Amid the generative AI boom, video coding and AI expertise have become in-demand skills. But tech companies are also looking to pay more for the expertise of people with 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 online storytelling battle.” Adobe is looking for an “AI evangelist” to lead the company’s “artificial intelligence storytelling.” Netflix, a company that sells stories into your living room, recently announced a position for director of product and technology communications 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 to about 80 people and is hiring five more, each offering salaries of about $200,000 or more. OpenAI offers several open communication jobs with salaries over $400,000. In the United States, the average communications director earns $106,000, according to Indeed.
Three years after widespread adoption of ChatGPT, the results are mixed: within technology companies, ambiance coding eliminates the need for beginner software developerswhile some workers in all sectors impose messages that are quickly generated, verbose and sloppy AI nonsense on their colleagues, leading to wasted time and a breakdown in trust. Even Sam Altman said last year that people were starting to adopt a sort of AI accent when speaking, and that now some speech on social platforms “sounds very fake.”
Amid all the talk about the AI generation creating jobs, the ease with which the AI generation spits out content has ironically reignited the demand for human communicators.
Because AI generates so much content, “you would think that actually the job of the communicator or storyteller would be less and less important,” says Gab Ferree, founder of Off the Record, a community of communications professionals and former vice president of global communications at Bumble. But that’s not what’s happening. Tech companies hire writers, editors, communications managers who work closely with CEOs, and “storytellers.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the percentage of job postings on LinkedIn mentioning “storyteller” doubled between 2024 and 2025.
In a competitive industry where startups are fighting to survive and big tech companies are campaigning for market dominance, a good story is a selling point. According to Ferree, one of the theories behind the push is “that there is so much trash that people want to pay extra for someone who can claim they can reduce the noise.”
The trend toward lucrative storytelling and communications jobs has been “creeping out for a while,” says Jenna Birch, founder of SISU, a communications consultancy for startups and venture capital firms. As Silicon Valley’s influence has grown over the past two decades, tech companies have been able to offer sky-high salaries, just as more and more newspapers have been losing more and more writers. Content marketing has become popular, and it has become essential to build a company’s brand on social media and make blog posts appear in Google search results.
More recently, the role of communications professionals has continued to expand, as they need to understand broad language patterns, corporate blogging, how to craft a broader narrative to distinguish a company from its competitors, and how to write in a CEO’s voice on LinkedIn and Substack. The number of communications director positions that encompass not only traditional communications tasks but also take on other responsibilities, such as marketing or human resources, at Fortune 1000 companies increased from 90 in 2019 to 169 in 2024, according to a report from the Corporate Reputation Observatory. The median salary for a CCO at a Fortune 500 company is now between $400,000 and $450,000, an increase of $50,000 from 2023, according to a survey by consulting firm Korn Ferry.
If everyone is a writer, then no one is a writer, and I think that’s very obvious right now.Cristin Culver, founder of Common Thread Communications
As the profession evolves and demand for narrative communications and storytellers increases, the number of communications experts able to work in rapidly changing conditions and with a broad mandate may be low, communications experts tell me, leading companies to offer hefty compensation packages in the war for top talent. A similar trend is emerging among the few people who are AI expertspushing tech companies to offer incredible salaries to poach top talent from rival companies. Even though they’re not the same nine-figure caliber, creatives are becoming the “high-value people in tech” on their own, Birch says.
During much of the tech boom, this high-value person was a software developer. Universities and coding bootcamps have rushed to fill job shortages and train the next generation of tech workers. Young people were told that coding would be a path to a lucrative and stable career. In 2023, the most recent year the New York Federal Reserve has released data, recent computer science graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1%, while the unemployment rate for communications majors was 4.5%. The number of job vacancies for software engineers fell by more than 60,000 between 2023 and the end of 2025, according to data from CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the U.S. IT industry. According to some, the best defense against automation will be liberal arts degree.
Words may be easy to generate with AI, but good writing is not ready for automation.
“If everyone is a writer, then no one is a writer, and I think that’s very obvious right now,” says Cristin Culver, founder of communications company Common Thread Communications. LinkedIn is full of AI-written posts in a similar style that bring wonder to the eyes as they scroll past. “I think AI makes storytelling a lot easier and harder,” Culver says. “Ironically, in the age of AI, some of the most poignant storytelling comes from those who realized everything was botched and opted for very tactical storytelling.”
Anthropic relied heavily on this tactical and tactile storytelling. In the fall, the company created a pop-up Claude Café in New York to position the chatbot as a thinking and problem-solving partner, marketing the space as one to show up in person, connect, and be surrounded by books and magazines on screens (although the company also has millions destroyed and scanned of books to train Claude, which a judge ruled last year did not constitute copyright infringement).
“Claude is definitely an important team member for everyone, but the communications people are a bit like BS detectors,” Sasha de Marigny said previously. Axios last May, a few months before she was promoted to communications manager to become the company’s first CCO. “Critical thinking remains a huge comparative advantage for humans. I’m looking for great strategists, people who understand the new world order and know how to develop holistic plans to reach the audiences we care about.” Anthropic declined to discuss its communications strategy further for this story.
“It’s a golden age for people who really love the communications business,” says Cisco CCO Steve Clayton, who previously worked at Microsoft and launched the company’s print publication. When he first tried ChatGPT, Clayton says he feared his career was over. He has since become an AI optimist, seeing Generation AI as a tool and opportunity for communicators and so-called storytellers to stand out with content that feels authentic, content projects that strike a chord with people. “In an environment where no one is sitting at their desk today saying, God, I wish I had more email, or I wish I had more websites to visit, or I wish I had more podcasts — the challenge is, how do you create something that’s worth people’s time and worth their attention?”
Jobs where brands create their own newsrooms “will be one of the last places where AI replaces writers,” says Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker, a content distribution company. Unlike traditional media, which relies on clicks, advertising and subscriptions to make money through a constant stream of content, “when brands invest in strategy, they’re not thinking about, ‘Am I breaking even on individual content?’ They’re asking themselves, “How can I create five or ten really incredible stories every month that will get our story out there, that will prove and establish us as an authority as a respected party in this space?” »
As for coding and image generationLLMs will likely continue to improve. LLMs may possibly write with more voice or sound more human. But chatbots and agents don’t think. They generate creative content without going through a creative process. A 2025 Columbia Business School study found that LLMs have an “option A” bias, preferring the first choice when given a list and asked to choose. For people working in communications, AI could be more of a friend than the foe initially imagined – at least because it makes their work stand out.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest companies and technology trends.
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