The debate around human communication in the age of AI was supposed to be simple. AI writes content. Companies save money. Writers find something else to do.

That’s not what happened.

Netflix posted a director of communications role paying up to $775,000. Anthropic grew its comms team from a handful of people to 80 in a single year. OpenAI has communications jobs listed at more than $400,000. The average director of communications in the US makes $106,000, according to Indeed. The gap between that number and what these companies are offering says everything about where things are headed.

The irony isn’t lost on anyone paying attention. The same technology that was supposed to make writers obsolete has instead made the internet nearly unreadable. LinkedIn is full of posts that follow the same cadence, the same structure, the same hollow enthusiasm. Sam Altman admitted last year that online discourse has started to carry an AI accent, a kind of synthetic familiarity that people can sense even if they can’t name it.

Gab Ferree, founder of Off the Record and former VP of global communications at Bumble, puts it plainly. You would think that all this AI-generated content would mean fewer jobs for communicators. But that’s not what’s happening. “There’s just so much garbage out there that people want to pay a premium for someone who can claim that they can cut through the noise.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that job postings on LinkedIn mentioning “storyteller” doubled between 2024 and 2025. Not copywriter. Not content creator. Storyteller. The word itself is doing a lot of work right now.

For most of the tech boom, the high-value person in the room was a software developer. Universities rushed to fill the gap. Coding bootcamps promised six-figure salaries in six months. Young people were told, repeatedly, that learning to code was the most practical thing they could do with their lives.

That bet is looking shakier now. The number of open job posts for software engineers dropped by more than 60,000 between 2023 and late 2025, according to CompTIA. Computer science graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1% as of 2023, while communications majors sat at 4.5%, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Vibe coding is quietly cutting the need for entry-level developers, and companies are leaning on AI to handle work that used to require entire engineering teams.

Meanwhile, the people who studied writing, journalism, rhetoric — the ones who were told their degrees were impractical — are becoming what Jenna Birch, founder of communications consultancy SISU, calls “the high-value person in tech now.” The best defense against automation, some argue, is a liberal arts degree. Nobody quite predicted that sentence would ever be written seriously.

The communications job of five years ago looked nothing like it does today. Writers drafted press releases, managed media relationships, and handled damage control when things went wrong. That was the scope of it.

But the role has quietly expanded into something far more demanding. Today, comms professionals must understand how large language models work, craft narratives that position a company against its competitors, and write in a CEO’s voice across LinkedIn and Substack. Because of this shift, the number of chief communications officer roles at Fortune 1000 companies that now fold in additional responsibilities like marketing and human resources grew from 90 in 2019 to 169 in 2024, according to the Observatory on Corporate Reputation. Meanwhile, the median pay for a CCO at a Fortune 500 company jumped to between $400,000 and $450,000, a $50,000 increase from just two years ago.

Sasha de Marigny, Anthropic’s first CCO, described her team as “BS detectors.” She argued that critical thinking remains a huge comparative advantage for humans. Moreover, she isn’t just looking for people who can write well. She wants strategists who understand the landscape and know how to reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time.

That’s a fundamentally different job. And companies are paying for it accordingly.

None of this means AI isn’t getting better. It is. Large language models will likely keep improving, and some will eventually write with more voice and more nuance than they do today. But even so, there’s a meaningful difference between generating content and thinking through it. A 2025 Columbia Business School study found that LLMs carry a bias toward “Option A,” consistently favoring the first choice when given a list. That’s not strategy. That’s pattern matching.

Steve Clayton, CCO of Cisco, admitted that when he first tried ChatGPT, he thought his career was finished. Instead, he became an AI optimist. He now sees generative AI as a tool that gives communicators more room to do the work that actually matters. Because the real challenge, as he puts it, isn’t producing content. It’s creating something worthy of people’s time and attention in an environment where nobody is asking for more emails, more websites, or more podcasts.

Furthermore, brands that invest in building their own editorial voice are, according to Noah Greenberg, CEO of content distribution company Stacker, among the last places AI will replace writers. Because those brands aren’t chasing clicks. They’re building authority, one well-told story at a time.

Cristin Culver, founder of Common Thread Communications, summed it up simply. “If everyone’s a writer, then nobody’s a writer.” The conversation around human communication in the age of AI was never really about survival. It was always about value. And right now, that value has never been clearer — or better compensated.