For more than a decade, Woden has helped purposeful companies become essential brands using our unique storytelling framework. We’re excited today to introduce StoryEngine, a custom AI tool that helps teams create content anchored in their strategic narrative.
We built StoryEngine because every off-the-shelf AI we used fell short. StoryEngine works by layering Woden’s philosophy with channel expertise and client-specific narratives. It’s authentic storytelling at scale—and it took us hundreds of hours of testing and refinement to build it.
What we’ve learned? When AI understands your brand story, it stops generating undifferentiated slop and starts creating content that connects. So if you’ve ever felt frustrated editing yet another generic AI draft to sound like your brand, this can help you solve that problem. And if you’re curious how story-driven AI could transform the way your team scales messaging, StoryEngine is the answer.
Who’s Telling Your Brand Story?
Every go-to-market effort needs AI support. Teams must keep pace with market shifts and customer expectations, adapt messaging quickly, test new approaches, and customize outreach at scale. And the ones who can move faster, iterate smarter, and stay aligned across channels are the ones winning in their markets.
It’s no surprise, then, that reported AI use within organizations jumped from 55 percent to 78 percent in just one year, according to McKinsey. These adoptions numbers simply reflect what teams already know: without AI, you’re fighting an onslaught of opponents with one hand tied behind your back.
So, teams turn to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another tool. They ask it to draft an email. Write a LinkedIn post. Maybe punch up a sales deck. And within seconds, they get, well, something.
Words appear. Sentences form. The output looks professional enough. But there’s a big problem lurking beneath the output: it doesn’t sound like your brand or connect to your strategy. And it certainly doesn’t pull customers through their journey in a way that makes them see you as essential.
Generic AI gives you content. But content without strategy is just noise.
Off-the-shelf AI tools are built for everyone, which means they default to language that’s broad, and, ultimately, forgettable. The tone shifts wildly depending on the prompt. The messaging drifts far from what makes you different. And every output requires heavy editing to align with your brand.
The result? Inconsistent, off-brand messaging across channels. Different teams speaking different languages. Content that talks about features and benefits instead of the transformation you enable. Prospects who can’t articulate what makes you unique from competitors, because your own content doesn’t make it clear.
This isn’t just a strategic problem, and one that gets worse as AI use cases accelerate. For a company to lead its market, it must become a brand customers cannot live without. That requires a strategic narrative and AI that actually understands it.
What Story-Driven AI Looks Like
Woden’s proprietary methodology, anchored by the StoryKernel, helps your clients and prospects see your brand as essential. Across more than 300 engagement we’ve learned the best brand stories aren’t created, they’re revealed. And once revealed, they need to be implemented consistently in every interaction with your buyer.
Which is why we built StoryEngine.
StoryEngine is a custom AI tool that solves the fundamental problem created by off-the-shelf AI: bland, undifferentiated content disconnected from your brand strategy. Instead of generic slop, you get content that’s anchored in your strategic narrative, enabling you to scale messaging without sacrificing the alignment that makes it effective.
It’s trained on three distinct layers of expertise that ensure every output moves customers forward.
Layer 1: Woden’s Storytelling Philosophy
StoryEngine starts with the same foundation we use in every client engagement: our proprietary StoryKernel framework. This ensures the AI understands how to position your customer as the hero of the stories it tells, and your brand as the mentor who guides them toward transformation.
Every output reinforces your brand’s purpose, speaks to the threats your customers face, and demonstrates how your solution enables their success. Like all StoryKernel-derived messaging, outputs are designed to pull prospects to the next stage of the customer journey.
Layer 2: Channel-Specific Expertise
Different channels require different approaches. An email that works for cold outreach won’t work as web copy. A LinkedIn post needs to grab attention differently than a nurture sequence.
So, StoryEngine incorporates best practices for each medium it supports—email, LinkedIn, web copy, and strategic editing, at the time of the beta launch. It understands makes cold outreach convert, how social content drives engagement, what web copy structures guide prospects through consideration, and how to strengthen existing content to align with your unique story. This makes sure your message isn’t just on-brand, but tailored to the relevant channel.
Layer 3: Your Brand’s Strategic Narrative
This is where StoryEngine sets itself apart from any other AI tool on the market. The tool draws directly from your StoryGuide—the comprehensive blueprint we create during client engagements that maps your strategic narrative to each stage of the customer journey.
When StoryEngine generates content, it’s not inventing your voice. It’s amplifying the story that’s already inside your brand, ensuring consistency across every touchpoint and every team member who uses it.
What We Learned Building It
Training a custom AI isn’t a straight line. It’s trial, error, and hundreds of hours of iteration. Our entire creative team was involved, running test after test, logging every failure and improvement.
We learned that it’s better to do a few things exceptionally well. That’s why StoryEngine launched with the four core capabilities of email, LinkedIn posts, web copy, and strategic feedback. We deliberately limited the scope so we could ensure outputs were consistent, brand-aligned, and genuinely helpful.
StoryEngine includes deliberate guardrails. If you ask it to create content outside its scope—say, a TikTok script or event flyer—it will tell you that it’s not trained on it yet. And trust us, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Doing fewer things exceptionally well is more valuable than doing everything poorly. And when those few things are aligned to your strategic narrative and customer journey, the impact compounds across your entire organization.
We also learned that without strategic narrative at its core, AI drifts. It hallucinates. It sounds robotic or generic. But when the StoryKernel anchors everything, the AI stays focused on what matters: moving customers forward in their journey.
Our ultimate test was whether StoryEngine’s content reinforced your essential positioning and helped prospects see you as a brand they can’t live without.
From Generic to Meaningful
Here’s what StoryEngine makes possible:
For Marketing Teams: Draft web copy that translates your StoryKernel into customer-facing language without losing strategic intent. Create social content that keeps your moral and differentiators front and center. Generate campaigns that feel cohesive across channels because they’re all anchored in the same narrative.
For Sales Teams: Build outreach messaging that ties back to your strategic narrative instead of slipping into feature-benefit pitches. Craft emails that speak to specific funnel stages and buyer personas, using language that’s been proven to resonate with your audience.
For Leadership: Ensure every team member, no matter their tenure, communicates your brand story consistently. Scale your go-to-market efforts without sacrificing the strategic alignment that makes your message effective.
What’s Next
StoryEngine represents the beginning of how AI can serve strategic narrative, not replace it. We’re continuing to refine the tool based on client feedback, expanding capabilities thoughtfully, and exploring how to give more teams access to story-driven AI.
Because here’s what we believe: AI can give you content. But only story can give you content that connects.
When AI understands your brand story and applies it across the customer journey, it stops being generic and starts being meaningful. It becomes a tool that helps your team consistently reinforce what makes you essential with the right message, to the right audience, in the right channel.
Your story is your strategy. StoryEngine ensures your AI knows it.
StoryEngine is currently available to Woden clients only. Learn more about working with us here.
