There’s a new AI in town: Affinity Intelligence
Do you have it?
Before I was “the Innovation Storyteller,” I was a field epidemiologist in Thailand in the 1990s, working in communities being devastated by AIDS. I learned something there that has never left me: you cannot save people with facts alone. I could recite transmission rates and mortality data all day, and it changed almost nothing. What changed behavior — what actually saved lives were stories. Specific people. Specific choices. Specific consequences someone could picture happening to them.
I think about that constantly now, watching IT executives try to roll out AI across their organizations using the same tool: facts, alone.
Beyond the Empathy Gap
I’ve written a lot about the “Empathy Gap” in AI and how to create a purpose around an initiative while taking into account the emotional needs, fears, and drives of your teams and executives. That empathy has to be a long running theme that aligns with you values.
Affinity is the next level – getting your audience to have a liking or inclination toward something new.
That’s where GREAT storytelling turns listeners into do-ers.
Your Rollout Deck Isn’t the Problem. Your Rollout Story Is.
I talk to a lot of CIOs, CTOs, and heads of digital transformation, and almost all of them can give me a flawless technical explanation of their AI deployment. Fewer of them can tell me the story of the person in their organization who was afraid of it — and what happened to that fear.
That’s the affinity gap. And it’s where most AI initiatives quietly lose their momentum.
Here’s the pattern I see over and over: leadership announces an AI capability. IT does a genuinely good job explaining what it does and why it’s safe. And still, adoption crawls. Teams nod in meetings and then go back to their old workflow. Not because they don’t believe the tool works — because nobody addressed what the tool means to them.
Disconnection isn’t usually about distrust of the technology. It’s about an unspoken, unresolved question sitting in the room: what does this mean for me? If you don’t answer that question with a story, your audience will answer it themselves — usually with the worst-case version.
Why “We Explained It Clearly” Isn’t Enough
IT leaders are trained to reduce ambiguity. That instinct is exactly right for architecture decisions and exactly wrong for change management. Clarity about function does not create connection to purpose. You can perfectly explain how a system works and still leave a room full of people feeling more anxious than when they walked in, because clarity about the mechanism isn’t the same as meaning about the impact.
Affinity-driven storytelling does something a spec sheet can’t: it puts a human being inside the explanation. Not a persona. Not a use case. An actual moment — the exhausted nurse, the overwhelmed claims adjuster, the analyst drowning in a spreadsheet at 9pm — and what changed for them specifically. When people can see themselves, or someone like them, inside your story, the abstraction disappears. So does a good chunk of the fear.
Three Ways IT Leaders Can Close the Gap
Name the disconnection before someone else does. In every AI rollout I’ve seen succeed, leadership said the quiet part out loud: “I know this raises questions about your role. Let’s talk about that directly.” Silence around fear doesn’t reassure people — it confirms their suspicion that something’s being hidden.
Tell one story, not ten data points. A single, specific, well-told story about one person’s changed Tuesday will outlast every statistic in your deck. People don’t repeat charts to each other at dinner. They repeat stories.
Make the story theirs, not yours. The IT leaders who get real buy-in don’t just tell a story about the technology — they invite their teams to become the next storytellers. Ask people to describe their own “before and after.” The moment your organization starts telling the story back to you, in their own words, you know the disconnection has closed.
The Real Opportunity for IT Executives
AI doesn’t fail in organizations because it isn’t powerful enough. It fails because the humans meant to use it never got a story good enough to trust it, remember it, and pass it on.
That’s not a marketing function. That’s not something you can quietly delegate to comms. As the person closest to what the technology actually does, you are the only one who can tell that story with real credibility. The leaders who understand this — who treat storytelling as core infrastructure, not a soft add-on — are the ones whose AI initiatives don’t just launch. They last.
The technology will keep evolving on its own. Closing the affinity gap won’t. That part is still, stubbornly, human work. And right now, it’s yours to do.