AI Raised the Bar for My Keynote Presentations

Building quality presentations in the age of AI takes more work, not less

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.

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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.

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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 design. Death by bullet points and clip art.

I talked with Claude about the impression I wanted to convey. We landed on showing the emergence of socio-technical structures (organic systems meeting technological growth). Claude helped me write a prompt for creating techno-organic slide backgrounds with Nano Banana Pro. Each image needed space to display a quote, insight, or graphic without feeling cramped.

I used the template to create a gem in Gemini that generates dozens of these visuals on demand.

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I'm a seasoned founder, intrapreneur, and former CIO who builds maps and models for Solo Chiefs navigating sole accountability in the age of AI—informed by plenty of scar tissue. All posts are free, always. Paying supporters keep it that way (and get a full-color PDF of Human Robot Agent plus other monthly extras as a thank-you)—for just one café latte per month. Subscribe or upgrade.

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The Presentation Content

Now comes the part where orchestration matters most: every slide needs to earn its place. The goal is to give the audience something worth photographing at every major beat—because if the insight doesn’t stick without you on stage to explain it, it wasn’t an insight. And I learned this the hard way years ago: never cram a slide with text. The story of a keynote should be spoken out loud, not written on a screen. The slide highlights the main point. Everything else goes in the presenter’s notes where it belongs.

The goal is to give the audience something worth photographing at every major beat.

When a graph or video actually supports the story, show it. When it doesn’t, cut it.

AI-Generated Animations (Optional)

I don’t always bother with this step, but when there’s room it’s fun to make things more dynamic. For this keynote I experimented with xAI’s Grok and Google’s Veo to turn my static visuals into five-second animated transitions.

Sometimes these animations looked great. Other times they were absurdly funny. I left them all in anyway as a demonstration of how far AI-generated video has come in the last twelve months. Also, because chaos is where the interesting signals live.

The Test Audience

I’ll be honest: the first time I do any presentation for a live audience, it kinda sucks.

Only then do the signals come in. And most of them tell me I must do better. The middle section drags. The last section gets squeezed. A video refuses to run. Some jokes land weird. Part of the message doesn’t carry despite everything looking perfect in the outline.

Writers have proofreaders. Software has quality assurance. Keynote speakers have test audiences. The signals from a live audience hit differently than the signals from Claude. AI tells you what’s structurally wrong. Humans tell you what doesn’t move them. You need both feedback loops, and the judgment to know which one to trust.

Last Monday’s Crosscompany meetup at KLM gave me a long to-do list. This is good. You can’t fix what you haven’t broken.

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From Agility to Viability: What AI Means for Leaders and Teams [Keynote by Jurgen Appelo]

Abstract
AI is exposing the limits of every organizational model we once believed in. Agile accelerated teams but largely ignored technology. AI accelerates technology but routinely ignores people. This keynote reconnects both through the lens of socio-technical systems. It explains why agile scaling frameworks only solved parts of the problem and why systems thinking matters more than ever. From solopreneurs to frontier firms, we explore agentic AI, adaptive swarms, and networked agentic organizations. The result is a practical way to design viable organizations where human judgment and machine intelligence evolve together—orchestrated by the Solo Chief.

If this sounds like a talk your conference, leadership team, or community needs, let’s talk. I’m booking keynotes for 2026. Contact me.

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Why AI Presentations Take More Work, Not Less

My new keynote has cost me three to four days so far: researching, outlining, visualizing, animating, testing. That’s about the same as every previous keynote I’ve built.

But here’s the difference: the quality has gone up.

Perplexity sharpens my research. Claude challenges my storylines. Gemini elevates the visuals. None of them save me time. All of them raise the bar. That’s the Solo Chief deal: you orchestrate everything, so everything gets better—or worse—depending on you.

Truth be told, I wasn’t satisfied with my performance last Monday. I can do better. I see the current version as a rough diamond. Plenty of work remains before it shines. But I can already tell that, when it does shine, it’s going to outshine everything that came before. Because each talk should be better than the last one. Otherwise, why bother?

The moral: instead of using AI to shave hours off your day, you can use it to deliver your best work ever.

Your audience deserves it. And if you’re the one standing on that stage alone, so do you.

Jurgen, Solo Chief

P.S. What’s one keynote you’ve seen that raised your expectations for every talk since?