Peter sits down with Patrice Poltzer, co-founder of My Story Pro AI and former Gracie-winner TODAY Show producer, to talk about why human storytelling is becoming the scarcest skill in an AI-saturated market — and why most marketers are still getting it wrong.
About Patrice Poltzer
Patrice Poltzer spent seven years as a producer on NBC’s TODAY Show, where she had a front-row seat to the power — and devastation — of how a story, well told or badly told, could change the trajectory of a brand overnight. In 2016, she left to build her own storytelling agency in New York, working with brands like Netflix, Amazon, and Lululemon.
In 2024, she co-founded My Story Pro AI with her online business partner Wiebke — a human-centered AI storytelling coaching platform that hit five-figure MRR within 30 days of launch with zero ad spend. She now runs the business from Lisbon, where she moved with her husband and three sons after leaving Brooklyn.
She describes storytelling as “the hill I die on” — and after listening to this conversation, you’ll understand why.
Connect with Patrice through her website or LinkedIn.
About Peter Benei
Peter Benei is co-founder of AI-Ready CMO the daily intelligence platform for senior marketing leaders navigating the AI era. He spent a decade as a marketing director at tech and product companies before co-founding AI-Ready CMO with Torsten Sandor.
Connect with Peter via his newsletter or his LinkedIn.
Top 10 Takeaways
No one cares about your product. They care about the story that connects your world to theirs.
Storytelling isn’t a soft skill anymore. It’s the competitive edge that code can’t replicate.
The line between human and AI isn’t taste — it’s lived experience. AI can structure a hero’s journey. It can’t tell you how it felt to be fired with a newborn while your husband just quit his corporate job.
Most people are afraid to go deep into themselves. That fear is why AI output stays shallow, regardless of how good the prompt is.
AI wants to make you happy immediately. A good storytelling coach knows you have to earn the depth.
Facts and data are now table stakes. Anyone can access enterprise-grade research in minutes. The scarce asset is emotional connection.
The brands that win in the next 3 years won’t be the ones with the best AI workflows. They’ll be the ones whose people actually show up as humans.
Storytelling compounds inside organizations. One leader who starts being vulnerable in team meetings can transform an entire unit’s culture.
The Stanford graduate with 105 interviews and zero offers isn’t losing because she lacks AI skills. She’s losing because she hasn’t learned to make someone feel something.
Your story is not copyable. The structure can be lifted. The feeling can’t.
Why no one cares about your product
There’s a version of marketing that’s been standard practice for decades. You lead with features. You cite your stats. You build a pricing page and a comparison chart and you wait for the rational decision to happen.
Patrice Poltzer watched that approach work on the TODAY Show — briefly, in the early days — and then watched it collapse.
“Marketing has changed,” she said.
“The level of access to how someone thinks, what their viewpoint is, where they were born, how they grew up — that is now expected. People buy differently now.”
Patrice Poltzer
The problem isn’t that founders don’t believe in their products. It’s that they treat the product and the humans behind it as separate entities. There’s the company, and then there’s the person who built it — and the assumption has been that keeping those two things apart was professional.
That assumption is wrong. And in a world of product abundance, it’s also commercially fatal.
The distinction Patrice draws is precise: storytelling isn’t about you. It’s about finding the intersection between your lived experience and the thing keeping your customer awake at 3am. When those two things meet, something neurological happens. She calls it neurocoupling. The listener’s brain synchronizes with the storyteller’s. That doesn’t happen when you list your features. It only happens when you make someone feel recognized.
Peter made the same point from the CMO side. For a decade across product-led tech companies, the instinct was always to lead with the roadmap, the integration, the metrics. The breakthrough was realizing that none of that is what closes. What closes is the moment a customer thinks: that’s me.
The problem with AI-generated stories
My Story Pro exists because of a moment of recognition.
Patrice’s students started submitting AI-generated stories. She could tell immediately. Not because the grammar was wrong or the structure was off — but because nothing in them was real.
“The problem is that most people are afraid to go deep on themselves,” she said. “And so when you have a lot of people not wanting to go deep, even if you have the best prompt loaded into Claude from the most amazing marketer, it is never going to go as deep as it should.”
The reason is structural. General AI tools are designed to give you output. They want to make you happy immediately. That’s the product. A good human interview — the kind Patrice ran under deadline pressure at the TODAY Show — works the opposite way. You earn the depth. You go through questions one through eight to psychologically disarm a person before you ask the question that actually matters.
“I knew I couldn’t start at question nine. I had to go through the psychological dance of answering questions one through eight to make them feel safe. In order to then go deep with me. In order to actually reveal to me who they are, what they think, what they believe.”
Patrice Poltzer
Most AI tools skip straight to nine. And the output looks fine. But it sounds like everyone else.
This is the strategic gap My Story Pro is built to close. The platform functions less like a content generator and more like a trained interviewer — one that refuses to let you stay on the surface, because the surface is where all the slop lives.
Where the human line actually is
Six months ago, Peter would have drawn the line at taste — the human judgment required to evaluate AI output and decide what’s good enough to ship.
His answer has changed.
“AI has reached a level where it’s above mediocre now on a one-shot prompt, for most cases,” he said. “You’ve literally out-competed half of the freelancer market with whatever AI tool you’re using.”
Peter Benei
If taste was ever the moat, it’s getting shallow. The new line is higher up.
“The line right now is for a human to figure out the big picture for the brand. Figure out the story. What is your brand? What is the very high-level strategy? What’s the story you’re trying to tell? Once you figure that out, it’s easier to create the executional level of those stories.”
Core narrative is a human job. Execution is increasingly not.
Patrice pushed it further. The reason her product keeps growing — even as Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok all get better every month — is that she and her co-founder hold a fundamentally different view of what AI is for.
“AI is not going anywhere, so we love AI. But if you don’t change the behavior of how people interact with AI, you are going to create a society that I really believe we don’t want.”
Patrice Poltzer
The problem isn’t the tools. It’s that the tools are being asked to replace the part of you that no tool can access: what actually happened to you, and how it felt.
The case for storytelling as a hard skill
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently: companies are desperate for storytellers. Netflix listed a Chief Storyteller role at $700,000.
This would have been unimaginable when Patrice first left the TODAY Show in 2017. “Storytelling was seen as a soft skill,” she said. “People would say, ‘Oh, storytelling — we do content marketing.’”
That framing is gone. Storytelling is now listed alongside engineering and data science as a capability gap at the enterprise level. And the reason is straightforward: everything else can be automated. The emotional vehicle — the thing that actually changes someone’s decision — cannot.
The story Patrice tells to illustrate this is about a digital media CEO in Chicago. Multi-million dollar operation. Small team. On every measurable metric, his company outperformed the competition. He walked into a meeting with a major bank and spent the first six minutes explaining who he was. No one knew his name. One person thought he was from his competitor.
He realized he was going to lose.
Not because his product was worse. Because his competitors had a face, and he didn’t. He wasn’t getting invited to the private dinners. Not being asked to speak at Cannes or South by Southwest. He was being professionally invisible while his numbers were excellent.
He started showing up differently. Sharing why the work mattered to him. What he’d been through. Patrice ran into him a year and a half later at Cannes, where he was now speaking. His team would walk through fire for him.
“That’s what we need more of,” she said. “Not a performative way. A real way.”
What this means for your team
The implication most leaders miss: this isn’t just a personal brand conversation. It’s an organizational one.
Patrice worked with a product manager at Apple — 13 years in, starting to feel the ground shift. She wanted to know whether to learn more AI, more tech. The answer was neither. She started opening her team meetings differently. Just briefly — here’s a little about my past, here’s why the way we do things matters to me.
The result was a promotion, recognition in the company's internal newsletter, and a team that completely transformed the way they worked. Her unit became cited internally as an example of what was possible.
“Who is making your brand narrative? It’s people,” Patrice said. “And you want motivated, interesting people in that mix. People who are comfortable being more human in a real way.”
The companies that win the next cycle won’t be the ones with the cleanest AI workflows. They’ll be the ones who figured out that their people are the content strategy — and gave them the language and permission to show up that way.
That’s a harder build than a prompt library. It requires actually knowing your own story.
My Story Pro is built on the idea that most people don’t — yet.
