language is the new code
A CMO I just started working with sent over everything up front.
Their positioning deck, sales decks, marketing content, with a note on top:
“I hate most of this. Don’t use any of it yet.”
I have a version of this conversation almost weekly.
They’re not alone, and it’s not their fault. Things are moving faster than most companies can bring back into alignment, so the words end up a step or three behind the company’s strategy and GTM. Hate it or not, your document library is the language your whole company runs on. Every output your team is producing is likely pulling from a corpus that’s gone stale and no longer fits where you actually need to go.
So, why does language often lag behind the company you’re already become?
You’re running on legacy language
Generic is only the surface tell.
There’s a word for the technology a company has outgrown but still runs on.
The word is legacy. Legacy processes, legacy systems, legacy infrastructure. It once served a purpose, and now it quietly taxes everything you try to build on top of it: the simple change that somehow takes three engineering sprints, the workaround nobody remembers the reason for. We call it tech debt, and right now everyone is pointing AI at it, ripping it out and rebuilding.
Almost nobody realizes they’re carrying legacy language too. The “averaging” I’ve written about these past two weeks, where AI reaches for the middle because you gave it no center, is one symptom of it. Outrunning your own words is the deeper one.
Words for the company you used to be are still running the company you’ve become.
How a phrase becomes yours
Ownable language is the handful of phrases people repeat on your behalf.
It’s the line a customer says back to you in a meeting you weren’t in. You don’t get it by writing a clever tagline. It comes from two things:
The first is discernment. Of all the true things you could say about what you do, which few words actually carry it? Choosing those, and cutting the rest, is taste, and it’s the one move AI can’t make for you, because it reaches for the average and the average is the opposite of a choice. Compress the complicated thing down to that essence, and the phrase starts to read less like a description and more like a rallying cry.
The second is repetition. A sharp line said once is just a tagline. You come to own it by living it: using it, repeating it, building around it until other people say it back to you. That’s the difference between a trademark and a tattoo. A trademark is registered. A tattoo is worn, and it’s costly to remove because you made a real commitment to it.
Take a life sciences company we work with. Their strategy lived in a document many pages long that no one could repeat from memory. We worked to give them a few words clear enough that the whole company, product and sales alike, could rally around the same idea.
That idea started with the clinician. Their days fill up with the work around the work: administering tests, writing reports, deciding which assessment to use at all. So the company said it back to them in their own language: “Your work is hard enough. Let’s make it easier.” And the promise underneath it: “Give people their time back.” The proof sits beneath it: hours of friction pulled out of the day, and time to diagnosis cut by 30 to 50%. Empathy for the clinician has become the through-line for the product, the experience, and the way the company talks about where it’s going.
What those words actually do
Signature words do more than travel. They bind.
When a company lands on a few words in common, people stop drifting into private versions of the strategy. A new hire in week one reaches for the same line a 5-year veteran uses. That shared language is what culture actually is, not the values poster on the wall, but the words everyone reaches for without being told.
Get a company onto the same handful of words and it’s finally singing from one song sheet.
That used to be true only of your people. Now it has to hold for your AI, the agents and models your company is starting to run on. They inherit whatever language you hand them, so the more distilled that language is, the more it behaves like code.
Codify it once and it aligns the team and every agent at the same time. Words as code and words as words. Distilled language has gravity; it pulls people and AI into the same orbit. Leave it generic and it goes inert, nothing repeats it and nothing coheres around it, and your language quietly commoditizes into the category, the opposite of a moat.
This is why voice and point of view aren’t decoration on top of strategy.
With AI, language is both a currency and the building material, the instructions your company runs on and the meaning those instructions carry, at once. The work is to chisel it with enough distinction that it’s worth repeating and impossible to mistake for anyone else’s.
Naming a category that didn’t exist yet
A real-estate investment firm we work with isn’t selling buildings.
It’s selling a thesis: that longevity, the wellness and recovery economy, is an asset class in its own right, not an amenity you add on, and that culturally relevant places hold their value. The language carries the firm: longevity as an asset class, ownership in places that matter, the shift from transactional to transformational real estate. Those phrases didn’t exist in the category before this firm earned them. Now they’re how it describes a new kind of firm for a new kind of time, and how the market is starting to describe it too.
Your best line is probably already in your deck
A B2B startup we know spent months trying to frame its category.
The line that finally did it was already in their deck, buried on slide 12, in their own words: “the trust layer for B2B.”
It had been there the whole time. They just had to move it to the front and commit to it.
Sometimes the words are already in the room, in how a founder talks off-script or a phrase a customer keeps using. Sometimes they have to be found, framed, and shaped. Either way it’s its own discipline, which is why it helps to have someone who obsesses over language and meaning, whether that’s a narrative architect or someone on your team who owns it. And it matters more now, not less.
AI is a large language model. The more you organize your language into a codex, the more precisely you can scale it, across every person and every agent that draws from it.
It’s also what we’ve been building toward at Storied: a way to codify this language so it holds across your whole team and every AI agent, not just the one LLM chat window you’re in right now. Next week, I’ll start showing you some of Claude skills that can do this for you.
So, a question to leave you with: what’s the one line you’d want people repeating about you? And are you saying it enough times that they will?
Michael
P.S. Language is the new code. ;)
P.S.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help CEOs & operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote speaker, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk