When information isn’t enough
We’ve become very good at making information available.
AI can gather information from thousands of sources, organize it, summarize it and deliver it to us in seconds. It can translate that information into dozens of languages and increasingly tailor the way it’s presented to the person receiving it. It can even turn information into an interactive experience, responding to questions and adapting what it presents based on what we want to know.
But making information available isn’t the same thing as communicating.
I was reminded of this distinction a couple of weeks at a conference during the Festival dei borghi. One of the companies presenting had developed an application that uses AI to create immersive storytelling experiences for tourists. The idea is to capture the stories of small communities and use them to create personalized itineraries, immersive experiences and multilingual content, giving visitors a richer understanding of the places they’re exploring.
No doubt it’s a compelling application of the technology, particularly because so much of what makes a small town interesting exists outside the conventional tourist narrative. The history of a building may live in the memory of a local family. The significance of a particular festival may be understood by the people who have participated in it for generations. A village may have stories, expressions and traditions that never make it into a guidebook or onto a tourism website. AI could help preserve some of that knowledge and make it accessible to people who might otherwise never encounter it.
But then the conference took a turn. The mayor of a small Sicilian village spoke about something that seemed, at first, to have very little to do with AI.
He was talking about people moving into the village and buying abandoned houses. Many of them, he said, were coming from large metropolitan areas. What attracted them wasn’t simply the architecture, the landscape or the opportunity to own a home in Italy. They were looking for the community they had experienced as missing from city life: knowing the people around them, hearing their stories, having everyday interactions and becoming part of a place rather than simply passing through it.
That contrast stayed with me because it raises a question that goes well beyond tourism.
If AI can capture the stories of a community, translate them, personalize them and turn them into an immersive experience, what exactly is it communicating?
The answer depends on what we think communication is.
For a long time, much of our approach to communication has been based on the assumption that the primary problem is getting the right information to the right audience. If people don’t understand something, give them more information. If they don’t speak the language, translate it. If they aren’t engaged, make the content more interactive. If they have different interests, personalize it.
AI is exceptionally good at all of these things.
The problem is that information is only part of communication. The harder part is creating meaning for the person receiving it.
That distinction matters enormously when the subject is technology. Engineering-led companies are often surrounded by information about their products: specifications, features, capabilities, performance data, use cases and technical documentation. They can explain what they’ve built in considerable detail. What’s often much harder is helping someone outside the company understand why that technology changes something for them.
That’s where a market narrative comes in.
A market narrative doesn’t simply add another layer of content around the technology. It gives people a way to interpret what they’re seeing. It connects the technical development to a change in the market, a problem that needs to be reconsidered or an opportunity that wasn't previously visible.
And that’s where the distinction between information and communication becomes particularly important in an age of AI.