The boons and banes of tomorrow’s storytelling technology

Insignia Ventures Partners’ On Call podcast, hosted by Paulo Joquiño, sat down with Smobler founder and CEO Dr. Loretta Chen on the future of storytelling — one of a series recorded with speakers from NOVA 2025: SG60 Edition, co-hosted by Smobler, the New York Stock Exchange, Gemini, Nifty Gateway Studio and Skadden.

Chen’s starting point is that storytelling is not a marketing function but the thing that holds societies together. All nations need a narrative, she argues, reaching for Sang Nila Utama and the Merlion: a story that may be fictitious, but which anchors a fishing village’s account of itself. Values, tradition and perspective get transmitted the same way a mother tells a bedtime story.

Her background is theatre direction, and she carries the discipline into leadership. Theatre is ephemeral — here today, gone tomorrow — and still it moves a room full of different perspectives to the sound of a single drum. Getting a team to a shared vision while celebrating the diversity that makes it good is, she says, the same job.

Then the banes. Technology has made storytelling accessible and instantaneous, but the same power produces counter-narratives, counterfeit narratives and actors suturing distrust through compelling stories. Generative AI sharpens both edges at once: content faster, cheaper and better, and more fallout to deal with. Her answer is media literacy, an open mind and a strong moral compass, in a landscape where the line between reality and fiction keeps blurring.

The creator economy matters to her for reasons rooted further back. She grew up with institutional narratives where only a chosen few had a platform, and read Snow White long before she read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston — the first book she found with an Asian character in the dominant culture. Technology has since democratised access to communication and creation, and that is what she wanted to carry into a technology company.

Her advice to other CEOs: the balance sheet still matters and is no longer sufficient. Communication and storytelling now decide whether a leader can lead by example — and the more generative technology there is, the more people want what is genuine.