Storytelling is the most powerful communication tool to fully convey a concept, elicit emotion (empathy, excitement, compassion, etc.), and thoroughly engage and capture an audience’s attention. In business, storytelling is also a powerful tool that allows your company and brand to connect better with customers. This is nothing new in marketing, PR, sales, etc., but using advanced technology to enhance and produce even more compelling and dynamic stories are becoming very real. At present, AI is a valuable and efficient technology that can help build the best narrative for your business strategy. As AI technologies continue to evolve, they will not only be helpful but a necessity.
What is AI-aided storytelling in business?
Modern businesses have traditionally used data to support business narratives as proof points. While building their brand or product stories, in addition to proof points, companies often leave the creative process entirely up to the author of any given story. One challenge is that this typically requires a good amount of data literacy to interpret, analyze, and recognize what is being evidenced within the data, the most vital information to tell the story. AI democratizes data enabling less data literate employees to build a narrative more easily on any subject.
Many organizations use charts and dashboards to help monitor and explain their data. While this is a compelling way to help visualize and begin to tell any story the data reveals, it is not always apparent to all what the actual story may be. Charts and dashboards usually just tell you what is happening, but not necessarily why it is happening. AI-generated dynamic dashboards that are animated with the movement of various charts, graphs, and maps take it to another level in the story process. It not only tells the story but also why. In addition, the story can be taken even further to glean the full potential of the story of the data.
Critical elements of storytelling:
1. Set up
2. Conflict
3. Resolution
One of AI’s many advantages over traditional data analysis is the ability to sort through immense amounts of data and pinpoint any of these key elements within seconds, allowing an author to focus on making a story compelling and engaging. AI can also recognize similar stories that have already been published and analyze why or why not a story has been well received by readers. And yet, another area where AI can help with storytelling is by identifying an audience’s emotional reaction to a story. As mentioned in an article from McKinsey & Company, AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators, the emotional arc of a movie can be automatically plotted on a graph showing “how positive or negative a scene is compared with other points in the movie.”
While AI, at present, will not necessarily create original content, it can learn and identify the most compelling aspects of past content. It can also be said that it is the case for humans, though “Art is not created in a vacuum.” Humans draw on their past experiences and process the experience through their own neural networks. Essentially this is how deep learning models are created by mimicking human neural networks.
AI Technologies that aid in storytelling
Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a form of AI that turns data into clear human-sounding narratives. NLG can generate large amounts of content with personalized communication and optimize analytics reporting.
Automated journalism is one example of how this technology can be used. Automated web searches scrape data from different sources, generating a summary text that can be published quickly. Another advantage besides the speed with that AI can sort through large volumes of data is that it is completely unbiased. According to an article published by Connexun | news API, Top 2021 Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for automated journalism. “Heliograf smart software wrote 850 articles in a year, including 500 on the US elections, which generated more than 500.000 online hits” for the Washington Post.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the technology that allows computers to understand language in a way similar to how humans understand language, allowing for swift analytics of text (stories) and insights from unstructured data. This is the technology behind more specific applications of sentiment analysis and emotion AI (Please see our article Emotion AI Interpreting Human Expression) and can play a significant role in AI-generated storytelling.
Predictive Analytics is an advanced analytics tool that predicts future outcomes using historical data combined with algorithmic modeling and machine learning.
This article has already mentioned a couple of examples where predictive analytics can play a role in AI-aided storytelling, like predicting the most compelling aspects of a story based on previous stories. Predictive analytics can also help determine and predict the success of a story within any given demographic.
The (present) and future of AI and Storytelling
Gartner predicts data stories as the most widespread way of consuming analytics by 2025. But interestingly, 75% of said stories are expected to be automatically generated rather than human-made, using augmented analytics tools.
The New York Times recently published the article We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting. The article mentions DALL-E 2, “an app developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI that turns text descriptions into hyper-realistic images.” AI can also make recommendations for musical scores to any stories, being able to sort through vast collections instantaneously. The implications of this technology are astounding and will take us into a new era when it is coupled with evolving technology focused on the “Metaverse” (Please see our article The Role of AI and Data Science in the Metaverse). Presently and relatively, the metaverse is still a very young concept and has a few obstacles to overcome before it is commonly adopted and becomes the “new internet.” However, it opens the way to explore storytelling in a way that has never been possible. We can plan on some remarkable outcomes through text, speech, or pictural as these technologies are converging.
Storytelling is a powerful way to connect with your customers and build your narrative. AI-aided storytelling is becoming more and more of a necessity in business to tell your most dynamic, relatable, and touching stories to move your business forward.
To learn more about how emotion AI can transform your applications and systems to reach new levels of intelligence, send us your query to intellect2@intellect2.ai. Intellect Data, Inc. is a software solutions company incorporating data science and artificial intelligence into modern digital products Intellect2TM. IntellectDataTM develops and implements software, software components, and software as a service (SaaS) for enterprise, desktop, web, mobile, cloud, IoT, wearables, and AR/VR environments. Locate us on the web at www.intellect2.ai.