Tomá Hunt-Beczak · On narrative & AI · Essay · 2026
AI today and tomorrow.
What artificial intelligence changes for the people who tell companies' stories — what is already true today, and what the next five years ask of us. By Tomá Hunt-Beczak · 12 min read.
For twenty years the hard part of marketing writing was volume — enough posts, enough pages, enough decks to keep a brand present. That constraint is gone. The models can produce fluent text at a scale no team ever could. Which means the value of a writer no longer sits in producing words. It sits in deciding which words are worth producing at all.
01 — The shift already underway: The bottleneck moved from output to judgment.
Every team I work with has already crossed the same threshold. Drafting is cheap. Summarizing is cheap. First passes at almost anything arrive in seconds. The scarce resource is the person who can look at ten fluent options and say why one of them is right and the other nine are noise.
That is not a small change dressed up as a big one. It reorders the whole craft. The writer becomes an editor of possibility — setting the frame, holding the standard, and deciding what the work is actually trying to say before a single sentence is generated.
02 — What changes for the storyteller: A brand is a system, and systems can be taught.
The most useful thing a writer can build now is not a single great post. It is the system that lets a hundred good posts sound like they came from the same mind. Voice, point of view, the sentences a company would and would not say — written down, made legible, and handed to both people and models.
Done well, this is liberating. The narrative strategist stops being a bottleneck for every asset and becomes the author of the standard everything is measured against. The machine drafts inside the frame; the human owns the frame.
The post that travels is still the one a reader can repeat in a sentence — and no model can decide, for you, which sentence that should be.
03 — The next five years: Abundance raises the price of taste.
As drafting approaches free, the market will flood with competent, forgettable content. The scarce thing — the thing readers reward and algorithms eventually follow — will be a distinct point of view held with conviction. Taste stops being a soft skill and becomes the product.
I expect the best marketing teams to get smaller and sharper: fewer people, each operating a larger surface area of the brand, each spending more of their time on judgment and less on production. The org chart will start to look like a newsroom run by editors, not a factory run by managers.
04 — Where humans still lead: Meaning is a human assignment.
A model can tell you what has been said. It cannot tell you what is worth saying to this audience, at this moment, given everything a company is quietly trying to become. That judgment draws on context no training set contains — the room, the rivalry, the reputation, the reader.
So the work does not disappear. It concentrates. The next decade belongs to the people who can hold the whole story in their head, decide what matters, and make the work legible to everyone else — human and machine alike. That has always been the job. The tools just made it the only job that's left.