5 Tips for Using AI to Help Develop Better Presentations | Foundant Technologies

Patti Schutte

The way we communicate with others has the power to forge strong relationships and business alliances. Presentations are a great way to bring a certain topic, product, or service to an audience’s attention and connect with them as you do so.

While you should develop your presentation using your own thoughts and insights, artificial intelligence (AI) can help you refine your presentation for better results. The following tips will help you work in tandem with AI to create more impactful presentations that leave an impression on your audience. Let’s get started!

1. Learn more about your audience.

Before you dive into your speech itself, it’s important to make sure you have a solid understanding of your audience. Be Brilliant Presentation Group’s guide to conference presentation tips recommends researching your audience so you can fill in any knowledge gaps in your presentation and reaching out to the conference manager or organizer for any data they may have on the event’s audience.

Then, you can feed this information into your AI tool to flesh out different segments of your audience. Ask the tool to create audience personas based on your presentation topic and current audience data. Similar to customer personas, these profiles can give you insight into what the main focal points of your presentation should be based on your audience’s demographics and interests.

2. Create an outline.

When preparing for a presentation, one of the most important steps is to create an in-depth outline of how your presentation will go. That way, you can brainstorm what content you’d like to include and build in moments that strike the audience’s attention.

To save time in your preparation process, you can ask your AI tool to create an outline for you. Tell the AI what your main topic is, who your audience is, and any other information that describes the purpose of your presentation. Then, fill in the gaps on your own.

This step is crucial in ensuring your presentation has a solid structure before moving forward, so feel free to tweak the outline AI produces or ask it to refine its output by adding new stipulations to what you want your outline to look like.

3. Tighten up your presentation language.

While AI can be helpful in the presentation writing process, you don’t want AI to write your speech for you. Although AI isn’t a person, taking a speech word from word from the tool is still technically plagiarism. Additionally, if your speech is posted online, it could harm the SEO rankings of the host site for being too generic, biased, unhelpful, or inaccurate.

Most importantly, you want your presentation to sound natural. If you rely on an AI tool to write the presentation for you, it won’t have that human touch and may sound jumbled in some places. Instead, if you’re struggling with how to write a presentation, work with a presentation coach.

Once you’ve developed your presentation, run it through AI to tighten up the language or make it more concise. This technique can be especially helpful when you have a timed presentation and need to summarize concepts as quickly as possible. Plus, it pulls the best aspects of your presentation and combines them with the AI’s capabilities for best results, instead of simply relying on AI to write the entire presentation.

4. Find meaningful data.

Relevant data and statistics make your claims more tangible and credible. While you can search for these yourself, AI can quickly pull meaningful statistics, research papers, or case studies that relate to your topic or audience.

For example, if you’re presenting at a nonprofit conference on matching gifts, citing that 78% of donors are unaware of their company’s matching gift programs is more powerful than simply saying most people don’t know about matching gifts.

When you’re using data found by AI, just be sure to investigate the data’s source to make sure the information is accurate and comes from a trustworthy site. Then, during the presentation itself, mention the source of each data point and include citations in your presentation slides to indicate where each piece of data comes from.

5. Get inspiration for visuals.

Brainstorming visuals can be one of the most challenging parts of planning a presentation. Lean on AI for visual inspiration.

One way to use AI for assistance with visuals is to ask it for help with infographics. You can ask your AI tool questions like:

What type of graphic could explain this topic?
What kind of visual could aid in an audience’s understanding of a presentation on this topic?
What infographic format would be best for displaying these statistics?

While these types of questions can help you create informative images, you can also ask AI for help with the smaller visual details of your presentation, with questions like:

What color scheme would be best for this presentation?
What fonts should this presentation feature?
Is there a specific slide layout that would enhance this presentation?

Using these insights, you can create impactful visuals or work with a graphic designer to make your vision come to life.

AI isn’t replacing human work, and it’s not meant to. These types of tools are making human-led processes easier. While you still need to incorporate your own thoughts and input to create a successful presentation, leveraging AI can simplify presentation preparation and save you time that you can dedicate to more important tasks.