Been talking to technical companies lately and finding words for a question I’ve been mulling on: **Does AI actually change the narrative for your company?** As an editor my gut immediately squawks *no* - but recent conversations have helped break down the logic. AI doesn’t rewrite your story; it only expands the market in which your story now has to compete. I’ve been in the headspace of biotech and pharma, energy and electrification, industrial engineering - the kinds of industries that used to be too R&D-heavy for widespread venture attention. The infrastructure layers. High investment, high risk. Not the stuff investor dreams were made of. But AI has derisked commercialization for deeptech. It’s compressing the path from hypothesis to drug, tightening grid efficiency, [running multidimensional physics simulations](https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/27/physicsx-emerges-from-stealth-with-32m-for-ai-to-power-engineering-simulations/), doing it all at new levels of speed, accuracy, and fidelity. It's wild that these are now my biz dev throughlines - a far cry from my last indie season in 2020-2021 when I was talking to mostly consumer facing companies. But even if deep B2B's entering its platforming era too, it deals with the same dynamics - - AI derisks the supply side of invention - through speed, cost, efficiency. - What’s still missing is derisking the demand side - belief, adoption, integration. Derisking demand happens through narrative. Through having enough conviction that you don't have to lead with "AI inside," or "now we have greater TAM/SAM/SOM" (hardly trust-building outside your investor narrative). You can accelerate invention, but you still have to educate the market. Define what you stand for to your teams, customers, regulators. Translate technological capability into a paragraph that people don't have to read 3x to understand. Even for market leaders where AI is the explicit product, they abstract away the technical aspects in their marketing campaigns. (See: [ChatGPT](https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/openais-biggest-ad-push-yet-brings-chatgpt-into-everyday-moments/) & [Claude ads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNkDBNR7AM).) They try to embody the energy of a _Black Panther 2_ scene: Princess Shuri losing her mind while developing a drug to save her brother, iterating at 10x speed with her AI assistant, finally getting somewhere when she obtains the right source material. Most websites are content overload, even the ones that don’t rely on conventional SaaS content strategy. _Quick, generate some words to fill the empty boxes,_ _it’s good enough no one’s reading anyways._ This works until it doesn’t. Founder pedigree and handshake credibility only get you so far - and whether it kicks in at 10M or 10B, conversation is the new moat. Narrative IP is IP too. Meme: ability to articulate concept w/o copywriter https://www.instagram.com/p/B9HN1zgAieb/ In 1981, English artist and writer David Hockney and Stephen Spender visited China, where they got to talk to local guides about Chinese policies. Spender writes in their *China Diary*: > “...but I saw that I accepted too easily as truth the scientific arguments [for curbing population growth] and that in accepting scientific arguments one may be jettisoning the insight of the imagination into human nature.” Science and imagination go together. No technical person wants a world where AI is perceived the differentiator to their work, just as no artist would. If we're gonna keep iterating on this thesis: **AI derisks production; story derisks adoption.** I’m always looking to talk with founders and VCs who are trying to hold both technical velocity and narrative integrity, or interested in what that could look like. (See: [[Technology doesn't move people; poetry does]]) Who are trying to answer the real question... how does AI help you translate capability into trust? Who understand: [[The hardest part is finding what you want to say]].