The best leaders take time to plan their communication style and delivery
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We’ve all sat through those presentations where you’d much rather be somewhere else. You’re in an all-hands meeting. The department head is presenting some exciting updates, but the updates are drowned in data, crowded slides, or jargon that seems too complex to fully understand. You can’t wait for the meeting to be over.
And meanwhile, you idle the time away by getting some work done on your laptop while the presentation runs in the background.
But is that how presentations should really be?
You’re not the type of leader who will bore your audience with presentations that feel irrelevant, contain 50+ slides, and are not engaging or captivating. You’re the type of leader who drives change through meaningful communication and deliberately takes time to optimize engagement. That’s exactly why you’re reading this article.
So today, I’m going to teach you a simple AI workflow that you can use to craft the most impactful presentations.
The AI Workflow For AI-Powered Presentations
Here are the AI tools you will need:
ChatGPT/GeminiPrezi AI, Beautiful AI, or other AI presentation generator that allows you to prompt directly into the tool and it automatically generates the full slides. And that’s it!
Step 1: Create a ChatGPT folder titled “Stakeholder Presentations.” This is where you will store all your files related to presentations for different types of stakeholders. It’s important to categorize your stakeholders because you will need to adapt your communication style and preferences to each.
For example, the data and frequency of how you would display information to your financial stakeholders will not be the same when you present to your marketing stakeholders or technical team, and vice versa.
Senior level stakeholders require more of a high-level overview approach, whereas team members require more operational details.
You can then repeat the process below for each stakeholder.
Step 2: Once you have this folder open on ChatGPT, you can then customize it with instructions like this:
“You’re an expert presentation designer for executives, your role is to help me design and craft tailored presentations for [the roles you specified, i.e. Project Director]. To begin with, the title of the presentation or presentation topic is going to be about, [i.e., quarterly review]. And the objectives are [what you’d hope for the audience to understand or do, act on, by the end of the meeting].
“What are some key considerations that I should bear in mind when preparing this presentation?” This allows you to step into your stakeholders’ shoes.
Step 3: Upload a file containing all the data that you would need–the raw data that you would need to include in the presentation. Then ask ChatGPT to combine this data with the key considerations it listed, into a presentation outline of no more than 10-12 slides, with what details need to be included on each slide, as well as sub-details for each category.
Step 4: Now, take the details from this outline and copy and paste it into an AI presentation generator tool like Prezi AI or Beautiful.ai. Then let the tool generate the entire design and slides. You can then use your human input to adjust any elements as you wish, such as the visual elements like the font, spacing, and color scheme to ensure it aligns with the brand or company colors.
And you can also swap around the slides, add new slides, or change some of the content and images as you wish. But it definitely saves you the hours you would spend in creating an entire PowerPoint presentation from scratch with a blank slate.
Step 5: Finally, upload the slides to PowerPoint (even if you don’t intend on presenting them through PowerPoint) and rehearse while refining your executive communication skills, with Rehearse Coach, which is a smart tool available on Microsoft PowerPoint.
This AI coach picks up subtle nuances such as:
Your pacingUse and frequency of filler wordsUse of inclusive languageAny unnecessary repetitiveness in your presentation
Step 6: While you’re presenting, using an AI notetaking app like Grain, Fireflies, Otter.ai, or Zoom’s AI Companion will cut out the need for you to repeat yourself later when someone asks for a resource or meeting specifics.
AI-powered presentations give you the ultimate unfair advantage
gettyAI Presentations Give You An Unfair Advantage
I remember when worked in senior leadership and managed a portfolio of up to six projects and almost 30 reports, I had to prepare one presentation every week for our weekly partnership meetings, as well as monthly and quarterly review presentations and dashboards.
I was already swamped for time, and I often found myself spending 10-12 hrs gathering data from different sources, compiling reports, and creating slide decks from scratch, trying to force my presentation into templates that simply didn’t feel quite right.
Knowing what I know now about using AI strategically to solve these issues, if I had used this AI workflow, I would’ve more than halved my prep time, and my presentations would have been way more captivating.
This is the “unfair” advantage you have as a leader right now. While everyone else is using AI to write emails or summarize messages, you can use AI to empower you to be a better communicator, speak the language of your stakeholders, and design and deliver presentations that are memorable, persuade the audience to act, and leave a lasting impact.
This is the second article in my AI workflow series. Check out the first article on how to use AI to plan and deliver meaningful 1:1 performance review conversations. And for more presentation techniques and communication skills you can master as a leader, read this article I wrote.