AI Raised the Bar for My Keynote Presentations

AI can generate a slide deck in seconds. But who wants to sit through that slop?

In the age of AI, building a quality keynote takes longer, not shorter. Strategic orchestration beats automation. Here’s what three days of work looks like.

So, what does it take to build a keynote when you’re the only person accountable for every decision … from storyline to slide design to stage delivery? I could fire up Gamma, Canva, GenPPT, or Prezi AI and generate an entire slide deck in seconds. The technology exists. The button is right there.

But who wants to sit through that crap?

Not me. Not you. Not anyone who values their time.

My new keynote flips the script from agility (responding to change) to viability (building something that survives AI disruption). If you’re the single wringable neck at your organization, this talk is for you. Interested? Contact me.

AI-generated slide decks exist for AI-powered summarizers. The only audience is bots and algorithms, same as those SEO meta descriptions nobody reads but everyone generates for search engines. Sure, it’s all technically English. But it’s written by machines for machines. Humans are just there to press a button.

This is also why building a keynote solo is both terrifying and clarifying. There’s no committee to dilute the message. No design team to blame for ugly slides. Every choice is yours, every risk is yours. The single wringable neck extends all the way to the stage.

There’s no committee to dilute the message. No design team to blame for ugly slides. Every choice is yours, every risk is yours.

Entertaining actual humans for 45 or 60 minutes requires more than a prompt and a Generate button. So I spend days designing my talks. The newest one is titled From Agility to Viability: What AI Means for Leaders and Teams. Here’s what went into it:

AI Deep Dives, Then Double-Checks

Research comes first. I know, it’s shocking.

I use the Deep Research features of Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Then I double-check everything (or I pit the LLMs against each other) because you should never rely on the output of a single AI.

No shortcuts here. If I skip research, I end up with confident nonsense wrapped in pretty templates.

The Story Outline

Getting the story right is everything, especially when there’s no team to catch what you miss. I consider myself a storyteller (I even wrote an entire novel), so I care about arc and flow more than most other speakers I know.

I created an outline in Google Drive and asked Claude to criticize it. Claude and I went through my Substack archive to find the best insights and quotes. We added them to the outline, then argued about placement until everything landed where it belonged.

And if it didn’t fit in one hour, it didn’t make the cut.

Beyond PowerPoint Templates

Standard PowerPoint templates are the purpose pollution of keynote des