What Story Is the Machine Telling About You?

Last week, The 10 Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives officially launched. It’s the product of 40 years of friendship and collaboration with Jeff Gomez — a framework for how businesses build and sustain the stories that hold them together.. I'm proud to have it out in the world.

A book captures a moment in time. The moment you ship it, the world keeps moving. That’s not a flaw — it’s the nature of the thing. And there’s at least one challenge I was already thinking about that didn’t make it into the book.

Most weeks I try to give you something practical: — a framework, a filter, a question to take into your next meeting. This week is different. I want to share a problem I can see clearly but haven't solved yet. If you're running a business or building a brand, you’re likely to encounter it soon — if you haven’t already.

If you've been anywhere near a marketing conversation lately, you've heard the acronyms. AEO. GEO. AIO. The pitch is the same everywhere: optimize your content so AI includes you in its answers. Get into the machine. Show up in ChatGPT, in Perplexity, in Google's AI overviews.

The entire industry is focused on getting in.

Nobody's asking what happens once you're there.

What version of your story is being told? Who wrote it? And does it reflect what you actually stand for?

In Optimization Without Story Is Just Noise, I argued that the order is Story → Signals → Surface.  Without substance, surfaces are just mechanics. That argument still holds. But it assumed the surfaces were visible – your website, your social feeds, your search results. Places where your story appears and where you can see whether it is landing the right way. 

Now there's a new category of surface you didn't create and may never see.

AI-generated answers about your company. Summaries of who you are, delivered to someone in the middle of a decision, assembled from whatever the model scraped. That's not a surface you optimized. That's a surface that happened to you.

And here's the part that should bother you: it's being delivered with the same confidence as the surfaces you spent years building. How much of that answer reflects your actual story? You don't know. And right now, you don't have a reliable way to find out.

In the book, we talk about narrative substrates— the low-level chatter in customer conversations that can spread mimetically and shape how people perceive you. Those substrates are organic. They come from real people reacting to real experiences. You can listen to them. You can respond.

This is something different.

Your story is being assembled by a system that has some access to your content but no real grasp of your foundational narrative. It may have scraped your website, indexed a few articles, picked up a customer review. It has pieces. What it doesn't have is the intent —  the hierarchy of what matters and the context that separates load-bearing elements from noise.

And it's delivering that partial version with complete confidence to someone who has no reason to question it.

These are surfaces you can't see, that may not reflect your corporate narrative, and you have no way to measure.

What does this mean if you're running a business?

If you're a founder, is your pitch being rewritten by a stranger who skimmed your About page? If you're a CMO, is your positioning being flattened into a category summary that strips out everything that makes you different? If you're a consultant or advisor, is your reputation being described by something that has never worked with you, never seen your results, and has no stake in getting it right?

The question everyone's chasing — "How do I show up in AI answers?" — skips the question that actually matters

When you show up, is the version of you one you’d recognize? Is it one you’d stand behind?

In the book, Jeff and I write about knowing your foundational narrative and refusing to stray  from it. About respecting it — holding it above personalities, trends, and the whims of marketers. About equipping stakeholders with the resources to tell your story accurately.

All of that assumes the storyteller has some connection to you. An employee. A partner. A customer. Even a critic. Someone who has at least encountered your actual story.

In The Room Has Moved, I asked whether your story could survive retelling by someone who doesn't work here. That was about people. This is the same question — applied to machines.

What happens when the storyteller is a model that has pieces of your content but was never handed your corporate narrative?

Berkson's Bits

The inspiration for many of my Berkson's Bits comes from looking through my old Linkedin posts. This one gave me a chuckle. I wrote this on Linkedin in March of 2011. I have literally NO idea what the context was.

"If your organizational skills are weak you may be driven to be innovative and analytical with your language."

Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

What I'm Listening To...

Wynton and Branford get the lion's share of attention for the Marsalis brothers but I'm also a big fan of their younger brother, Delfeayo Marsalis. Delfeayo plays trombone and always has a hot band. For your enjoyment, here's Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra with Dr. Hardgroove. 

The commandments still hold. But they face a new test:

Can your narrative survive retelling by something that knows you exist but lacks the context,clarity and intent to tell your story accurately?

I don't have a commandment for this yet. I'm not sure what the playbook looks like when part of your storyworld is being assembled without enough context and none of the original intent. But I know the question now — and in my experience, that's usually where the useful work starts.

If you're thinking about this too, I want to hear from you. Because this isn't one I'm going to figure out alone.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan