A few days before the deadline, I’d find myself in that familiar pool of anxiety : staring at a blank digital canvas, clock ticking, knowing the next 20 hours would dissolve into a blur of bullet points, chart creation, & late-night pixel-alignment.
Time to make a presentation.
With AI, I’ve slashed the time it takes to build a presentation from a full day down to just a few hours
I start with the essence – three key ideas or stories that will resonate with my audience.
With these seeds planted, I’ll dictate to the AI to architect a 12-slide framework, calibrated for its audience (recently, sharing predictions for data in 2025 to a group of data engineers & analysts which I’ll publish next week). They are The Great Consolidation, Scale Up Architectures & Agentic Data.
I suggest a few deeper points like new query engines, virtual developer environments, separation of compute & storage, & collaborative BI.
Then I ask the AI to draft the speaker’s notes in a framework that my management coach at Google taught me – the “Clearing-Content-Transition” framework:
Clearing: Describe what’s on the slide
Content: Detail 3-4 key points & supporting stories
Transition: Set up the next slide naturally
Each iteration refines the narrative. “Move slide 5 to after slide 10.” “Shorten the section on AI & engineering teams fusing.” “In scale up architectures, there’s a generational transition where many of the new engineers prefer Python. Weave that in.”
The outline evolves as AI & I collaborate. We craft a surprising hook (no more “Hi, my name is…”), from Matthew Dick’s storytelling wisdom to give audiences a reason to care by introducing the Stakes.
With the outline nearly complete, the next step is to add the visual flair. “Please create a prompt for an image in for each slide.” This part isn’t yet automated, but I flipped back and forth between the prompts and an image generation AI.
Put it all together, deliver it online, read from the script a few times to practice so the delivery is a bit more spontaneous and it’s done and dusted.
Not every image or every slide can be fully automated, but many of them can. There’s something about starting a blank canvas with an AI that solves or at least bevels the edges of writer’s block.
I’ll publish the presentation on Jan 24. I’ll also publish the script alongside it & would love to hear your reactions.
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