Owning the Room in the Age of AI

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IN AN AGE where artificial intelligence can generate presentation scripts, polish slides, and even give feedback to the tone of your voice during rehearsal, what sets presenters apart isn’t just content, it’s presence. When the moment matters, audiences still want a real person to show up. They want to connect human to human so that they can trust what’s being said and who’s saying it. Presence has become the most strategic communication skill in business.

At Duarte Inc., we’ve seen this shift firsthand. Large companies still come to us to build materials for sales presentations. But lately, we’re seeing something deeper underneath the request. They don’t have a slide deck problem — their teams have a presence problem.

That doesn’t mean that they lack polish. Rather, it means they lack the ability to walk into any room prepared to make people care. Of course, these days, “the room” isn’t always a room. For instance, in sales, being prepared can include competency in generating leads through webinars, closing sales in video meetings, and representing your company at a trade show booth.

What’s driving some of this shift is a keen hunger for trust. Because AI cannot explain how or why it arrived at a particular conclusion, it erodes trust — especially if the content it generates could have significant consequences. Confirming that content is generated by a human has taken on new importance: According to the “2025 Freeman Trust Report,” for instance, 95% of survey respondents indicated that they trust brands more after attending an event in person. Another driver is simply audience expectations: Even TED, renowned for its formal presentation talks, is incorporating more conversational formats, such as demos, interviews, and Q&As at its events. In both face-to-face and highly digital environments, the most powerful and credible messages are delivered by people who are primed to accommodate whatever challenges the channel poses — and who can make their messages land.

Casual Formats Require Serious Work

Presentations used to be about a single moment: one person, with a slide, on a stage.

Now, communicating is a system. A single message might move across six different formats before it sticks. One piece of content might be in written form. Another might happen in a panel discussion. That discussion might be cut into short-form videos and posted on a variety of channels. At my company, we have found that communication works best when you think through it as a system of sticky moments that are designed with intention.

The big shift on presentation stages is a swing from monologues to multiple-presenter, moderated conversations and interactions. With the rise of podcasts and livestreamed reaction videos, many consumers of content now prefer communication that feels like a conversation rather than a performance. Organizations’ town halls are incorporating interactive dialogue, with Q&As and on-the-spot polling, rather than just pushing information to employees. Presenters are often shifting into hosts who elevate others rather than make themselves the center of attention.

This shift to conversations as presentations sounds like it might be less work to pull off, but it’s not.

Formats like on-stage conversations and interactive back-and-forths may feel less formal to an audience member, but the planning is just as intense.

Panels done well involve heavy lifting behind the scenes. The team needs to spend time aligning on the message arc, preparing the speakers, planning transitions, anticipating questions, and designing supporting visuals. What looks like “just a chat” on stage or in a webinar is often the result of multiple strategy sessions, pre-calls, and postmortems. That’s the cost of building moments that feel effortless.

For instance, one global services company transformed a large team meeting into what it called a “spark tank.” During the session, three solutions architects pitched the projects they had worked on, and employees voted on the one they wanted to hear more about during the meeting. I saw the planning documents for this interactive staff meeting. The prep sheet for the people delivering the pitches was three pages. In addition, the document about the process, format plan, and internal communications was eight pages. Did they also use slides? Yes. But the session demanded an investment of time for strategizing, framing, process planning, and getting approvals.

Communication crafted in multiple formats pulls people in and builds meaning in real time. This is true for messages from a stage as well as messages shared in smaller group settings, like a leadership conversation, a customer Q&A, or a livestreamed fireside chat. Their big impact comes from the presence of the speaker — when the audience can see them in real life and sense their conviction.

Communicating this way requires critical thinking, creative storytelling, audience empathy, and the ability to improvise when needed. These soft skills (if we can still call them that) are becoming hard requirements.

The New Communication Toolkit

To really own the room, real or virtual, leaders need to understand all the tools used to communicate content. Instead of just crafting one presentation, leaders need to remember that they are designing for a constellation of moments. Each moment can be architected to support their message and influence their audience toward adopting their idea.

Business communicators need fluency across a wide mix of mediums. Here are five:

Written formats. When visualized well, six-page memos can be a strategic asset. Used as a read-ahead, a written document (or Slidedoc, which our team has developed) can build buy-in before a meeting even begins. It can double as documentation and a conversation guide and be a useful leave-behind. Written artifacts are an important part of a persuasion system. When your words on a page bring clarity, making decisions becomes easier and happens faster.

Virtual live formats. Online presenting is central, especially in B2B. A substantial 86% of workers regularly have online or hybrid meetings. Content delivered in real time, face-to-face (even on a screen), is perceived as trustworthy. Virtual platforms have become deeply integrated into daily business operations, fundamentally reshaping how people meet and persuade. Live formats like Zoom meetings, LinkedIn Live, and digital town halls require strong structure and message control. Presenters need to guide the audience, build trust, and land the point.

Virtual asynchronous formats. Asynchronous video and audio are here to stay as major communication vehicles. Sales sends pitches via video files. CEOs send internal updates via video. But there are also options like internal and external podcasts and short-form clips on LinkedIn that help give messages longevity and permanence. A few times a year, for instance, I send a CEO memo as a recording to all my employees. The stakes are high, and I put a lot of planning into it. Preparation is required to deliver with presence, because you’re not looking at a human when you’re filming — you’re looking at technology. With practice, I’ve learned to look into my webcam and feel my heart warm as I speak to podcasters or my staff so that they can see, and feel, what I’m saying.

Facilitated formats. Panels and live Q&As are on the rise for both internal and external communication. The best ones have a clear strategy and purpose and are carefully designed to have a spontaneous feel. That means prepping panelists on tone, timing, and roles. You have to craft a conversation plan in advance, even if the words aren’t scripted. When I was on a panel for the Canva Create conference, my session was managed by a top podcaster. He interviewed the panelists in advance and encouraged us to be real, adapt our content as the conversation unfolded, and react to the content of the other panelists in real time. If you’re hosting others, you’re a presenter and a producer, and the best hosts are managing the flow in real time.

Staged formats. Main-stage keynotes still matter. When the stakes are high — as with presentations on culture change, product launches, and strategic announcements — you’ve got to make sure that the message is clear. These immersive and curated experiences can move an audience or an organization and can shift an entire industry. But they need to be prepared in such a way that they can be chopped up: Your communication is no longer finished at the podium. These moments now live as part of a larger system of repurposed video clips. They get chopped into shareable clips, embedded in sales decks, quoted in investor communications, and turned into social snippets. Great messages will stick at scale!

Each of these five formats takes time to develop. A panel takes just as much planning as a staged talk. A podcast episode can require more edits than a slide deck. A town hall with no slides might require more preparation than one with slides because now every word, every silence, and every transition carries meaning. It’s a myth that something that looks casual and personal must have been faster to produce than something more formal — the opposite is true.

As a presentation company, my organization has always built slide decks for our own internal events. This year, we knew that an interview format was the better option. We listened to the team leaders, framed up the messages, created supporting points, and then wrote the questions that our facilitator would ask. Making the experience come across as more real than rehearsed was important.

Bottom line, every high-stakes message needs collaboration across stakeholders, shared working docs, alignment meetings, a narrative arc, visual thinking, and time for rehearsal. Your formats can change, but mapping out a strategy and delivering it in a way that sticks doesn’t change. By taking the time to develop these messages thoroughly, a presenter has a better chance of coming across as informed, able to listen and respond to questions, and able to connect with the audience.

Showing Up Well Is the Work

We are at a strange intersection. AI can help speed up your work by writing your scripts and automating your slide layouts. But what it can’t do is replace your ability to read a room.

Audiences are tired of ill-prepared content and underprepared presenters. They don’t want to be impressed or dazzled. They want to feel like you cared enough to make the time they’re spending with you worthwhile. Communication now means crafting multiple formats so well that they build meaning in real time.

The hard work now is preparing leaders to show up well in every room and to be ready for a boardroom conversation, a keynote, a podcast, a short-form video, or an impromptu Q&A. Preparing enough to hone a presence is what lets leaders own the message and take advantage of each moment and format in a powerfully human way. Audiences are pickier today than they’ve been in the past, but they all really want the same thing: a human to hold their attention long enough to transfer meaning.

The organizations that will win are the ones that build communication into their core operations like a system rather than seeing it as an afterthought. When you wire communication in as a discipline and train your teams to deliver messages well, you’ve done the bulk of the work to help your company win.

When ideas are thoughtfully shaped and delivered, they unite teams and inspire progress that scales. With so much synthetic content out there, real human communication will be what helps your organization win.