Several years ago, we attended a storytelling workshop for business leaders at a chemical engineering firm in Pennsylvania. One participant — let’s call her Jane — told a story about the day her mother passed away. Even all these years later, we can still recall the subtle details: how she described the smell of breakfast cooking at her father’s house, the hand gesture she used to answer the telephone when the hospital called, how she slowed her speech and her movements as she demonstrated walking down the hall to her mother’s hospital room …

Even more significant than those sensory details was the connection Jane made with the audience: We were transfixed, enthralled, frozen in the emotional grip of Jane’s potent story. All of us sat silent and motionless, ready to find out what happened next. In fact, none of us were looking at our phones! The room felt a certain way, too — the air hung heavy with a somber energy. By using storytelling, Jane impacted how we felt as well as the energy in the room.

We also learned more about Jane — a seasoned firecracker engineer. Brilliant, tough, even a touch stoic. But in this story, we saw Jane, the human being whose mother had just died.

Now, Jane’s story had a relevant business message about how important it is for us to show up for each other in hard moments. But what made that message resonate and stick with us was that it was embedded in a powerful, evocative, authentic, human story.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t do that. AI can’t transfix a human audience, rendering them silent, awestruck and focused. AI can’t shift the energy in a room from conviviality to solemnity. AI can’t reveal a leader’s human side.

Leadership is about humans. Artificial intelligence is about data. True, leaders need data, too, but our job as leaders is to do something with the data so that it resonates with our audience, so that we make a connection with them. And this is where storytelling comes in — good ol’ fashioned human-generated storytelling.

Why Do We Need Human Connection in the Digital Age?

Especially for those of us who lived in the previous century, life in the digital age is fast, automated and convenient. Could you have imagined — as you dialed the rotary phone to call your best friend’s house — that one day you could just tell the phone to call someone? Or that the device that plays music in the house could also write your grocery list? Or order your groceries? Order groceries … for delivery?!

So much of life is automatic now. We don’t need to search for a new book to read; Amazon suggests books we might like. We don’t even need to remember to turn off the lights in our bedroom or change the thermostat when we leave the house. Any number of “smart” home assistants can do it for us.

With the advent of all this digital convenience, there’s now a premium on human connection. We need each other now more than ever (the pandemic taught us that). If the bookseller is a bot, or we swipe our own groceries at self-checkout (if we even bother going to the store), then we are missing those day-to-day moments of human connection.

Similarly, if our workday consists mainly of logging in and logging out of virtual meetings where no one is on camera and all our conversations are on chat or WhatsApp, then we are missing those seemingly mundane — but actually vital — moments of human connection.

This is why leaders need to make authentic human connections. Stories help us do that.

AI Has Its Place — But So Do Our Emotions

Humans will never be able to analyze data and generate reports as quickly — or as accurately — as AI. But AI will never grasp the nuance and complexity of human language, or master imagination or creativity. And it certainly won’t be able to tap into our feelings and create a mood and sense of connection like Jane did.

These are the necessary ingredients of a good story.

In a world drowning in data and algorithms, we need our emotions to help show us the way. Our feelings help us organize information and make decisions. Stories are a vehicle for our emotions. They can help us contain and transmit an experience or life event.

As leaders struggle to connect in a digital, hybrid world, we must leverage the emotional worlds of our people, and storytelling is an age-old avenue well worth traversing time and again to achieve this end.

Teams and leaders with higher emotional intelligence (EQ) tend to function better and deliver higher-quality results. Our ability to connect with our own feelings and the feelings of others enable us and our teams to perform better. The reason why this works is because humans are emotional creatures. It’s what makes us maddening and destructive, but also what makes us altruistic, innovative and aspirational.

Human Connections Transcend the Impact of AI in the Realm of Storytelling

Despite the speed of AI and the sheer volume of data it can parse and analyze, the power of authentic human connection will always trump AI, especially when it comes to storytelling. Storytelling is in our DNA. AI hasn’t had the benefit of millennia spent sitting around the proverbial campfire, spinning yarns.

Here’s what human-generated storytelling offers us:

• • The power of face-to-face interactions (or at least camera-on virtual interactions) to build trust and safety.
  • Genuine emotions that bolster connection, reflection and commitment.
  • Shared experiences that human storytellers create through their craft.

Sitting in that training room in Pennsylvania drove home this last point about shared experience. Collectively, we experienced Jane’s story together while each of us were simultaneously having our own unique experience of her story — and, possibly, reflecting on our own.

We still need human storytellers. We will always need human storytellers. AI may automate a lot of jobs, but it will never put human storytellers out of business. We’re too good at what we do. And the world needs us.