Don’t Let AI Tell Your Story
When Carter and I lead communication coaching seminars, we’re often asked how we feel about using AI to create presentations.
AI can make your presentation development process more efficient. It can help clarify your message, generate ideas, and create more consistent designs. But it’s easy to take it too far. If you’ve experimented with AI, you’ve probably seen the result – pages of endless bullet points, generic themes, and repetitive summaries. Don’t fall into the trap of dropping that content straight into your slides.
I don’t trust AI to tell a story with data. The output is often vague or just off. It can misinterpret or oversimplify what’s happening in the data, which can be dangerous if you aren’t checking the results.
For fun, I asked ChatGBT to analyze hotel performance in the Colorado Ski Area submarket and tell me a story of this past winter. Here are the headlines it came back with: “We didn’t collapse—we lost momentum after the holidays and never got it back.” “This wasn’t a rate strategy issue—this was a demand environment issue.” Those are perfectly vague and not the full story. There’s no mention of the drought conditions in Colorado and impact of low snowpack on visitation. If you want your presentation to resonate with your audience, it still needs to be your story, told in your voice.
A better approach is to use AI like how you would ask for help from a colleague in your office. You wouldn’t ask them to prepare your entire presentation for you. You would ask them for advice: Does this chart make sense? Is my main point coming through clearly? How could I approach this differently?
Next time, try some of these prompts:
What are three different ways I could visualize this data?
Give me three options for a slide title that captures the key message.
What are the top questions my audience might ask?
Even this brainstorm process will likely take several iterations to reach a result that is helpful.
And when using AI tools to design presentations, remain focused on your story and structure. When it’s easy to generate slides, it’s just as easy to include too many slides and lose the focus of your story. I like to map out my story on paper before I even open PowerPoint. Then I build slides to support the story and not the other way around.
Be intentional and selective with your content. That’s what is going to ensure you’re staying focused and delivering a clear message.
Some articles we found worth reading:
Hospitality might not be a lifelong career for young people entering the workforce: This article (and corresponding podcast) talks about the fundamental changes in the hospitality workforce. While they focus on the UK, there are themes that can be applied to other areas of the world.
U.S. Hotel Market Shows Early Momentum in 2026: Jan Freitag’s article talks about improving hotel performance in Q1 and the factors that could slow this momentum.
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