The Future of Smart Storytelling

We are storytellers. We have been telling stories throughout our long history from the ancient times to our modern civilization. Today, we still understand that a story is the best form of communication for anyone to remember. As we tell our stories, we incorporate our imagination, creativity, critical thinking, awareness, empathy, and ability to understand others to influence, entertain, excite and bring together.

Over the years, technology has changed the way we tell our stories. The use of modern media and computer technology has enhanced our stories into almost a surreal environment as if we are there; our stories today come alive with action, adventure, drama, suspense and a hero.

As we continue to embrace newer technology such as adaptive and cognitive learning, how will this artificial intelligence shape our storytelling? How can we apply machine learning to enhance not just our narratives but also improve our ability to connect with the right people?

In today’s modern world, it is not a matter of telling stories but making the time to tell the stories. As an expat living in South Korea, I come across a term commonly used, not just in business, but in Korean life - 빨리 빨리 (pali pali) which translates into fast fast. I believe this same term applies to how we live our lives today. Get it done as fast as possible to move on to the next thing and do that as fast as possible, again and again, so it seems to never end.

This same approach applies more so with business. We are always looking for ways to increase our productivity. Our storytelling has now transitioned into content creation and messaging in the business world, as we reach our audience to convince them to use our products or solutions.

So how can AI help us with our content creation? I believe AI can be utilized to help increase content creation narratives across all lines of business. Content creation is at an all time high as organizations share more information, whether about the industry, company, people, product, solution or trends. Companies create this content to build transparency and trust. But with content creation comes the same challenge, creating it. Various marketing reports state that over 60% of organizations are constantly challenged, as they try to create content. This is where AI comes into play. What if you could plug in key content topics and information to generate narratives, build stories and delivery compelling content in hours instead of days or even weeks. AI can scour the Internet regarding the topic, monitor social media to understand trends and perceptions, understand broad and specific customer challenges in the industry and emphasis the solutions available as solving their problem through the key product benefits or features. As cognitive technologies increase their ability to understand and learn, they can also enhance our productivity to generate quality content implementation allowing us to focus on the strategic components of the business.

The other side of this content creation issue is when we create all this content, many believe it is being wasted because it is not going to the right audience or just not connecting with our audience. Only until recently, we didn’t have the right tools to understand who is really interested in our content. We tested, did surveys and did our research but if we did have the information, most of the time it was dated and too old to rely on for current use.

Big data mining help change that mindset. We are now seeing big data analysis in real time, giving us more reliable data but again, sometimes this is still not enough to understand who benefits from our content creation. This is where predicative analysis comes into play, not only using real time data to determine the brand perception, users feedback and current key insights to properly position our product toward the right audience; but also use cognitive learning to determine the most effective messaging, medium and type of content messaging that appeals to their functional, emotional and rational expectations. This is where cognitive learning can determine the best way to reach them based on their behaviors, psychographics, personalities, buying habits and trends by creating personalized messaging that touches them just like a story. These types of storytelling results will connect with an audience and could easily influence their mindset toward a product or solution.

As AI enhances our ability to become better storytellers, this is just one example of artificial intelligence becoming integrated within multiple scientific and business applications. Our ability to work together with artificial intelligence will build a better future to understanding and solving challenges from improving our daily lives to exploring complex situations that enhances innovation for all humanity.