Not all stories are equal

Hello from a small Greek island. Last issue I argued that once there is a draft, the work moves to everyone who touches a customer story; how we've all become Citizen Editors.

This issue is about the decision that comes before any of that, the reality that not every story deserves the same love. Some will simply never be great, whatever you do to them. Others become far bigger than they first appear. The skill is telling which is which, and investing accordingly.

Let's start with the one that will never be great; we've all written it.

A company buys a server. The IT manager who signed off did not especially want to; they prefer another vendor. The product does what the category does: it runs faster, it draws less power, it has a smaller form factor. That is more or less the whole arc. No jeopardy, no reversal, nobody standing at a fork in the road. You can hand that story to the finest writer alive and they will hand you back a competent, accurate, instantly forgettable draft, because there was nothing to uncover.

Then there is the other kind. The story that looks routine on the intake form and turns out, once you actually talk to the customer, to be about a team that was failing and is not failing now; a buyer who staked their own credibility on the decision and was proved right; a change that mattered to real people in the real world. Storytelling gold, worth finding.

The difference between how those two are handled is the first editorial decision anyone makes; not a decision about story shape, rather a decision about investment.

01  Match the investment to the story

Investment, here, means human time. And human time is money, whether the human is in-house or at an agency; the cost is real either way. It's always baffled me how some orgs burn their best people's time (and agency time too) on stories that don't deserve it, or chasing 'perfection' at any cost. Every hour a skilled person spends shaping a story has a cost; invest it wisely.

We all want to create the very best work, yet no company has a pile of gold large enough to hand-craft every story it needs at full white-glove intensity. And nor should it. Pouring the same deep effort into the dull server purchase as into the career-defining transformation is not craftsmanship; it's madness.

Spend the hours where they change the outcome.

So there is a slider. At one end, the story hand-crafted through a full, high-touch human process. At the other, something close to raw, lightly-touched output. Every story sits somewhere on it, and where it sits is a judgement about potential: how much better can human investment actually make this story?

02  Why the obsession with who does the typing?

It strikes me that much of the AI debate around customer storytelling collapses into a single anxious question: did a human or a machine write it?

I think that's the wrong question. The right one is simpler: where does this story need a human, and where doesn't it?

AI cannot replace what a great journalist does. Finding the story worth telling, building trust with an advocate, running the interview that surfaces the moment nobody expected; that is irreplaceable, and it sits with the writers and producers who have always understood that the story begins long before the first draft.

And yet. I am fully confident in saying that no professional customer-story writer has started from a genuinely blank page in eighteen months. Nobody. The blank page is gone, quietly, across the whole profession. So the argument about whether AI is "allowed" to be involved is already over; it lost. AI is assisting in dozens of small ways in every story being produced right now, whether or not anyone admits it: the first structural pass, the reordering, the tightening, the alternative headline, the transcript wrangling.

That is what the slider actually measures. Not human or machine; the ratio of the two, chosen per story. A transformational narrative earns a large human investment, with AI in a supporting role. A transactional story that does not justify a big time spend lets AI take on far more of the load, with human judgement applied where it counts and nowhere it does not. The line moves with the story's potential. Fighting about who touched the keyboard misses the entire point.

03  The case study is not dead; it's not even feeling a little under the weather.

Repeated with no lack of confidence, yet zero evidence: 'the case study is dead'.

It's been declared dead for about twenty-five years. I have watched the obituary get rewritten across my whole career; the PDF is dead, long live the interactive story; the interactive story is dead, long live the video; and on it goes. And yet the customer challenge–solution–results shape endures, because it is shorthand for something buyers instantly understand and genuinely need: the reassurance that someone just like them did this, and it worked.

If anything, the need is growing.

A complex B2B purchase now runs through a whole committee, each member arriving with their own independently gathered research. And the bigger that group gets, the more cautious it becomes; every stakeholder needs to be able to justify a yes. When you're spending other people's money, a feeling is not enough. You need a weight of evidence. Not one story; a body of them.

Full disclosure: this is why I built Proofpoints, and it's the same reason this issue exists. Customer evidence endures; the only question is how much of you each piece of it deserves.

04  What comes next

This is the second issue of Proof Positive. We have established that everyone is now an editor, and that not every story asks the same investment of them.

Next issue: writing was never the bottleneck. If drafting is the easy part now, where does the time really go; and why do good stories still take weeks to ship? Subscribe if you have not. Forward to one person who has written one too many dull server stories.

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Robin Hamilton is the founder of Proofpoints, the customer storytelling platform launching in 2026. Previously, cofounder and CEO of inEvidence. Proof Positive is published fortnightly.

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