surveys even found that science fiction viewing predicts greater public support for both government and private space exploration.

Storytelling doesn’t just sell products. It sells permission. Permission to invest. Permission to regulate (or not.)

Permission to trust.

Getting beyond the storytelling slop

None of this may be a revelation to you. So if you remember anything from this article, remember this:

AI alone won’t make you a better storyteller. But it can make you a bad storyteller at epic scale.

If you don’t have the skills to tell an authentic human story, no amount of Claude coaxing or ChatGPT sucking up will turn you into William Faulkner or Sheryl Sandberg. Just because I can use a calculator doesn’t mean I can do my own taxes (I can’t by the way.)

I work with AI every day. I’ve built my career on storytelling. I believe in both. But I am deeply wary of storytelling that operates without accountability. Of narratives designed to manufacture consent for technologies whose consequences we haven’t begun to understand.

R&D makes emerging tech possible. Storytelling makes it real. But what storytelling really does — what it does better than any other human invention — is make you feel.

The brands and organizations that win will be those that cultivate real emotional connections alongside artificial intelligence. Stories that cut through the noise will carry human stakes: lived detail, vulnerability, specificity. They’ll be attributable, not anonymous; emotionally resonant, not algorithmically optimized.

The more our tools become intelligent, the more we need to be reminded that humanity is our ultimate competitive advantage.