Presentations in the Age of AI

In 1922, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." ^[1]. My interpretaion of this is what we know is limited to the words we have available in our language. Similarly, AI models are limited to the data they have been trained on. Even with well-constructed prompts, they often lack contextual nuance. If using AI models for work, they often fail at understanding the subtle political dynamics of your organization. AI-generated content is limited in it's ability to understand the contextual situation surrounding the information you are trying to deliver to reach your desired outcome. I've tried a variety of AI presentation-generators, and they all struggle with this limitation. A well-crafted presentation does not just effectively transfer information, it tells a story and engages an audience. Yet with AI-generated presentation tools gaining popularity, more and more people are tempted to offload this creative work to a machine.

I use AI daily. I truly believe in AI's utility, and believe that is a necessity. It has the potential to help us solve some of humanities most pressing problems. AI-generated presentations are efficient, polished, and offload a significant amount of cognitive effort. These are real benefits, but they come at a cost. If you want to write well, you must write. If you want to paint well, you must paint. If you want to present well, you must present. The best presenters are the ones who immerse themselves in the process of crafting and delivering a well laid out presentation. By removing human skills like emotional intelligence and creativity from the process, you are often left with a dull transfer of information. No matter how polished that AI-generated slide deck looks, it will lack depth and contextual nuance. The AI-generated presentation is no longer an extension of the presenter's thinking; all that's left is a prefabricated assembly of bullet points, layouts, and AI-generated images.

To be a good presenter, you need to be an authentic storyteller. It's not just what you say, but how you say it. Great presentations use emotion with information, and just like master storytellers, create deliberate tension that guides the audience towards a desired result. Whether you are seeking approval, sharing important information, or making a sales pitch, success is dependent on structuring your presentation in a way that resonates with your audience. Slides should be an extension of the presenter's thought process and act as visual cues for the narrative being delivered. Content is still king, but how you convey that content often determines whether you'll achieve the presentation's desired result.

The Human Process of Crafting a Presentation

To create a great presentation, you must decide what to emphasize, what to omit, and in what order to reveal key insights. This is not busywork and is a skill that needs to be practiced and nurtured. The act of wrestling with a presentation's structure and visual cues will make you a better presenter. AI does not go through this iterative struggle. It uses math to predict the next best word or pixel. It's only through the process of questioning, rearranging, sketching, and iterating that we develop a deeper understanding of our narrative and more effective communication emerges.

A common mistake I see when people are crafting presentations is thinking "the information I'm putting on this slide will speak for itself". This mindset often results in a dull bulleted list of information that the audience quickly forgets. A good presentation should not just inform, it should shape how the audience thinks. At the risk of sounding pompous, a presentation is a structured oral and visual performance designed to evoke emotion and engagement from your audience. Delivering great presentations require a harmonious blend of tone, pacing, body language, visual cues, and stage presence. Authenticity suffers when we rely too heavily on scripts and generic templates. AI-generated presentations still feel too templated.

Crafting a compelling presentation is akin to writing a novel. The best novelists immerse themselves in their worlds, shifting perspectives, refining their language and sentence structure, and focus on perfecting their rhythm and prose. Similarly, a great presenter should immerse themselves in understanding their audience, shaping their narrative, adjusting their visual cues, and practicing their delivery. Today, AI slide generators lack the contextual nuance surrounding your intended narrative and desired result. How can we expect them to build effective narratives and visual cues that will resonate with our audience?

The Cognitive Load Problem

Our brains can only handle a certain amount of information before they become overwhelmed. The science of cognitive load theory tells us that people process information in stages; first by perceiving it, then by encoding it into short-term memory, and finally by integrating it into long-term understanding. When your presentation is loaded with too much text, colors, charts, graphics, and fancy transitions it disrupts this process as there are too many things vying for your audience's attention. When you are presenting, gaining and keeping attention is all that matters. In the book Brain Rules, John Medina writes "You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it." ^[2] Understanding human psychology needs to be top of mind when crafting your slides.

There is an art to deciding which information to highlight and omit in your presentation. When making these decisions you need to keep your audience in mind. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ^[3] Current AI LLM models, like 4o and 3.5 Sonnet, are fairly good at summarizing and copy editing, but when you are using a AI slide generator, you don't necessarily know what the underlying models are. Some AI-generated presentation builders allow you create detailed prompts to improve the result, but so far I have found that these tools fill slides with unnecessary and distracting decorative elements. Great presenters, like Apple keynote speakers, understand that every slide should only do as much as it must, and no more. AI does not yet have this restraint from a visual slide design perspective.

Research suggests that when visuals and text work together effective, they enhance memory retention. ^[4] AI-generated slide decks often miss this balance, placing excessive emphasis either on the visuals or text without considering how they interact in a meaningful way. Don't get me wrong, humans struggle with this too. Good presenters practice and work on this skill. They take time to ensure that the images they use directly relate to the information being presented. They label their visuals clearly to help bridge the connection between the verbal and visual elements. They integrate multimedia, like videos or animations, only if they contribute to the narrative and effectively engage both visual and auditory senses. Great presentations choose these elements strategically to gain and hold their audience's attention.

The Role of Storytelling and Emotional Intelligence in Presentations

Why do we remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, but not the numerous bureaucratic reports on civil rights from the same era? Why do 18-minute long TED Talks outperform dry classroom-style lectures? The answer lies in storytelling. Humans have an innate ability to connect with information when it is framed as a story. We resonate with the hero's journey, emotional experiences, and overcoming obstacles. Well told stories evoke emotion and internalize and act upon the message being delivered. They also present information in a way that guides an audience to a desired conclusion. Storytelling is uniquely human tool that makes a speech, presentation, or idea endure in the minds of an audience long after the moment has passed.

One reason that AI-generated presentations often fail at storytelling is because the underlying AI models used lack emotional intelligence. Today's AI models are incredible at summarizing information, but they can not feel it. Storytelling is the backbone of human communication, and it's why the best presentations follow a narrative arc. They introduce tension, build momentum, and resolve with a clear call to action. AI-generation presentation software, at present, is ill-equipped to recognize what details should be emphasized for building emotional connections with an audience. The best presenters are skillful at reading the room. They can predict and anticipate audience reactions, and incorporate this knowledge into designing their presentations. Current AI-generated presentation tools can't replace this innate human instinct.

A Better Way of Using AI to Help Craft Impactful Presentations

While AI-generated presentations offer convenience, they still struggle with softer skills like creativity and empathy. Current AI models are competent at pattern recognition, summarization, and copywriting. Presenters should leverage AI for their strengths rather than replacing innate human skills. When preparing a presentation, avoid relying on AI for tasks requiring common sense reasoning, contextual understanding, cause-and-effect analysis, and originality. AI models are currently limited by their training data and struggle with edge cases and real-time adaptation. Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, says "Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity." ^[5]

Here are some practical ways I use AI to help craft presentations:

• Generating rough outlines and helping the presenter structure ideas and story arcs
• They can help summarize complex information and condense content efficiently
• Make layout suggestions that the presenter can manually refine
• Providing initial drafts of speaker notes or talking points
• Help with writing titles, labeling visuals, and copywriting bullet points

AI is an incredibly valuable tool with the right prompting and oversight. By combining AI's efficiency with human ingenuity, presenters an create more engaging, well-structured, and impactful presentations.

The Human Touch Still Wins

A great presentation is a performance. It's a moment of connection between the speaker and their audience. AI-generated presentations, for all their convenience, lack this connection. They create polished slides, but they don't tailor those slides to the contextual nuances surrounding the audience. Presenters need to ask themselves: Am I outsourcing convenience at the cost of creativity and impact? AI might help draft a script, but the best presenters write their own stories.