Over the past few months, some of the biggest companies in tech have been paying striking sums for senior communications, storytelling and narrative roles.
The interesting part is not the salaries themselves. It is what they reveal.
When companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Adobe and Netflix are willing to pay heavily for people who can explain complexity, shape understanding and build trust, they are telling you something important: in an AI world, narrative is not a layer on top of the business. It is part of the business.
Read as a salary story, this is noise. Read as a signal, it tells you where commercial value is moving.
That shift makes sense. AI has made content radically easier to produce. It has not made clarity easier. It has not made judgement easier. It has not made trust easier. If anything, it has done the opposite.
We now have more words, more images, more opinion, more commentary and more sameness than ever. When everyone can publish at speed, being visible is no longer enough. The scarce thing is being believable.
When everyone can publish at speed, being visible is no longer enough. The scarce thing is being believable.
That is why communications and PR are being revalued.
Not old-school PR as press release machinery. Not empty thought leadership. Not volume for the sake of volume.
The work that matters is more fundamental than that: positioning a company so people understand what it is, why it matters, what it is not, and why it can be trusted when the stakes are higher. Investors look for it. Partners feel it. Talent responds to it. Journalists test it. Customers pick up on it faster than most companies realise.
The companies paying up for these roles seem to understand something others are still catching up to: if your market is trying to make sense of a fast-moving category, the company that explains itself best often ends up being perceived as the company leading it.
Not always. But more often than founders like to admit.
There is another shift underneath this. Search is changing. More people are now asking AI systems for answers directly, and those systems often pull from cited, third-party sources. That has obvious implications for visibility. If your company is not being written about, referenced, contextualised and quoted in places the models can find and trust, you are increasingly absent from the layer where perception is now being shaped.
In that environment, earned media matters differently. Not just as validation, but as source material.
For years, many companies treated PR as an output function: announce the thing, chase the coverage, post the link, move on. That was always too narrow, but it is especially narrow now. Communications is closer to market infrastructure than many companies realise. It shapes how a company is understood by the people who matter before they ever take a meeting, click a deck or visit a website.
In practical terms, it affects fundraising, hiring, partnerships, expansion, resilience under scrutiny and the general quality of the conversations that come back to you.
You can see serious institutions arriving at the same conclusion. Andreessen Horowitz did not create a New Media team because storytelling suddenly became decorative. They did it because distribution, trust, talent attraction and narrative control now have direct strategic value. That is not the language of vanity. It is the language of capability.
Three surfaces, same underlying pressure.
Tech companies are hiring senior storytellers because AI has made content cheap and credibility scarce. Venture firms are building media capability because their portfolio companies need narrative strength to compete. Answer engines are giving renewed weight to earned coverage because editorial judgement is one of the few remaining trust signals that still holds up.
The common thread is simple: when anyone can produce unlimited content, what cannot be automated is judgement. What is true. What matters. What is interesting. What should be emphasised. What should be left alone. And how to say it in a way that lands.
That is the thing becoming expensive.
That is the thing the smartest companies are now taking more seriously.
And yes, there is a lighter side to all of this. When a struggling company can mention AI and briefly change the conversation around itself, you are reminded that narrative impact is real even when the underlying story is thin. The recent Allbirds moment was a funny example of that. But it underlines the more serious point: markets, media and audiences do not respond only to fundamentals. They also respond to the story wrapped around the fundamentals, fairly or unfairly.
The job is not to manufacture fiction. It is to make sure reality is understood before something weaker, louder or more opportunistic fills the gap.
I have spent my career around moments where the story mattered more than companies expected: growth phases, launches, acquisitions, leadership shifts, scrutiny, crises and founder profile-building. Across tech, venture, public-company environments and before that across cultural institutions and high-profile organisations, the pattern has been consistent.
Reputation is built before it is needed.
The founders and firms that get the best outcomes rarely start working on narrative when the round opens or the pressure arrives. They have usually been compounding credibility for months or years in advance. When the moment comes, they are not introducing themselves.
Most reputation work fails because it is executed tactically, without a strategic frame underneath. A press release here. A panel there. A reactive comment when something happens.
The better question is not just what do we say.
It is: what do we need people to understand and believe about this company, and why?
Everything else follows from that.
And the best work is often almost invisible. The placements that matter do not look like "PR". They look like a smart piece of journalism, a well-judged introduction, a founder who is understood properly, a consistent point of view surfacing in the right rooms and in front of the right people. Done well, reputation work does not announce itself. It simply shows up in the outcomes.
That is the premise behind Everyone Knows.
Not that companies need more content. Most need less. They need sharper judgement. Better timing. Stronger positioning. Clearer narrative guardrails. More deliberate earned media. And a better understanding of how reputation works now: across stakeholder rooms, media ecosystems, investor perception, search, social distribution and increasingly, answer engines.
AI changes a lot. It compresses timelines. It expands reach. It raises the baseline for output and lowers the cost of generic material.
What it does not change is this:
People still back the companies they understand and trust.
And trust still travels through narrative.