We need to talk about the elephant in the room. The giant, AI elephant. At least once a week I get asked “Can’t I just have AI write my talk?” and I just want to scream “For the love of god, don’t use AI to write your talk.”
While we’re at it, don’t have anyone else write your talk.
When someone writes your talk for you, it is evident. You’ve heard this talk at conferences. It’s clearly written by a marketing staffer with good intentions, reviewed by the speaker once, and brought on stage. The speaker reads it, it’s flat. They trip over words and phrases because it’s not the way they speak.
Now add AI to that… and it gets worse. AI is trained on writing not speaking, and it certainly isn’t trained on you speaking. (But Tre, can’t I train AI on my voice? Kinda. But to write in your voice, it needs a substantial body of your work to pull from. If you’ve only given 10 or 15 talks, you’re still finding your voice. That body of work is inconsistent. What you get is generic.)
If you’re newer to speaking, there’s another layer. Finding your voice and style takes reps and experimentation. It takes learning how you speak and what sounds good when you say it on stage. You can’t build that if someone or something else is writing your scripts.
Look, I’m not anti-AI, I’m not particularly pro-AI either. But I get it, you are busy. Building talks is a lot of work, if these powerful tools can help, let’s put them to use well.
5 smart ways to use AI for talk prep
Research
If you have a gap to fill, a context or historical factor or new technology you want to understand deeply, AI is fantastic for this. It’s also useful on the “who” question: building a better picture of who might be in the room before you write a single word.
Voice capture
This is my favorite. The way that we phrase things when we’re speaking is fundamentally different than the way we write. Writing is a different medium with a different brain process than speaking. Take an AI note-taker on a walk. Click record, take your neighborhood walk, get your steps in, and think out loud about your talk topic. You’re going to say something and think, “Oh damn, that was so good.” Tag it with a keyword. I use the word “capture” when I’ve just said something worth keeping. Then I go into the transcript, search for “capture,” and the phrase is right there ready to be put in your script.
Stress testing scripts
We are so deep in the work we do, it’s common to make logical leaps. We’ll skip some steps. We’ll mix our metaphors. We’ll open loops not close them and leave the audience with unanswered questions. AI is fantastic at catching all of this. Put your outline or script in and ask: am I making any logic leaps? Is every bit of my argument following? Have I mixed metaphors? Have I opened a loop and not closed it? Is there something I’m skipping or missing? These are the things that drive your audience nuts, and they’re hard to catch yourself.
Slides draft
Let me be clear, AI isn’t going to build amazing slides. But it’s going to move you past blank page syndrome. Every AI slide builder I’ve used (and I’ve used most of them) has the same problem: too many bullet points, more like a teaching deck than a storytelling deck almost every single time. AI slide builders will get you to 70% which is a massive head start. Give it your beats and a half-built style guide, let it build V1, and then make it better. Add images and graphics, reduce the words, add slides that land punch lines or story points.
The one thing I recommend avoiding: AI-generated photos. Most audiences are still agitated by them.
Rehearsal feedback
Rehearsal is a deeply underused tool. I want you to rehearse, full stop. Yoodli and Orai are solid rehearsal partners. They give you feedback on pacing, filler words, energy, eye contact, clarity. As Californians, we speak a lot faster than other people do. Just knowing that is helpful. And just having that speech speed bar graph (watching yourself tear through a section, slow down, speed up again) is incredibly useful when learning to pace your talk correctly.
Experiment with one or all five. See what saves you time and what doesn’t. The only rule is the one we started with: don’t use AI to write your talk.