How AI Turns Everyday Brand Story Drift Into Narrative Entropy at Scale
It’s 6:10 a.m.
If you’re like me, your coffee is still too hot to drink, and there’s a brown smear of peanut butter toast on your iPad while you thumb through LinkedIn.
Then you see it. A post published under your company’s name overnight.
Your team drafted it with AI. It’s tidy. The hook is sharp, the bullets are crisp, and the call to action lands right on cue.
You read it once. Then you read it again, slower, hunting for one sentence that sounds like you.
Crap. You don’t find one.
You wipe the smudge off the screen. The post still reads like a stranger quoting you.
That’s narrative entropy introducing itself. It arrives quietly, as a well-formatted post that could have come from any of your three closest competitors.
What Is Narrative Entropy, and How Is It Smearing Your Brand Story?
Narrative entropy is the natural drift of any brand story left ungoverned.
Every new hire interprets it. Every agency bends it to fit a template. Every AI prompt averages it toward the middle of your category.
Each pull is small enough to ignore. Together they move the whole story a few degrees a week, until the company you describe in a pitch and the company your content describes are two different businesses.
AI is the accelerant. Feed AI a fragmented story, and you get fragmentation at scale: on time, beautifully formatted, and compounding every week.
StoryOps™ is the discipline that governs it across every person, channel, and AI tool. The mechanism StoryOps™ installs is the Brand Brain – the single source of truth your people and your AI tools draw from in every channel, so what gets said in your name stays yours when you’re out of the room.
You can feel it when that source is missing. In the slide that softens your positioning. In the LinkedIn post at 6:10 a.m.
The five questions below are a narrative entropy diagnostic. They measure how far the drift has gone. Answer them out loud. Write the numbers down.
1. When did your team last describe your brand and you thought: that’s not quite right?
Maybe it was a new account lead on a prospect call, or the “About Us” page someone updated without asking. The words were close. They just belonged to a slightly different company.
You let it slide because everyone was busy.
Small drift, tolerated, becomes the new baseline. Next quarter’s version starts from there.
A brand always drifts toward whoever last touched it without a map.
This just happened to me. We launched StoryCycle Genie® in July 2025, and I saw it through the lens of my 40 years of toiling in brand story development. Define it. Refine it. Get every soul behind it.
That’s an accurate story. My co-creator, Sean Schroeder, saw a bigger one.
He retold our story from his point of view around story governance, and that led to our discipline of StoryOps™. It’s a new and far more powerful story.
Sometimes “not quite right” means bigger than you.
I write the weekly Brand StoryOps™ for Agencies newsletter partly to keep that bigger story clear in my own head.
What’s hiding underneath: the conviction that the story is perfectly clear, because it’s perfectly clear to you. It lives in your head in high definition. The team member who joined six months ago has never once heard you tell it in a room.
2. If your AI produced content today completely unsupervised, would it sound unmistakably like you or like a confident approximation of your category?
Try this. Strip the logo off your last ten AI-assisted posts and line them up next to your competitors’. Could a stranger pick yours out?
AI writes fluent, professional, on-topic copy. It does the same for every brand feeding it the same generic prompt. I call it blandscaping. It erases your differentiation one well-formatted post at a time, at whatever cadence you set.
Sports Illustrated found out what that costs. In November 2023, Futurism reported the magazine was running articles under writers who didn’t exist, including a “Drew Ortiz” whose headshot came from a site that sells AI-generated faces.
Within weeks, the publisher fired its CEO and three other executives. The publisher denied the articles were AI-written and blamed an outside vendor. A brand built on seven decades of bylines took the hit either way.
Somewhere tonight, your AI and your competitor’s AI are drafting the same post. The only race left is who hits publish first.
What’s hiding underneath: the comfortable assumption that copy that’s grammatical and on time is also on-story. Fluency is table stakes. The market measures you on whether you sound like the only brand that could have said it.
3. Who on your team is the last custodian of your brand story, and what happens to it when they leave?
For most Story-Driven leaders, the honest answer to the first half is a little embarrassing. It’s you.
The story lives in your memory, so you spend hours every week re-explaining it. The pre-call Slack correction. The email you rewrote at 10 p.m.
So run a load test. On LinkedIn this week, Mike Hayes dared his followers to write their brand story in two sentences. So I did:
“I work with story-driven leaders who know they have a story. They can feel it, but they just can’t find it. Until now.”
Yes, I count three. But that’s for effect – the storyteller’s prerogative.
Write yours. Then ask three people on your team to write theirs. Put the versions side by side.
Three people, three companies.
An installed story holds its shape across a team of two or two hundred, with or without you in the building. A remembered story walks out the door with whoever remembers it best.
Your entire brand story is one retirement party away from amnesia.
I’ve watched it happen. Dr. Avein Saaty-Tafoya, then CEO of Adelante Healthcare, grew the organization by 600 percent with a remarkable brand story. When she left before COVID, much of that story knowledge walked out the door with her.
Here is what the publicly filed IRS Form 990 data shows:
Fiscal Year Revenue Growth Net Income (Following COVID Relief Funds for 2020 and 2021, which inflated revenue and net income)
- FY2022: +16.9% Revenue, +$3.2M Net Income
- FY2023: +8.0% Revenue, -$416,664 Net Loss
- FY2024: +1.2% Revenue, -$3.3M Net Loss
(Source: IRS Form 990 data via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer; FY2024 net loss from Adelante Healthcare, Inc. audited financial statements, August 13, 2025.)
When I recently ran Adelante’s current brand through the StoryCycle Genie® Brand Story Grader, it scored a D- on the 14-point brand story framework — which measures structural mechanics like ABT messaging, audience clarity, transformation story, and competitive differentiation. The narrative quality score — authenticity, story cohesion, and emotional resonance — came in at a D+.
What’s hiding underneath: the promise that you’ll get the story out of your head and into the system when things slow down, or someone leaves. Things never slow down and people leave. So you stay the bottleneck, one Slack thread at a time.
4. What is it costing you — in coherence, in competitive positioning, in culture — that your brand story isn’t governing your AI output right now?
Most leaders file narrative under soft costs. It never makes the budget conversation, so it never gets priced, and it never gets governed.
So PRICE it! Put a number on three things:
- The deal that felt close and went quiet.
- The hire who left within a year because the culture you sold didn’t match the one they found.
- The referral that never came.
Add them up. Divide by the months you’ve known about the drift.
That’s your monthly entropy tax, the revenue cost of a brand story nobody is governing. Narrative entropy has been billing your revenue line the whole time, just without an invoice.
I learned to look for that bill early. In 2003, Goodwill of Central Arizona hired us as its first ad agency to spur sales in its 24 stores. Today it’s Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, part of the largest Goodwill operation in the world.
They wanted a memorable TV campaign. Before we touched any creative, we shopped the stores. They were dirty, and their inventory trailed the mom-and-pop thrift shops down the street.
So we told leadership to clean up operations before running a single spot. As ad legend Bill Bernbach warned in 1965, “great advertising can make a bad product fail faster.”
They hired an ad agency for great campaigns. What they got first was a partner telling them to clean up their act. I think they were shocked. But they did it. They spent two months sprucing up every store before this first spot aired.
This 30-second story won a Rocky Mountain Emmy and lifted same-store sales by 42 percent the next month. Customers came into the stores talking about it.
Last week on my Business of Story podcast, former ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks VP Jason Stolarczyk called that move Shift Left, a term he borrowed from cybersecurity.
It inspired me to flip the old adage – One step back, two steps forward.
That’s the first step to story governance in a nutshell, spoken by a true nutcase. 😉
What’s hiding underneath: the habit of filing your story under creative expenses. Revenue, code, and talent all run on governance. Your story still runs on goodwill.
5. What’s the version of your brand story you’re most afraid will get lost?
Name it out loud.
- The reason your company came into the world.
- The line your first customer repeated back to you, unprompted, because it landed so precisely.
- The promise that made your first hire say yes when safer offers were on the table.
Those three things are your brand’s marrow. They’re also the first things to get quietly swapped for something smoother, more scalable, and slightly less true.
Air Canada’s website chatbot told a grieving customer, Jake Moffatt, that he could apply for a bereavement fare within 90 days of buying his ticket. That policy didn’t exist.
When the case reached a tribunal, Air Canada argued it couldn’t be held liable for information from its representatives, chatbot included. The tribunal noted this suggested the chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”
It ruled against the airline in February 2024. “It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website.”
A brand argued, on the record, that its own AI wasn’t speaking for it.
Every AI tool working in your name is telling your brand story right now, governed or not. The chatbot, the email sequence, the auto-reply, the generated FAQ.
The test is whether any of them still carry those three things you just named.
What’s hiding underneath: the worry that the thing you built will outlive what it stood for. Bigger, louder, more distributed, and harder to recognize as yours.
The Question Beneath All Five
Look back at your answers. Each one marks a place where your story is being told without you, through a smear you’ve stopped noticing.
StoryCycle Genie®, the tool built specifically to help brands govern their story and stop narrative entropy, exists for exactly this work.
If you’re not governing your brand story right now, who – or what – is?
Story on, my friend.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is narrative entropy in a brand story?
Narrative entropy is the gradual drift that happens when a brand story is left ungoverned. Every new hire interprets it, every AI prompt averages it toward the middle of the category, and every agency bends it to fit a template. Over time, the company you describe in a pitch and the company your content describes become two different businesses.
What is blandscaping, and how does it erode brand differentiation?
Blandscaping is AI-generated content that’s fluent, professional, and on-topic, yet indistinguishable from every competitor using the same generic prompt. AI produces the same copy for any brand that feeds it the same inputs, so AI use without a governing brand story erases differentiation at scale.
What is StoryOps™, and how does it prevent brand story drift?
StoryOps™ is the discipline that governs a brand story across every person, channel, and AI tool in an organization. Its central mechanism is the Brand Brain, the single source of truth your team and your AI tools draw from. With both in place, what gets said in your brand’s name stays consistent when the founder is out of the room.
What is StoryCycle Genie®, and how does it address narrative entropy?
StoryCycle Genie®, the tool built specifically to help brands govern their story and stop narrative entropy, addresses the risk these five diagnostic questions reveal: a brand story that lives in the founder’s head, gets reinterpreted by every new hire, averaged by every AI tool, and slowly drifts from what the brand was built to stand for.
What is the narrative entropy tax?
The narrative entropy tax is the monthly revenue cost of an ungoverned brand story. You calculate it by pricing the deals that went quiet, the hires who left because the culture didn’t match the promise, and the referrals that never arrived, then dividing by the months you’ve known about the drift. It’s a real number with no invoice attached.
What is a real-world example of brand story drift?
Burberry. By 2006, the brand had sold 23 licenses around the world, and each of the 23 licensees was doing something different. The famous check ended up on products as far afield as disposable nappies for dogs. CEO Angela Ahrendts said, “I felt like I spent my first few years here buying back the company.”
What happens to a brand story when its founder leaves?
Apple is the classic case. Co-founder Steve Jobs was forced out in 1985. By fiscal 1997, Apple lost $1 billion as revenue fell 28%. Back in charge that September, Jobs told employees, “The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect,” and asked, “Who is Apple? What is it that Apple stands for?”
What happens when a company replaces human customer service with AI?
Klarna found out. In February 2024, the company said its AI assistant could do the work of 700 customer service agents. By May 2025, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said cost had been “a too-predominant evaluation factor,” and “what you end up having is lower quality.” Klarna started hiring human agents again.
