You’re Still Talking to a Person

Nothing happens in business until somebody buys something from somebody.

Whatever role AI plays in that process — defining requirements, identifying candidates, narrowing options, evaluating alternatives, recommending winners, even negotiating deals — there are people behind that AI making decisions. For meaningful tech investments at companies large and small, a person still decides whether to pay attention, whether to take a closer look, whether the agent is right, whether to advocate internally, and whether to do the deal. You can automate everything upstream and downstream from those moments, but they are the moments that matter.

You’re still talking to a person. And if you’ve forgotten how to move one, your tech stack won’t really matter.

Technology doesn’t move people. Stories do.

The Biology of Belief

There’s a reason stories are so effective at moving people, and it’s not a marketing theory. It’s evolution.

Yuval Noah Harari made the case in Sapiens that the thing separating Homo Sapiens from every other human sub-species wasn’t physical strength, brain size, or even language. It was the ability to tell stories — to think and communicate conceptually, to share myths that bind strangers together in common cause.

Your average group of chimpanzees can signal to each other that there’s a lion. Only we can say the lion is the spirit animal of our tribe. That capacity — to build shared meaning out of thin air — is what enabled collective action at a scale no other animal has ever matched. It’s why we’re here and the Neanderthals aren’t.

I mean myth here in the broadest sense, of a shared story. Religion is a myth, regardless of its underlying truth. So is America. So is money. When people ask whether Bitcoin is “real,” I tell them it’s as real as a dollar, in that both depend on a shared story about value.

Stories are what make us human. They’re the mechanism by which one mind reaches another and actually changes it. Not data. Not “workflow.” Not even a well-constructed argument with citations. A story, with a central character the listener recognizes, facing a problem they feel, moving toward a resolution that matters.

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” — Richard Powers

If you’re in Sales or Marketing, that’s not some feel-good line from a novelist. It’s a description of the operating system running in the people you’re trying to persuade right now.

The Flood

A lot’s changed since our ancestors were telling stories around fires.

AI has made it trivially easy to produce content that looks like communication. Blog posts, emails, decks, social posts, white papers — all generated at volume, all technically competent, all carrying none of the signal that made communication work in the first place.

I wrote recently about the uncanny valley of the cold email — the moment when a note that’s supposed to feel personal instead feels surveilled. The root of that problem isn’t bad personalization. It’s that the thing being produced isn’t a story. It’s a simulation of one, and we’re getting very good at telling the difference.

The flood is real. More words are being produced right now than at any point in human history, and the vast majority of them mean nothing — not because the grammar is wrong or the facts are off, but because no human being chose those specific words to tell that specific story to that specific person. The signal that made communication powerful — proof that someone thought about you, understood your problem, and decided you were worth the effort — gets washed out by volume.

This is the paradox. The tools that make it easier to reach people have made it harder to move them. More messages, less meaning. More content, less connection.

What a Story Actually Does

A story does something no quantity of content can replicate. It transfers feeling from one person to another.

When you hear a story about someone you can identify with, facing a problem you recognize, something happens that’s beyond rational. You feel what they feel. You lean in. You care about the outcome. That’s not a persuasion technique — it’s the way Homo Sapiens processes information about the world.

That’s the mechanism behind every business outcome that matters. A customer deciding to buy isn’t weighing your feature matrix against a competitor’s. They’re deciding whether they trust you to solve a problem they feel. An engineer deciding to join your company isn’t just comparing comp packages in a spreadsheet. They’re responding to a story about what you’re building and why it matters. An investor writing a check isn’t running a DCF in their head. They’re betting on a founder who made them believe in a version of the future.

Information can change minds, sometimes. But you usually need emotion to change behavior. Most people — and most companies — are drowning in the first and starved for the second.

The Scarce Resource

Every startup founder I meet is building tools to automate something. Many are good at it. Few can tell me why their customer should care — not what the product does, but why it matters to the person deciding whether to use it.

That gap is getting wider, not narrower. As AI makes it easier to build, ship, and market products, the ability to tell a story that cuts through the noise becomes the scarcest capability in the stack. It’s not the engineering. It’s not the data. It’s a human in front of another human, saying something that makes them feel something they didn’t feel a minute ago.

I’ve argued before that the only sustainable moats are brand and culture — both of which are, at bottom, stories a company tells about itself that turn out to be true. AI can replicate a feature set. It can’t replicate why someone should give a damn.

It’s why the companies winning right now aren’t the ones with the best models or the most automated workflows. They’re the ones whose founders can walk into a room and make the people in it feel something. That’s not soft. It’s the hardest skill to come by at the AI hackathon, and the one that really matters.

For the Builders

I wrote a piece a few years ago called How to Tell a Startup Story. It’s a framework — Hero, Villain, a sentence that captures why your company matters. It works. Hundreds of founders have used it.

But frameworks only work if you understand what’s underneath them. The reason the Hero/Villain structure works isn’t that it’s clever. It’s that it exploits the same cognitive wiring that’s been running since we were sitting around fires trying to figure out whether the strangers across the river were dangerous. You name a person your listener recognizes as themselves, you name a problem they feel, and something ancient clicks into place. They pay attention. They lean in. They decide.

That’s what your pitch deck is actually for. Not just to convey information — to transfer a feeling that makes someone want to act. Listing features won’t get someone to risk embarrassment by taking a flyer on some startup. Naming a villain they already hate, and showing them a weapon to beat them back? That works, more often than not.

If your deck works as a document someone reads alone and never talks about, it’s not a story. It’s a brochure. Stories spread because they make the listener feel smart for retelling them. That’s the test.

In rooms full of smart people building AI tools, the conversation is almost always about what the technology can do. How fast it processes, how accurately it predicts, how many humans it removes from the loop.

None of that matters until someone decides to buy it.

That decision is still made by a human, and I’d bet my house that won’t change in what remains of my career. The mechanism that drives it is still a story. The biology hasn’t changed in two hundred thousand years, and it won’t change because the pitch deck was generated by a model instead of a person.

You can optimize everything else. This part — the part where one human being reaches another, and makes them care — is what will separate the winners from the losers.

So remember you’re still talking to a person. Talk to them like one. Tell them a story.