Due to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), practitioners can instruct their AI chatbots on conversational styles that best serve their customers’ needs, such as storytelling. Stories are a natural form of communication for humans, and storytelling has received attention in marketing research. However, storytelling chatbots have been studied to a limited extent. There is a research gap regarding whether customers perceive storytelling chatbots as more context aware and intelligent than non-storytelling chatbots. Therefore, an experiment was conducted in which an AI chatbot’s storytelling was manipulated. By doing so, this study examines how storytelling influences the perceived intelligence of AI chatbots through the experience of chatbots’ context awareness. In the experiment, participants discussed with an AI chatbot about their chosen travel destination and, after that, responded to a survey. 140 valid responses were analyzed with an instrumental variable method. The results show that there is a negative causal effect between storytelling and the perceived context awareness as well as storytelling and the perceived intelligence. The results contribute theoretically to the research on storytelling marketing, especially in the context of storytelling AI chatbots. Practical contributions are also presented.