Let’s be honest. Virtual meetings and presentations are rarely fun or fulfilling. They come with a lot of baggage: the small screen, tech problems, the temptation to multitask, and the simple fact that there are too many of them. And despite their flaws and drawbacks, they’re essential to making business happen. They’re were problems are discussed, people get aligned on strategy, and actions are decided.
Meetings also give you a powerful opportunity to build your personal brand. They allow you to showcase your expertise, build relationships with stakeholders, and be visible to senior leaders. But, to make your mark, virtual meetings and presentations need a major makeover so you can truly impact, influence, and impress others. How you’re perceived in meetings impacts your career success.
AI Is A Powerful Partner For Upgrading Meetings And Presentations
The great news is that AI can enhance every element of leading meetings and delivering virtual presentations. When you partner with AI, you can efficiently design and participate in virtual meetings that people actually want to attend. Here are some tips that will help you create impact in all three steps of the process: prep, delivery, and follow-up.
Use AI To Maximize The Prep Step
The busyness of business often limits the time we spend preparing for meetings and presentations. Yet, as with many work activities, it’s the most important part. It allows you to create a meaningful impact. AI can help you turn vague plans into structured, outcome-oriented agendas that keep everyone focused. To maximize AI for the prep step:
Clarify Your Goals and the Key Messages You Want to Share
Whether you’re leading or attending a meeting, you need to be clear about the goals you want to achieve. Here’s an example AI Prompt you can customize: I’m leading a 45-minute strategy meeting. Here are the details [paste]. Please help me define a clear goal, agenda, and 3 key outcomes.
Create Captivating Openings
The most important part of a meeting or presentation for engaging participants is the kick-off. That’s when participants decide if they want to pay attention. When you make your kickoff interesting, provocative, mysterious, or just plain different, you signal that this is not going to be like the (boring) online event you just left.
Ask AI to generate compelling hooks, stories, or metaphors that connect emotionally with your audience. It can even help you come up with a joke, riddle, or puzzle. It can also source videos you can use to start with a bang. Making your meetings magnetic is one of the three Ms of making meetings people want to attend. An example prompt: Please give me three powerful ways to open a presentation about innovation to senior engineers. I want them to be interesting, fun, and brief.
Anticipate Questions
After you’ve crafted your draft slides, upload them along with your notes, and prompt: What are some tough questions my audience might ask that I need to be prepared for?
This helps you prepare smart, pithy, respectful responses in advance, so you don’t get caught off-guard.
Polish Your Slides and Visuals
AI tools are quite skilled at making materials more inviting and riveting. They can suggest design improvements, help you reduce the number of words on slides, and recommend images and videos that can get your message across in a more exciting way. Try a prompt like this: Here are my draft slides for a project update meeting I am attending [paste content]. I want to keep participants engaged throughout. Please give me a detailed assessment of the content and suggest improvements for the content, visuals and format. Also, let me know what’s missing.
Personalize Your Message
If you have a standard presentation that you want to refine, AI can tailor your content for specific audiences. It can help you match tone, level of detail, and relevance. Consider this prompt: This is my standard presentation about [describe]. Please refine it for a group of first-time managers at a tech company.
Use AI As Your Real-Time Assistant During The Meeting Or Presentation
Generate Live Summaries
Don’t be distracted by taking notes. AI tools, like Otter.ai, Fireflies, or Zoom AI Companion, can capture notes and action items in real time, helping you stay connected with the audience throughout.
Get Insight and Audience Reactions in Real-Time
Some AI meeting platforms, like Microsoft Copilot and Fathom, can analyze the sentiment of attendees and their level of participation to help you understand what’s going on in the Zoom room. This allows you to course correct.
Use AI for Instant Translation and Accessibility
If you’re meeting with an international audience, use AI-powered transcription and translation to make your meetings and presentation materials more inclusive. Real-time translation and summaries are invaluable for multilingual teams.
Make AI Your Follow-Up Partner After Meetings Or Presentations
Summarize and Assign Actions
Ask AI to synthesize meeting notes into concise summaries with next steps. Use a prompt like this: Please summarize this meeting transcript into 5 key takeaways and list action items by participant. Please also identified the three most important overarching messages that were shared throughout the meeting.
Turn Meetings into Opportunities to Increase Your Visibility
When you create and deliver a presentation, you’ve produced content that can be repurposed into visibility opportunities, like a LinkedIn post, blog, or internal training module. Just make sure that there are no confidentiality rules being violated. Make it a rule to get people’s permission before sharing their input.
Improve Continuously
All strong brands ask for feedback. In addition to asking the audience for their feedback, ask AI for its perspective. Try this prompt: Please analyze this meeting transcript and review my materials. Identify ways I can be more concise and engaging in my next online presentation, and tell me the things I did well.
Make Virtual Meetings And Presentations More Efficient And Productive With AI
When you consistently use AI throughout the three steps, you’ll show up in more confidently, deliver a powerful session, and strengthen your personal brand. Working with AI helps you show that you’re professional, insightful, and audience-focused. Every time you have a virtual meetings to lead or presentations to deliver, start by asking this question: How can AI help?
William Arrudais a keynote speaker, author, and personal-branding pioneer. He speaks on branding, leadership, and virtual presentation mastery. Join his free online session, Deliver Captivating Meetings & Presentations.