Creative Storytelling with AI

Explore new mediums. Capture attention. Evolve your craft.

Creative Storytelling with AI is built on IDEO's storytelling craft and hands-on AI practice. You'll gain a complete IDEO Story Canvas to direct and evolve your story long after the course ends. It's designed for people who believe storytelling is a deeply human skill and not something AI can or should replace. People who want to use AI to create stories that matter, stories that move people, and stories we will remember.

You'll learn to direct AI to sharpen your story, build a world around your idea that brings it to life, and translate information into something your audience can feel.

Course Outcomes
  • A complete IDEO Story Canvas—a working framework you'll use to direct, build, and evolve your story.
  • Direct AI to sharpen your story so it's aimed at the right people and desired action.
  • Pressure-test a story and edit it down to the moments that will drive your audience to act.
  • Translate information into something that lands emotionally with your audience.
  • Build the judgment to know when and how to use AI to make your story stand out.

Skills You’ll Gain
Persuasive Storytelling AI Direction and Judgment Creative Communication Multi-Medium Storytelling
Explore new mediums. Capture attention. Evolve your craft.
Format Online Cohort Course
Start Date
Quantity
Duration 5 Weeks
Time 4 Hours/Week
Price
Regular price
$899
Sale price
$899
Unit price
per 
Download Syllabus

What You'll Get

How the Course Works

  • • See — Watch video lessons from real-world IDEO practitioners who use these methods in client work.
  • • Try — Apply what you just saw to a real idea from your own work in a hands-on assignment.
  • • Share — Bring it to your cohort and teaching team for live discussion and feedback.
  • • Reflect — Process what landed and what didn't, then carry it forward into the next lesson.

Plus: a downloadable toolkit of templates and frameworks you'll keep using after the course ends.

Introduction — Direct the Story

Discover how AI expands what your storytelling can do, and learn three creative ways to direct it toward moving someone to act.
Assignment
  • Choose the idea, challenge, or message you'll carry through the whole course, and start your Story Canvas.

Lesson 1 — Aim for Action

Use AI like a great editor—distilling your idea, viewing it from new angles, testing it on your audience, and refining it—so your story is aimed at the action you want.
Assignment
  • Direct AI to sharpen your story so it’s focused on your audience and their needs.

Lesson 2 — Build the World

Learn worldbuilding as a distinct storytelling skill: how to go beyond explaining an idea and use AI as a creative engine to render the world around it.
Assignment
  • Direct AI to build a world around a key moment in your story.

Lesson 3 — Make It Felt

Transform information and data into something your audience can sense and feel, with AI as your prototyping partner.
Assignment
  • Direct AI to translate data or an abstract idea from your story into a felt artifact.

Conclusion — Keep the Story Yours

Learn to reach for the right power at the right moment, so your story stays yours as the tools keep changing.
Assignment
  • Take a final pass at your Story Canvas and choose what moves your audience toward the action you set out to drive.

Meet Your Instructors

Ed White

Senior Design Director at IDEO

Ed helps companies unlock design’s superpower—its ability to paint a compelling vision and strategy of what the future could look like—and prototype the first steps to concretely move them toward that place. With a background in journalism, storytelling is core to that effort. Ed uses stories as a way of helping teams and clients empathise with their customers today, get excited about a vision of tomorrow, and clearly understand the strategic choices they need to make to get there. Previous to IDEO, Ed was a writer and editor for 12 years at publications including the Financial Times, Wired, and Contagious.

More About Ed

Max Lackner

Senior Design Lead at IDEO

Max is a senior design lead who specializes in turning ambitious ideas into tangible realities. With a background in visual storytelling, speculative design and interaction design, he guides teams from blue sky vision to working prototypes, brands, and launched products. His work spans health, learning, media, and emerging technology, with projects ranging from AI-powered EdTech tools to patient-centered healthcare experiences. Max is known for creating clarity in complexity through fast prototyping, immersive workshops, and deep client collaboration.

More About Max

Tiange Wang

Senior Design Lead at IDEO

Tiange is a multidisciplinary software and product designer. At IDEO, she leads teams in designing AI-native products and experiences across digital and physical systems, helping companies translate new AI capabilities into well-crafted products from early ambiguity to market-ready execution. Her work bridges interaction design, code-based prototyping, emerging technology, and product vision, pushing the edges of new interaction paradigms between people and frontier technologies. Across mediums including software, connected objects, food, games, multimedia art, and multisensory data experiences, she makes emerging technologies more tangible, engaging, and humane.

More About Tiange

FAQs

This course is for professionals who use storytelling to move ideas forward and gain alignment. Designers, PMs, marketers, consultants, and strategists will all find value. It's the right fit if you:

  • Communicate ideas and move people for a living.
  • Have seen too many decks fail to land and are ready to break out of the default format.
  • Are already using AI in places and can feel where the output gets generic.
  • Believe storytelling is fundamentally human and want to learn how to direct AI without giving up what makes your stories yours.

No. You need to be curious, but you don't need prior AI experience. We'll teach the judgment of when and how to direct AI. We'll work with tools you can access for free.

Each course answers a different question. Storytelling for Influence is about storytelling fundamentals—audience, intention, structure, tone. Impactful Presentations is about how to deliver a story with command and presence. Creative Storytelling with AI is about expanding what a story can be and going beyond the expected format to make your idea more unexpected, more resonant, and more experiential.

If you're newer to storytelling as a deliberate practice, Storytelling for Influence first builds a strong foundation. If you already have a storytelling practice and want to push what it can do, you can start with Creative Storytelling with AI. Impactful Presentations is great for storytelling in a public speaking or presentation context.

No. We don't teach specific tools, but rather methods, mindsets and approaches that can be used across any platform. This course teaches judgment for when to use AI, when not to, and how to direct it so your story stands out instead of sounding like everyone else's.

The course is 5 weeks. Most learners spend about 4 hours per week on a mix of video lessons, a practical assignment, and live moments with your cohort. It's designed for people with full calendars to be able to fit into their schedules.

Absolutely. Many teams go through our courses together. For teams, we provide a Team Learning Guide, a Manage Learners function for visibility into progress, and the ability to create a private Learning Circle for team-only discussion. For more information, visit our Team Learning page.

We share exclusive offers with our email list. Financial assistance is available for teachers, students, nonprofit workers, and those in need of government assistance. Visit our financial aid application for more information. For orders of 10 seats or more, contact hello@ideou.com for bulk purchase pricing.

Yes. Many of our learners use professional development budgets to enroll. If your organization requires an invoice or has a specific purchasing process, contact hello@ideou.com and our team can help.

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“The course exceeded my expectations! I feel confident that I acquired new marketable skills. There were a lot of hands-on exercises and deep-diving assignments that were enlightening.”

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