DAVOS 2026 | AGENTIC AI | The Story Engine: How AI Is Rewriting Trust, Creativity, & Human Economy

Описание: Storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest survival technologies. Long before markets, contracts, or institutions existed, shared narratives enabled humans to cooperate, trade, and extend trust beyond bloodlines. In this keynote, Gregory Matusky explores storytelling as a biological, economic, and civilizational force—and examines what changes when artificial intelligence enters that equation.

Drawing from anthropology, economics, and modern communications, the talk traces how narrative shaped early trade systems, collective belief, and social coordination. It then confronts a defining tension of the AI era: if storytelling helped create the human experience as we know it, what does it mean when machines can now generate stories at scale?

Rather than framing AI as a threat to creative professions, Gregory reveals a different pattern emerging across media, communications, and the creative economy. AI does not simply replace human storytelling—it unlocks suppressed demand, removing barriers of time, access, and production. The result is not fewer stories, but exponentially more—hyper-personalized, culturally specific, and deeply human in new ways.

The keynote culminates with real-world examples of AI-assisted storytelling, including projects that preserve intergenerational memory, voice, and historical perspective. These demonstrations position AI not as a substitute for meaning, but as a multiplier—raising urgent questions about authorship, authenticity, and trust in an age of intelligent systems.

The talk closes where it began: with storytelling as a survival mechanism. As machines learn to narrate, the ultimate question becomes not what AI can say—but where human judgment, intention, and moral authority still matter most, and how storytelling may once again redefine what it means to be human.