Welcome to the paradox.

In one corner, words have never been cheaper. ChatGPT may not be able to fold your laundry or trim your tree, but it churns out word count like a champ. Words are an easy AI result to obtain here in the early days, so brace yourself. Anything word-based, from diet plans to daily devotionals, is fair game. We’ve seen the forecast, and we’re about to get drenched.

Hilariously, our professional selves are seeding those same storms. Find me a Fortune 500 company that hasn’t rammed “AI-Driven Efficiencies” into its annual plan with the subtlety of a space shuttle at a garden party. Flooding a market is how currency gets devalued. If you’ve scrolled through hundreds of AI-generated taglines that all miss the mark, you know this. Words made cheaply are cheap. 

And yet: words have also never been more precious. 

What a weird patch of road we just drove, eh? First was the surge in storytelling doctrine: Simon Sinek, Amy Acker, “twenty-two times more memorable”, and so on. Then we took a hairpin turn into the attention economy. Goldfish have a 9-second attention span. Always move the camera. Vine. TikTok. Echo chambers. Dopamine treadmills. Scroll, scroll, scroll. 

So here we sit, starving for narrative but too impatient for it, and with rising mounds of AI content targeting what attention we have. We’re all communicators – but what’s a communicator to do?

August Hale was founded on the belief in a silver bullet: your message. 

You can assemble an incantation that disarms your audience right away and keeps them alert for the full ride. You can signal to them that you care about them, that you designed this just for them, that you’re taking them on a carefully-plotted journey that will matter to them.

And they’ll feel it down to their bones because investing in one another is what humans do. 

It’s not easy work. You design the iceberg before you show the tip. But at August Hale, this is the work we do. See how far you’ve made it down this page? We ran a reverse Susan B. Anthony and two Billy Martins. No, we didn’t, but we relied on principles of narratology and speechwriting to bring you this far. We are your narrative partner, a role we know is as odd to the ear as “consulting detective”, so let’s answer a few of your questions:

• So are you, like, an editor? Think of August Hale as your life coach for story skills. We start at the slab and build out, rather than going roof-first.
• Whose principles? Yorke, Egri, Tufte, McKee, Chatman, Cialdini, Olson, Jung, Aristotle – people who have codified the innate narrative skills of the modern human. Much of our work focuses on Jason Bourne-esque remembering of what you already know.
• What does that look like, if it’s not editing? It looks like building a solid conceptual plan before worrying about words. We operate from principles of narratology, a rich field of thought that guides premise, voice, language, audience, timing, and other controls that aren’t just, you know, editing. (Though we do bring the fire brigade for that, too.)
• Sounds deep. But tell it to me in a way that my procurement office would understand. Sure thing: front-end design, skills coaching, workshops, review/diagnosis, rescue service, and bespoke consultation, of course. Come to August Hale if you have the report or presentation of your life coming up – or if you want your people to be ready for theirs.
• Who do you work with, exactly? Individuals, teams, organizations: our work has put us in touch with everyone from day-one employees to executive suite officers. Multiple CEOs and myriad individual contributors. Scale and stature are no matter when you’re dealing with the universal.

Your audience will always be able to tell when you used AI: a script overcranked on best practices, an announcement too anodyne, a presentation too pat and prim. They’ll see a human communicating like a computer. 

If you’ve been intentional about your message, though, they’ll get that buzz. You know it: the warm feeling when you sense how much someone has devoted and invested in you, before you even turned up to see what they had to say. 

This is deeply human work, and it requires humans like you and me. August Hale is your partner to make this magic happen. Continue the conversation here and kick things off with the one thing that always has: your message.