Posts tagged: unexpected

In the generative AI boom, vibe coding and AI expertise have become in-demand résumé skills. But tech companies are also looking to pay a premium for expertise in people who have a skill that predates AI: the art of communication.

Andreessen Horowitz launched its New Media team last year to help founders learn what they “need to win the narrative battle online.” Adobe is looking for an “AI evangelist” to lead the company’s “artificial intelligence storytelling.” Netflix, a company that sells stories to your living room, recently posted a director of product and technology communications role with a salary range of up to $775,000. Microsoft began publishing a print magazine, Signal, last year, calling it an “antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.” Anthropic tripled the size of its communications team last year, growing to about 80 people and is still hiring five more, each offering salaries of around $200,000 or higher. OpenAI has several open communications jobs boasting salary listings of more than $400,000. The average director of communications in the US makes $106,000, according to Indeed.

Three years after the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT, results have been mixed: Within tech firms, vibe coding is nixing the need for entry-level software developers, while some workers across industries are foisting rapidly generated, verbose, and sloppy AI nonsense onto their colleagues, leading to wasted time and a breakdown of trust. Even Sam Altman said last year that people have started to affect a sort of AI accent when speaking, and now some social platform discourse “feels very fake.”

Amid all chatter about gen AI taking jobs, the ease with which gen AI spits out content has ironically revved the demand for human communicators.

Because AI generates so much content, “you would think that actually the job of the comms person or the storyteller would be fewer and farther between,” says Gab Ferree, founder of Off the Record, a community for communications professionals, and former vice president of global communications at Bumble. But that’s not what’s happening. Tech companies are hiring writers, editors, chief communications officers who work closely with CEOs, and so-called “storytellers.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the percentage of job postings on LinkedIn mentioning “storyteller” doubled between 2024 to 2025.

In a competitive industry where startups fight to survive and Big Tech rivals campaign for market dominance, a good story is a selling point. One theory behind the push, Ferree says, is “there’s just so much garbage out there that people want to pay a premium for someone who can claim that they can cut through the noise.”

The trend of storytelling and lucrative comms jobs has been “percolating for a while,” says Jenna Birch, founder of SISU, a communications consultancy for startups and VCs. As Silicon Valley’s influence ballooned over the past two decades, tech companies could offer staggering salaries just as more newspapers were bleeding more and more writers. Content marketing became popular, and building a company’s brand on social media and surfacing blog posts in Google search results became essential.

More recently, the role of the comms pro has continued to expand, as they have to understand large language models, company blogs, how to craft a larger narrative to set a company apart from competitors, and how to write in a CEO’s voice on LinkedIn and Substack. The number of chief communication officer roles that encompass not just traditional comms duties but also take on another responsibility, like marketing or or human resources, at Fortune 1000 companies grew from 90 in 2019 to 169 in 2024, according to a report from the Observatory on Corporate Reputation. The median pay for a CCO at a Fortune 500 company is now between $400,000 and $450,000, a $50,000 jump from 2023, according to a survey from consultant firm Korn Ferry.

If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now.Cristin Culver, founder of Common Thread Communications

As the job changes and demand for narrative communications and storytellers rises, the number of communications experts able to work under rapidly evolving conditions and with a wide remit may be small, comms experts tell me, leading companies to offer hefty compensation packages in war for the best talent. A similar trend is unfolding among the few people who are AI experts, driving tech companies to offer astounding salaries to poach top talent from rival firms. While not of the same nine-figure caliber, in their own right, creatives are becoming “the high value person in tech now,” Birch says.

For much of the tech boom, that high-value person was a software developer. Universities and coding bootcamps rushed to fill employment gaps and train up the next generation of tech workers. Young people were told coding would be a path to a lucrative, stable career. As of 2023, the most recent year the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data for, computer science recent graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1%, while communications majors’ unemployment rate sat at 4.5%. The number of open job posts for software engineers dropped by more than 60,000 between 2023 and late 2025, according to data from CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. The best defense against automation, some argue, will be a liberal arts degree.

Words might be easy to generate with AI, but good writing isn’t ready for automation.

“If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer, and I think it’s very evident right now,” says Cristin Culver, founder of communications firm Common Thread Communications. LinkedIn is full of posts written by AI in a similar style that makes eyes glaze over as they scroll. “I think AI is both aiding and making storytelling much harder,” Culver says. “Ironically in this era of AI, some of the most poignant storytelling belongs to the people who’ve realized that everything is sloppified and they’ve pivoted to very tactical storytelling.”

Anthropic has been leaning heavily into that tactical, and tactile, storytelling. In the fall, the company created a pop-up Claude Cafe in New York to position the chatbot as a thinking and problem solving partner, marketing the space as one for showing up in person, connecting, and being surrounded by books and magazines over screens (although the company has also destroyed and scanned millions of books to train Claude, which a judge ruled last year was not a copyright violation).

“Claude is definitely a prominent team member for everyone, but comms people are sort of like BS detectors,” Sasha de Marigny previously told Axios last May, months before she was promoted from head of communications to become the company’s first CCO. “Critical thinking is still a huge comparative advantage for humans. I’m looking for excellent strategists — people who understand the new world order and know how to develop holistic plans to cut through to the audiences we care about.” Anthropic declined to speak more about its comms strategy for this story.

“It’s a golden age for people who really enjoy the craft of communications,” says Steve Clayton, CCO of Cisco, who formerly worked at Microsoft and launched the company’s print publication. When he first tried ChatGPT, Clayton says he worried his career was done. He’s since become an AI optimist, seeing gen AI as a tool and opportunity for communicators and so-called storytellers to stand out with content that feels authentic content projects that strike people. “In an environment where nobody’s sat at their desk today saying: God, I wish I had more email, or I wish I had more websites I could visit, or I wish I had more podcasts — the challenge is, how do you create something that is worthy of people’s time and worthy of their attention?”

Jobs where brands build out their own newsrooms are “going to be one of the last places where AI is replacing writers,” says Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker, a content distribution company. Unlike traditional media, which relies on clicks, advertising, and subscription to make money off a constant stream of content, “when brands are investing in the strategy, they’re not thinking about: ‘Do I break even on an individual piece of content?’ They’re thinking about: ‘How do I create five or 10 really incredible stories every month that get our story out there, that prove and turn us into the authority as a respected party in this space?””

As with coding and image generation, LLMs are likely to keep getting better. LLMs may write with more voice or sound more human eventually. But the chatbots and agents don’t think. They generate creative content without cycling through a creative process. A 2025 Columbia Business School study found LLMs have a bias for “Option A,” preferring the first choice when given a list and asked to pick. For people working in comms, AI might be more friend than initially imagined foe — at least because it makes their work stand out.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.