In the era of the generative artificial intelligence boom, AI expertise has become a highly sought-after skill, including on programmer resumes. But technology companies are willing to pay a hefty salary for another type of expertise, one that predates the development of AI: the art of communication, writes Business Insider.
Venture capital investment firm Andreessen Horowitz launched its New Media team last year to help company founders learn what they “need to win the online narrative battle.” Adobe is looking for an “AI evangelist” to lead the company's “artificial intelligence story.” Netflix, a company that sells stories directly into customers' living rooms, recently posted an ad for a director of product and technology communications, with a salary range of up to $775,000 per year.
Microsoft began publishing a print magazine last year called Signal, which it describes as an “antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.” Anthropic, one of the biggest AI players, tripled the size of its communications team last year to about 80 people, and still has openings for five more, each offering salaries of about $200,000 or more. OpenAI offers several jobs in communication, with salaries over $400,000 per year.
But outside of Silicon Valley, the average salary for a U.S. communications director is just $106,000, according to data cited by Business Insider.
The growing use of AI has created a problem even in Silicon Valley
Three years after the widespread adoption of ChatGPT, the results are mixed: Inside tech firms, AI-assisted coding (“vibe coding”) is eliminating the need for entry-level programmers, while some employees in various industries bombard their colleagues with rapidly generated, wordy and sloppy AI texts, leading to wasted time and an erosion of trust.
Even Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said last year that people have started to adopt a kind of “AI accent” when they speak, and speech on some social platforms “now seems very fake”.
Amidst all the talk about generative AI taking jobs, the ease with which it produces content has ironically increased the demand for human communicators. Because AI is generating so much content, “you might think that the job of a communications specialist or storyteller is actually going to become rarer,” 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 happens.
Technology companies employ writers, editors, communications directors who work closely with CEOs, and so-called “storytellers”. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the percentage of job postings on LinkedIn that mention the term “storyteller” doubled between 2024 and 2025.
In a competitive industry, where startups are fighting for survival and Big Tech giants are competing for market dominance, a good story is a selling point. One theory behind this trend, says Ferree, is that “there's so much garbage being produced that people are willing to pay a premium for someone who can rightly claim to know how to cut through the background noise.”
Paradoxical situation for programmers in the US
For much of the tech boom, that high-value person was the programmer. Universities and so-called programming bootcamps have rushed to fill gaps in the labor market and train the next generation of tech workers.
Young people were told that programming would be a path to a profitable and stable career. In 2023, the most recent year for which the New York Federal Reserve released data, recent computer science graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, while the unemployment rate among communications graduates was 4.5 percent.
The number of job openings for software engineers fell by more than 60,000 between 2023 and the end of 2025, according to data from CompTIA, a non-profit US IT industry association. The best defense against automation, some argue, will be a degree in the humanities.
Words may be easy to generate with AI, but good writing isn't ready for automation, Business Insider points out.
“If everybody's a writer, then nobody's a writer anymore, and I think that's very evident right now,” Cristin Culver, founder of communications firm Common Thread Communications, told Business Insider.
The LinkedIn platform has come to be filled with ads and resumes written by AI in a similar style, which become boring and annoying as you scroll down the page.
“Ironically, in this age of AI, some of the most powerful forms of storytelling belong to people who have realized that everything has become shoddy and pivoted to a very tactical way of storytelling,” says Culver.
