Why Storytelling Is Now the Most Valuable Skill in Tech

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Scott Galloway (1:27)

The ability to make people feel something about your product, your company, or your idea is worth as much, and in some cases more, than the technical skills that got you in the door.

Today's Prof G Deep Dive is on storytelling and how it became the most valuable skill in the economy. I'm often asked, what is the one skill I would teach my children? And it's not computer science or Mandarin, it's, or even STEM, it's storytelling. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom was clear. AI would kill writing. If a machine can draft an email, write a press release, or generate an essay in seconds, what's left? Meanwhile, jobs including plumbing, surgery, even coding felt much safer.

But we've been to this movie before. When AI got good enough to read medical scans, the prediction was immediate and confident. Radiologists were done. If a machine can read them, then why do you need a doctor? But the opposite happened. Since those predictions, the Mayo Clinic's radiology staff has grown by 55 percent, according to the New York Times. And in 2025, radiology was the second highest paid medical specialty in America, with average incomes 48 percent higher than a decade ago. Why? Because we confused the most visible part of the job with the most valuable part of the job. A study of radiologists across three hospitals found that only 36 percent, a little more than a third of their time, was spent actually reading scans, the part AI can do. The rest was human judgment, deciding what matters, guiding treatment, asking the right questions. AI didn't replace radiologists. It replaced the part of the job that was never really the point. I can relate to this personally. Growing up, my mother was a typist. Ninety-eight percent of typists went away, and this was happening during the 80s when I was growing up. But my mom went upstream and did the hard part of the job, and that was managing her boss and making his life easier. My mother became a personal assistant, or what some people would refer to as a secretary. Typing was still part of her job, but an increasingly small part of her job. But she went after and was good at the hard part of her job. Writing is no different. We assume the value was in producing words, something AI can now do instantly. But once the Internet got flooded with generic cookie-cutter content, it became clear the words were never the point. So for example, I love to write. I write a book every 18 months, I write a newsletter every week, and people often ask me if I ever write under the influence, if you will.

I've tried writing under the influence of THC, and while I think what I'm writing is brilliant, the next day I find that it's pretty incoherent. But occasionally, I do write after one or two drinks, and I find I have an easier time being emotional, and quite frankly, some of my writing is just better and more gripping. I stopped doing that because I didn't want to ever become reliant on alcohol for the written word. But the point is, it took down the barriers, or it takes down the barriers, or the screens, or the thoughts, and doesn't look at patterns. I just write what I'm feeling, and I think that that's the problem with AI. AI is essentially looking at patterns and trying to guess what the next word should be and such that it's a regression to the mean. AI takes everything to the average, and people aren't interested in reading average, or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you. The value is judgment, perspective, taste. Again, it's emotion, or specifically the ability to evoke emotions that's really difficult to automate, which is why companies are now paying a premium for it. The percentage of LinkedIn job postings mentioning storyteller doubled between 2024 and 2025 to more than 50,000 listings in marketing and 20,000 in media and communications. Corporate executives mentioned storytelling on earnings calls 469 times in 2025, up from 359 in 2024, and just 147 times in 2015