It's Not "Death By PowerPoint" Anymore, It's "Death By Copilot"

I've been super busy coaching people over the last few months. And I've seen it. The rise of "Death By Copilot". Many, many people are using Copilot to create their presentations. Now, I am a huge fan of using tools to make you better. I am a huge fan of AI. The problem. AI is not helping, it's making presentations worse.

The Default Copilot Presentation

Sadly, I can spot a standard Copilot PowerPoint deck and presentation a mile off. How?

• The slide has a title, subtitle and tagline. It only needs the title.
• It reads like it was written by someone who swallowed a jargon thesaurus.
• There are far too many words, it's more like a brochure not visual aids.
• Ultimately it's a brochure in PowerPoint. Not a set of visual aids to amplify your narrative.

[In fact, halfway through writing this article I jumped on a coaching call, and this was exactly what the person had. You know who you are :)]

It may have only taken 5 mins to generate, and looks pretty. But it's reducing your impact, particularly in high value presentations.

What's The Impact?

So what? What's the impact of this.

• The visual aids distract your audience from your narrative. This reduces the impact of your message and reduces the engagement of the audience.
• You don't sound like a real human, you sound like the thesaurus version.
• You are less memorable and less successful.

Why Is AI Doing This?

Remember AI has been trained on the past. All the awful presentations that have ever come before it. The presentations you have slept through are the training data.

When To Use AI in Presentations?

Let me be clear. I am not saying don't use AI when you're creating a presentation.

I use AI loads when I'm preparing a presentation. I just don't use it where my presentation interfaces with other humans. Here's where I use it:

• Researching my audience. I use it to understand the pain, opportunities and industry knowledge of the personas that will be in my audience. It helps me be more relevant.
• Brainstorming talking points. I use it to help me brainstorm topics and talking points on particular themes, particularly if I'm not an expert in it.
• Getting clarity on my key messages. I use it to find key themes from my brainstorm and work out the key message.
• Repurposing content. I pass the talk track and slides to AI to repurpose them into better takeaways. Maybe a PDF or a web page rather than forwarding 100Mb slide decks to people.

So to summarise. Don't be a "Death By Copilot" presenter. Use AI in the background. Get it to help you raise your game and remove toil. Don't use it to reduce human connection with your human audience.

Hope this helps.

BenP