Boards have spent three years approving AI budgets and almost no time approving an explanation. The spending is real, the roadmaps are detailed, the productivity targets are modeled to two decimal places, and employees still have no idea what any of it means for them. Gavin McMahon, author of Story Business, argues that this gap is not a communications problem to be cleaned up after the fact. It is a strategy problem. A board can approve an AI investment and a chief executive officer (CEO) can announce an AI strategy, and neither act guarantees the organization understands what is happening or wants any part of it. The questions employees are asking: “Will AI replace me?” “Will it make my job better?” “Can I trust it?” “Why are we doing this?” The answers are not in a spreadsheet. “The world’s newest technology needs the world’s oldest technology,” McMahon says. “AI needs story.”
The Efficiency Case Is Too Small To Lead With
The efficiency argument is seductive, and that is exactly the trouble with it. If a system does the work faster and cheaper, the business case writes itself. McMahon’s challenge is one question longer: faster and cheaper to do what? He frames the choice with a scenario. A CEO announces that AI will cut the time spent processing customer complaints by 60 percent. Perfectly respectable. Now picture that same CEO asking something else entirely: what if we could give every customer the kind of attention we’d normally reserve for our most valuable ones? “Same technology. A completely different conversation,” he says. “One invites a discussion about cost and headcount. The other opens up a discussion about the kind of business we could become.”
The second framing is not a softer version of the first. It changes who in the organization sees themselves in the plan, and it changes what people do with the tool once it arrives. McMahon is careful not to sell this as a way around hard truths. Leaders have to be truthful about the consequences, including the impact on jobs. Any story that papers over those cracks will collapse the moment reality contradicts it. What he sees failing in practice is narrower than honesty. Working with leadership teams, he finds executives who can describe the destination or the journey, rarely both. AI demands both at once. Paint the future, then explain how the organization gets there: what changes, what stays, and what people will be asked to do differently. Skip that second half and you have a technology rollout masquerading as a strategy.
Make The Employee The Hero, Not The Technology
McMahon’s sharpest line from Story Business is that it is not the best ideas that win, it is the best-packaged ones. He bats away the obvious objection before it lands. That is not a marketing argument. It is about making an idea understandable, memorable, and useful, which is a precondition for anyone acting on it. Most AI strategies fail that test on arrival. They are presented as a collection of initiatives: the technology roadmap, the investments, the productivity targets, and the risks. All necessary. None of it is a story.
His corrective is a structure he calls the Hero Formula. “We bring X to Y to help them deal with Z.” In an AI strategy, X is the technology, the tool. Y is the employees, customers, and teams trying to do something better, and they are the heroes. Z is the business problem they are trying to overcome. “Too many organizations make the technology the hero,” he says, and the consequence is a narrative in which the workforce appears only as a cost line. Language compounds the damage. Fill a strategy with “AI-enabled transformation” and “intelligent operational excellence” and nobody can picture anything at all. McMahon wants the opposite: tell me what a nurse, an engineer, a salesperson, or a customer will be able to do tomorrow that they couldn’t do yesterday. Then he offers boards a diagnostic they can run without a consultant. Can every executive explain the AI strategy to their team, in their own words, and connect it to the decisions they make every day? “If they can’t, the strategy isn’t ready.”
Reframing The Future Is The Capability That Matters
There is evidence that the market is catching up to him, and it comes from an unexpected direction. Salesforce’s research on chief information officers (CIOs) found 57 percent reported improving their storytelling and narrative-building skills to prepare for agentic AI. These are people whose careers were built on technology, now identifying narrative as the gap. McMahon reads it as a job description changing underneath an entire profession. The CIO is increasingly asked to shape how the business works rather than supply the technology that supports it, which means convincing colleagues to make difficult choices, abandon established habits, and trust systems they may not fully understand. Technical expertise does not solve those problems. He has watched brilliant executives stall because they could explain the logic but could not connect it to what people care about. His distinction: reason leads to judgment, emotion leads to action, and leaders need both.
Pressed to name the single capability that boards and C-suites must build, McMahon chooses the ability to reframe how people see the future. Competing stories about AI are already circulating inside every company. Next industrial revolution. Coming for our jobs. Going to make us superhuman. A bubble waiting to burst. Those stories govern what people believe, fear, and are willing to do, and they are operating whether leadership engages with them or not. So the work starts with listening. McMahon teaches a tool he calls the T-Leaf, which asks what you want people to feel, know, and do alongside what they currently feel, know, and might be prepared to do. The gap between the two columns is the real job. His practical instruction to boards is to run three questions before announcing the next AI initiative: “What do our people believe is happening?” “What future do we want them to see?” and “What decisions will that new understanding help them make?” If the answers are not clear, keep working. AI will analyze information, model scenarios, and generate possibilities. Choosing which future is worth pursuing, and bringing people along to build it, stays human.
Follow Gavin McMahon on LinkedIn for more insights on leadership storytelling, executive communication, and Story Business.
