Creative Storytelling with AI

Explore new mediums. Capture attention. Evolve your craft.

Attention is a scarce resource, and most stories aren't earning it. The storytellers who cut through go beyond the expected to deliver information in new ways.

If you've hit the ceiling on what a slide deck can do, this course is for you. Creative Storytelling with AI teaches you 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. You'll work through a real story and leave with an artifact and the confidence to share it.

Build the skills and judgement to know how and when to use AI to communicate more effectively, and become the person your team turns to when an idea needs to land.

Course Outcomes
  • Direct AI to sharpen your story so it's aimed at the right people and desired action.
  • Build a world around your idea so your audience can see it and believe in it.
  • 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.
  • Leave with a complete Story Canvas—a working tool you'll use to direct, build, and evolve your story after the course ends.

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

This course is designed to move you from learning to applying. Each week combines video instruction from real-world IDEO practitioners, a hands-on assignment, and live time with your cohort and teaching team.

  • • Video Lessons
  • • Practical Assignments
  • • Teaching Team Support
  • • Live Moments with Peers
  • • Discussion & Feedback Opportunities
  • • Downloadable Toolkit

Introduction — Direct the Story

The world is saturated with stories. Standing out means going beyond the expected, and that starts with expanding what a story can be. In this introduction, you'll reframe the definition of storytelling, meet the three AI powers you'll use throughout the course, and open your Story Canvas with a real idea from your work.

Lesson 1 — Aim for Action

Shape your story with intention: Persuasion is the point of every story. You'll use AI as a thinking partner to find the shape of your story, then direct it to critique your story from different perspectives, pressure-test your ideas, and ensure you’re moving people toward the action you desire.

Lesson 2 — Build Belief

Create the world around your idea: When you're proposing something that doesn't exist yet, describing it isn’t enough. People need to see a world where it already exists so they can picture themselves in it. You'll learn worldbuilding as a distinct storytelling skill: how to stop explaining an idea and direct AI to render the world around it, so your audience moves from 'that's interesting' to 'I can see that working.'

Lesson 3 — Make It Felt

Turn information into something people can sense: Most information stays flat, shared on slides or explained in words. But when presented in a different form, the same idea becomes more visceral and memorable. In this lesson, you'll direct AI to help transform information and data into something your audience can sense and feel, so your idea lands somewhere that logic alone can't go.

Conclusion — The Next Act

Take a full pass at your Story Canvas. Of everything you made, what actually moves your audience toward the action you set out to drive? You'll leave with a complete artifact and the skills to keep iterating your story as new tools emerge.

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.

Collaborate with a Global Community

Learners Love IDEO U Courses

AI x Design Thinking Certificate learner
AI x Design Thinking Workshop learner
AI x Design Thinking Certificate learner
AI x Design Thinking Workshop learner
Creative Storytelling with AI

“The mix of course materials, alternative ways of learning, helpfulness of the teachers, and interactive social elements are great. I learn by doing, not reading, so the assignments are a perfect way to commit the ideas to my brain.”

AI x Design Thinking Certificate learner
Creative Storytelling with AI

“The team at IDEO are knowledgeable and really know how to get a group of people to participate, learn, and enjoy a course. Most of all, they are human, warm, and good — and it was a pleasure and honor learning from them.”

AI x Design Thinking Workshop learner
Creative Storytelling with AI

“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.”

AI x Design Thinking Certificate learner
Creative Storytelling with AI

“I've thoroughly enjoyed every IDEO U course I've taken. The course materials and activities are consistently insightful and immediately applicable to my work. The instructors are always very personable and knowledgeable. And I especially love interacting with the diverse learners in every course.”

AI x Design Thinking Workshop learner

Learners Also Purchased

  • Starting Soon
    Get certified in AI-powered design thinking. This deep-dive program combines our best-selling design thinking courses and AI workshop series into one in-depth cohort.
    Cohort Course 8 Weeks
    Regular price
    $2,250
    Sale price
    $2,250
    Unit price
    per 
  • Learn to use insights to turn customer needs into human-centered solutions.
    Cohort Course 5 Weeks
    Regular price
    $899
    Sale price
    $899
    Unit price
    per 
  • New
    Learn to work with AI to explore more directions with intention.
    Self-Paced Course Start Anytime
    Regular price
    $499
    Sale price
    $499
    Unit price
    per 

Enroll As a Team

How to Enroll as a Team
×

You are creative

Get tips on building creative confidence and applying the skills of design thinking.

Awesome, you're in!

×

Get the Syllabus

Enter your email to receive the Creative Storytelling with AI syllabus and email communications from IDEO U.

Thanks!

The syllabus should be in your inbox shortly. Click below to view the syllabus now.

VIEW SYLLABUS