Breaking Down the Walls Between Storytelling and Building

Last post, I wrote about what AI can’t do for your content strategy. This post is the antidote to that one — (human emdash!) — I want to talk about what your content strategy team or vendor should be using AI for, and why it matters that they do experiment with it.

What I’ll Cover

• Reflect on how old boundaries forced people to “choose a lane.”

• Show how AI collapses those boundaries and expands creative capacity.

• Highlight the value of hybrid skills at the intersection of writing, coding, and strategy.

• Offer examples of how AI can turn strategy into experiences, not just documents.

• Leave readers with a reflective challenge: what does your team expect from its content leaders?

The Inspiration

This piece began with inspiration from a post by my former Fortune boss, Daniel Roth (now Editor in Chief at LinkedIn), about how he—without being a professional developer—used AI to build and launch an app called Audio2.

His story reminded me of my own career arc: starting in web development and design, before moving into journalism (and now marketing and content strategy). Back then, straddling those worlds was an advantage, but also a tension. You had to choose: storyteller or builder. Even “data journalists” were often relegated to the far edge of the newsroom, treated by most organizations as service centers — neither true reporters nor real technologists.

I’ve always taken inspiration from Steve Jobs’ quote, “Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.” Man, I wonder what he’d have to say about this era, where finally, the walls between technology and creativity are not just crumbling, but collapsing.

Rediscovering the Builder’s Thrill

A few months ago, I revisited those old, rusty coding skills—but this time with AI at my side. I spun up a fully functional SaaS website and even deployed an iPhone app to TestFlight. Neither is destined for greatness, but that wasn’t the point.

The real thrill was connecting the dots quickly: idea → execution → live product. The process was messy, exhilarating, and deeply instructive. It proved that with AI, one person can now do what used to require teams—and do it faster. I could once again take an idea from drawing board to reality — and I was able to learn modern coding techniques by doing rather than flipping through O’Reilly books, like I did 20+ years ago. (Time flies.)

The New Rules of the Game

AI collapses the old business silos. Content strategists, once confined to drafting reports and polishing prose, now have the power to prototype experiences:

• An interactive dashboard or report instead of a slide deck PDF.

• A live calculator instead of a static explainer.

• A micro-app that demonstrates, not just describes, your product’s value.

• High quality AI-generated videos, voiceovers, courses, webinars, etc.

This is the shift: content is no longer just words. It’s a working environment where your audience can touch, test, and learn from your story.

Your content team is not going to replace your web developer, but in a well maintained dev environment, there’s absolutely no reason they can’t submit a PR and deploy to prod, either. (And I’m not talking about deploying apps that use PII or are hooked into proprietary data — for goodness’ sake, do a security audit before deploying those!)

Playing Both Sides of the Ball

Baseball offers a fitting metaphor. Shohei Ohtani is an elite two-way player, both pitcher and hitter—something MLB’s rules structure has discouraged for decades. AI is creating its own Ohtanis: professionals who can pitch and hit, write and build.

The most forward-thinking organizations are rewriting their own rules to encourage this. Shopify, for example, actively insists on building a team who can operate across lanes. That duality becomes a competitive moat: their employees are not just specialists, but hybrids who can move faster, think broader, and ship in ways others can’t.

What This Means for You

If your content strategist isn’t showing you prototypes, experiences, or tools they’ve built, you’re missing half the picture. The strategist who can write and build brings you:

• Speed: testing concepts in days, not quarters.

• Defensibility: experiences are harder to copy than white papers.

• Impact: audiences engage more deeply with interactive tools than static documents.

• Ownership: control over the narrative and the platform it lives on.

The Takeaway

Too many firms are still thinking of AI as a cheaper way to churn out copy. That’s the wrong game. The real advantage comes when your strategist uses AI to collapse the old boundaries between writing and building—between story and product.

The strategist who can do both doesn’t just publish content. They ship experiences. They create interactive tools that win attention, generate data, and build moats that competitors can’t easily cross.

When you hire for the old model, you get PDFs in your inbox.

When you hire for the new model, you get assets that live, breathe, and compound in value.

So the question isn’t whether AI will reshape your content strategy. It already has. The question is: will you have a strategist who can play both sides of the ball—or one still stuck on the bench?