Interview Summary

Richard Goring, the director of the presentation design agency BrightCarbon, joins Kiran Kapur to discuss presentations. The conversation centred on the common failures of presentations, particularly the phenomenon known as "death by PowerPoint," and provided a structured framework for creating more effective ones. Richard Goring outlines a three-step process for effective presentation design: first, developing a clear story by defining the objective, audience, and desired action; second, using visuals to support that story rather than relying on text-heavy slides; and third, employing simple animation purposefully for pacing and storytelling. The podcast also touches upon adapting slides for use as handouts and the current role and limitations of AI in presentation creation.

 

Key Points

  • The primary reason people created bad presentations was that they followed the software's prompts (e.g., "click to add text") instead of first thinking about their message. [02:46]
  • An effective presentation required a three-part framework: a compelling Story, supportive Visuals, and purposeful Animation. [08:35]
  • The "Story" was the most critical element. [08:43] Before creating any slides, a presenter needed to define their objective, understand their audience, and determine the call to action. [08:47]
  • Text-heavy bullet point slides were ineffective because audiences cannot read and listen simultaneously. [15:50] Visuals, or at least better-structured text in columns with clear hierarchy, were far more effective.
  • Animation should not be used for distracting effects. [20:33] Its primary purposes were to pace the flow of information, aid in storytelling by showing change or movement, and subtly improve the design. [22:00]
  • AI tools like ChatGPT were excellent for brainstorming the "Story" component of a presentation, but were not yet capable of creating genuinely effective, nuanced visual slides or animations. [29:54]

 

Interview Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Kiran Kapur (00:01):
Hello and welcome this week. We are in the exciting world of presentations, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Richard Goring, who is the director of BrightCarbon.

Richard Goring (00:10):
You don't need slides to be able to tell a story. You do need a story to be able to tell a story to communicate with people. And so the first thing that you should do before any kind of presentation or indeed any form of communication, is think what is it you are trying to do.

Kiran Kapur (00:24):
Richard, tell me a little bit about Bright Carbon. You are an interesting company before we even get into the PowerPoint presentation slide.

Richard Goring (00:31):
Oh, well thank you. We're a fairly niche company focusing on visual communication really. So that's presentations primarily and e-learning content, but anything where visuals can help you to communicate more effectively. So that can be things like infographics and explainer videos, and stuff. So quite a niche area. And the majority of our work comes from helping people with presentations, building them out to be more effective, and also running training and coaching for people on how to do things better themselves.

Kiran Kapur (00:58):
And you do a huge amount of free online training. I was skimming through some of your courses this morning and making notes that I need to go back and look in much more detail because you give away a lot of information.

Richard Goring (01:10):
Yeah, it's primarily fun to do it. I think so many people have to deal with presentations and with PowerPoint or Google Slides or whatever it is. Very few people get any formal training other than the click here to do this function. And so we have this very fortunate position where we can share with people, and webinars make it easier. Every Thursday, we do free webinar master classes for 30 minutes, just covering topics that should help people to do better, be more effective with their presentation. It's good fun.

Kiran Kapur (01:42):
And I have to say, just looking at some of your free resources, I learned tricks and techniques that I didn't even realise PowerPoint could do. There's some incredibly powerful things that PowerPoint does. I also love the way, since we're talking about Bright Carbon, I love the way you are very, very clear that you're quite a niche agency. You don't do lots of generalised marketing.

Richard Goring (02:07):
I think that comes from the expertise that we have in the company and the comfort level that we have, but also the primary ways of business, frankly, that we get new business and that we grow is through delighting our clients and getting referrals and things. And so if we are extremely good at the things that we do, but also then say, and this is what we don't do, that means that we've got a much higher chance of being successful as opposed to trying to spread ourselves too thin, where it might fall down. And so I think focusing on how we can help people the best and making sure that they're delighted with what they're getting from us is just vital to us, that's why we do it.

Kiran Kapur (02:45):
Thank you. So I find it really interesting the way you describe hating a really bad presentations on the website, something that BrightCarbon is very clear about. Why are we all so bad at doing the PowerPoint as part of a presentation?

Richard Goring (03:01):
Right? When you open there, we are a hobby horse right here.

Kiran Kapur (03:05):
Excellent. Love.

Richard Goring (03:05):
When you open a PowerPoint, what does it say? It says click to add text. And so obviously the people who have put this together know what they're doing. Oh, I'm going to do that. And you start doing what the computer tells you to, and you start adding in text. And I think that is the essence of people going down this route of slide after slide of text and bullet points and death by PowerPoints, because it's telling you what to do. And it's extremely difficult to create templates for anything else really, because at a base level, the template that you come up with in PowerPoint has to suit millions of people, billions of people around the world. And so the common factor that you could all do would be click to add text. The problem is that it's very rarely good unless you're writing a book, but you typically don't write a book in PowerPoint, and so all of a sudden it becomes a real problem. But I think that's likely the genesis of it. And when PowerPoint was invented 30 odd years ago, that was maybe what the graphics were capable of doing, although even then they could do a lot better. And so yeah, I think that's the primary reason for it. And everybody dislikes it. It's not great.

Kiran Kapur (04:16):
Yes, we all moan about it. We all talk about death by PowerPoint, but then we don't necessarily then do something about it. And I was thinking back to when I was originally trained to use PowerPoint, which of course was after I started work, because Oh, now you'll talk PowerPoint in school, that you were taught to have never have more than seven bullets on a slide. I mean, that's the one thing I remember. I don't remember being taught anything about visuals.

Richard Goring (04:39):
And here's the thing, there are lots of different variations on that. I've seen no more than six bullet points in a slide and no more than six words per bullet point. Sometimes it's three and three as well. People like to put the numbers on there. But again, how is it helpful to have that fairly arbitrary rule when, well, what if I've only got one point to make? Or what if I do have eight points, I've got a list of eight things that I need to get across, all part of one topic. Do I cut one off? And instead, you think about other things that are much more pertinent to what you want to achieve with the presentation.

Kiran Kapur (05:12):
Okay, so let's say we all hate bad PowerPoint. We all hate death by PowerPoint. You have this lovely line on your website about we hate bad PowerPoint presentations. We hate sitting through them. And so we want to save total strangers from suffering and going through it, which I just think is absolutely lovely. So let's talk about the different types of presentation. Actually quite key, isn't it? Your website seems to be very clear about that.

Richard Goring (05:36):
Yeah, so with all presentations, you have to think what am I trying to achieve with this and what is the environment in which I'm doing it? So the classic presentation is where you are standing up in a room in front of a lot of people. And so if that's a training room, for instance or a boardroom, you've maybe got between 10 and 20 people or so. The screen is going to be relatively small, and you can see them there. You've probably got a relatively clear idea of what you are trying to achieve with this particular audience. So you can be much more narrow and focused, but you can scale that up to be in a keynote at a conference. And then you've got thousands of people potentially in front of you, and you've got an enormous screen there, and you've got very different dynamics in terms of what you're doing.

(06:18):
And so you might need to think about content on the slide that is broader, more general, that's more captivating to all the audience that may not be that interested in general. Through to the other extreme, which I think lots people go for, which is I'm using PowerPoint as an authoring tool really to create a document. And so maybe that does need to be a little bit denser, that maybe needs to be a fewer number of slides so that people can flick through. Or maybe it's the basis of a meeting where you're having a discussion back and forth, and you're with a small group of people, and the slide is there as a reference for data perhaps, to form part of your discussion. So there's lots of different environments and use cases that you could have for presentations. And there's also lots of different objectives as well. Are you trying to show people there's a new way of doing something? Are you trying to get people on board with a new strategy? Are you trying to teach them something so that they can internalise that and change their behaviour? Are you trying to sell them something with a sales or a marketing presentation and be persuasive? And so I think those different components can have a dramatic impact on what you say in the presentation, how you say it and what the final deliverable would be.

Kiran Kapur (07:27):
So do you think the problem can be that people go, I've got to give a presentation, which usually panics everybody because most people do not like giving presentations. So I will start with the slides as opposed to starting with the objectives.

Richard Goring (07:40):
Yes. And again, it's open up, PowerPoint, click to add text, start doing that, or perhaps the other certainly more modern version of that is, open up PowerPoint, oh, I've got that deck from whenever and I will pull from that and maybe modify it a little bit, but I'm not truly thinking about what's going on. You said that the golden rule you were taught was no more than seven bullet points. Whilst I'm not a fan of gold and rules per se, I think guidelines can be extremely helpful. And at the risk of trying to be too reductive, let's go for three main things that you need to consider. First is the story you are trying to tell. Next is the visuals that you use to represent that story. And third is the way that you can incorporate animation into your slides to make it work. So, should we just go through those briefly?

Kiran Kapur (08:31):
Yes, please. Let's go through those very, very slowly

Richard Goring (08:34):
Story. The most important thing, I work for a presentation design agency. I love PowerPoint. Some of my colleagues love Google Slides. Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter. You don't need slides to be able to tell a story. You do need a story to be able to tell a story to communicate with people. And so the first thing that you should do before any kind of presentation or indeed any form of communication is think, what is it you are trying to do? And so I want you to think very clearly, what is your objective for this piece of communication for this presentation? What is it you are trying to achieve? Why are you doing this? Oh my goodness, so many people fail to consider that really basic thing. Doesn't need to take very long, just a minute or so. But that helps you to frame everything else that you'll be saying through your presentation.

(09:23):
The second part of that is you need to think about who is your audience for this. If you are speaking to a technical team, they probably want quite a lot of detail. They're going to be executing on something, they're interested in it, they're going to be picking holes. Maybe you want their feedback from it. And so it's okay to go into lots of information if you are presenting to the C-suite, probably not, because they're extremely time poor. They've only got maybe five minutes or so or really limited capacity to be able to take something on. They don't necessarily care about the this is what it is, they care about the this is what it means for the business, for the team, for the organisation. This is what you, as the expert presenter, would recommend that you're doing. So think really carefully about the audience that you've got there.

(10:09):
And then also related to that, what is the call to action that you want people to take? So you've got your objective, your audience in front of you, what do you want them to do to make this a successful presentation, to fulfil your objective? And if you can think from the outset of your objective, your audience and your action you want them to take, that helps you to filter out and focus all of the rest of your content into something that is meaningful and successful. And I do think that that applies pretty generally across any type of presentation you do, because it's forcing you to think about the most important components.

Kiran Kapur (10:48):
So it's interesting you use the phrase storytelling, but all of those are..., so a story to me says I need a beginning and a middle and an end. So should I be creating my presentation around a beginning and middle, and an end?

Richard Goring (11:03):
Yes. And probably do it in a nested way as well. Billy Connolly was great with this, with nesting his comedy, for instance. And the same thing is true in a presentation. So the high-level structure for your presentation should probably have a beginning and middle, and an end. Depending upon what you want to do here, there's lots of different approaches, but a really good one, if you want something that's persuasive and most presentations should be persuasive in some form, is to start talking about your audience in the beginning. This is the situation you're in or the challenges you have perhaps. In fact, the challenges sale is a really good example of this. If anyone wants to read that book, it's a fabulous guide on how to create persuasive stories. So thinking through what are the challenges to your audience right now? Some things that they may know about, some things that they don't, what is the implication of that and what maybe the shape of a solution to be able to do it, which is essentially outlining what you're going to talk about in your presentation.

(11:59):
And so, really early on, in just a couple of minutes, you framed things from the perspective of your audience as to why your content is important. That's your beginning. Your middle is where you spend most of the time. That's going to be the detail, the data, the content, the overview of the solutions, whatever it is you need to do. And now that you've done that initial setup, everything there is framed from the audience's perspective. This is why you need it, this is why it's important. And then you can do a wrap-up the end, to then connect those two bits. So we talked about this as being a problem, this is something you need, and then we've done it, and these are the conclusions, the call to actions, that's the beginning, the middle and the end. But within each slide or maybe sequence of slides, you could do the same thing.

(12:44):
We often like to talk about a three-beat structure for your slides, and that three-beat structure can be whatever you want. It could be the classic problem, solution, benefits. It could be here's the situation, this is the action, this is the outcome. It doesn't really matter what it is. But that three-beat structure helps you as a content creator to think, what is the story I'm going to tell? What content might I put on the slides to make it work? And it also makes it easier for your audience to follow along with, where am I in this? As opposed to it being, here's a whole lot of content, oh, I'm lost all of a sudden. And so it helps to guide people through and pace it in a really nice way. So yeah, structuring and structuring again is really helpful. And typically in threes, although if it needs to be four, it's not a problem. If it needs to be five, it's okay if it's just one major statement; that's all right, here's the golden rule: think.

Kiran Kapur (13:42):
Perfect.

Richard Goring (13:43):
But that kind of thing would be useful. There we go.

Kiran Kapur (13:45):
You said something about nesting, and I don't think I really understood what that meant.

Richard Goring (13:49):
Oh, I'm sorry. So if you had a slide with a three-beat structure on it, a beginning, middle and end, and another slide with the beginning, middle and end, and another slide with the beginning, middle and end, you've got this kind of series of short little story sequences. But then, overarching that, you've then got another kind of beginning, middle and an end structure to the whole presentation. So you're taking a small structure inside a larger structure, potentially inside a larger structure. If you are in a training course, for example, with a whole curriculum, and you are sequencing things there. So it just means that you don't have to have one overarching story. You can have small little bits in between it. Likewise, if you wanted to do a sales presentation, perhaps you can have your overall sales message, but then maybe do deep dives into case studies or examples, maybe technical details if that's relevant to your audience. And so again, you've got this kind of detailed structure and higher-level structures as well. That's what I mean by nesting it.

Kiran Kapur (14:47):
Brilliant, thank you. So we've not even started with our insert text here, have we? At the moment, we are just thinking. So, your next section to do after working out the story was the visuals. And I'm really intrigued that you start with visuals, not words. I presume that's deliberate. So what do I do now? I've got my story. Where do I go now?

Richard Goring (15:07):
Alright, so you've got your story. Depending upon how you've done it, it might be a mind map or a Word document or even speaker notes or bullet points or something like that, but you know what you want to say. And so then you need to think about what is the best way to visually represent this? You know what? Let's start with that classic bullet point slide. Maybe you've taken that from someone else, or you've used the bullet points to write out your notes. Why is it that a bullet point slide doesn't work? I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One is the bullet points themselves. People see those and go, oh, it's bullet points there. I hate it. Bullet points are there to try to help separate out the points that you put on there, but fatigue over time, death by PowerPoint means that everyone just hates bullet points immediately.

(15:48):
Second is there's way too much text. It's all fairly uniform on the slide, so you are overwhelmed, you can't get any sense of what it's about, and it takes 20, 30 seconds maybe to read all of that text. In the meantime, in a presentation, there's also someone talking. You can't read and listen at the same time. They're both done in the same part of the brain called the phonological loop, the auditory processing centres, which means that it's extremely difficult, and typically, you tune out the presenter and read the text, which means you lose all the nuance and the connection and stuff that the presenter will normally give you. And then third, is that it's a bit technical here, but the line length, you see bullet point slides, and it goes from all the way on the left to all the way on the right. And this now creates a problem because people are moving back and forth.

(16:34):
The eye movements are going, you can't find the start of the next point very clearly. Again, it's fatiguing and tiring. It doesn't really work very well. So if you have that, what's a very simple way of changing it? Break the content down into a column-based structure. This is what you see in newspapers and magazines because that shortens the line length. It makes it far easier to read, to pass what's going on. By breaking it into columns, you chunk it as well. I've got one bit at the left, one bit in the middle, one bit on the right, for instance. And so now you can easily see what's going on. And then you can start adding in things like hierarchy and contrast. So maybe you can add one or two words that summarise what that main chunk of content is going to be. That main chunk of content can be really small and tiny, and then the headline can be far larger.

(17:23):
As an audience member, you're then likely to scan through and read what's going on there with just those high-level words, which takes two or three seconds. And the detailed content, well, that's for the PDF or the speaker notes or whatever it is that people will normally do with it, because many presentations require multiple uses. And so that then helps you to create a slide that is still text-heavy, but is far better, far more effective from a presentation perspective. My ideal though would be, don't have the text at all. Get rid of all of that detailed content. Just have two or three words, maybe a relevant icon or image that goes with it, and now it's much more appealing as well as being far more focused on what's important. And with any visual slide, if you can get rid of stuff that's not directly helping people to understand or for you to explain your points, then it's so much the better.

(18:14):
Data-based slides are another really good example of this. If you put up a table on a slide, instantly it switches people off because there's so much information there, there's no way you can actually interpret it. There's too much going on. Instead, do it as a chart. What is the point of this? What is the purpose of it? Is there a trend over time? Is there a comparison? So let's do a line chart, let's do a bar chart and then start building out a much clearer sense of this is what the data means. A chart is a great visual representation of the data and allows people to see fairly instantly what's going on. Take it even further, though, and let's start creating a true, meaningful visual storytelling slide, where you might have something that represents the concept. Maybe you've got a site map, for instance, and you want to talk about the flow of people through it or where key things are going to happen.

(19:10):
Well, let's get a picture of the site map, that's great, but then enhance that with annotations and highlighting. So again, I've got this fairly complex image, but maybe you can use masking to focus attention on what's important there. You can use annotations, just the odd word here and there, to label part of a diagram, and that idea of highlighting content to focus attention can be used on all of your types of slides. So going back to your chart, well, if there's a particular area on the chart, show the chart and then highlight that particular bit. If you have that really basic, rudimentary column-based structure with a little bit of text in, maybe say these are the key points here, and then highlight the one or the two or whatever that's going to be most important, or maybe highlight each one in turn so you can go through and you can explain things more clearly. So I like the idea of being able to build it up and irritating. This is where the golden rules fall down, because the visuals you should use depend massively on the story you are trying to tell. It's thinking what visuals here will help people to understand what's going on.

Kiran Kapur (20:12):
Your last one was animation, and my heart sank.

Richard Goring (20:16):
Yes

Kiran Kapur (20:16):
We've all watched really bad animation in slides as somebody's done their transitions, and it goes boing, and it's totally utter convincing.

Richard Goring (20:24):
The bounce animation is the worst.

Kiran Kapur (20:27):
So why animations? And then what sort of animation should I use? But first of all, why should I even be using animation?

Richard Goring (20:33):
Yeah, so animation, totally get it. It can be and often is extremely distracting. The bounce animation, the credits, animation, the boomerang animation, all of these are hateful and should be banned. Again, I think there are three reasons why you might use animation, and you don't have to do it for all of these. The primary reason to use animation is to pace the flow of information. If in doubt, use the fade animation. Really simple, subtle, half-second building of your content. If you have three things that are going on in a slide, or even more, if you put them all up at once, you lose your audience. You now have no idea where anybody is looking. If you can animate something using simple build animations, one thing comes up in a slide. Now you are guaranteed that everyone is looking at that one thing. You are all having a shared experience.

(21:24):
Everyone, everyone's looking at the same thing at the same time, and they're listening to your explanation of that one thing. You've done that, you click, the next thing fades in. Now everyone looks at the new thing, then they are synchronised up with what you are saying, and the third and maybe the fourth and whatever it happens to be. So simple pacing of the flow of information is vital. It takes seconds to do it. It's extremely easy for you as a content creator to do it, and it's in no way distracting. People don't even notice it. You could do the same thing with builds from slide to slide if you wanted to as well. It achieves the same thing. Second is that you could use animation for storytelling. Now I'm a huge fan of this bright carbon or an agency, so we do this all the time, but now you've got the ability to change things on the slide a little bit more.

(22:13):
So let's take the example of a chart of a data set. If you had something that showed a trend over time with a line chart, that's fine. But then what if you wanted to say, but if we implemented this new system, it could be this instead. Well, you can just animate in a new line. You could just fade in a new line or you could show some movement to show that original line moving, changing over time, to really give the impact of this is the before and this is the after. If you had the idea of a site map, maybe it's people moving through the flow of a building or tests being done in a lab or something, you can actually show the movement of that on top of your diagram. You can build things up as things move around or they change colour or they grow in size or shrink down perhaps.

(23:02):
Now it's a bit more subtle, and it's not going to be used most of the time, but I think that type of animation can be extremely helpful to aid understanding to people to get something. And you can make really complex ideas, actually quite elegant through effective and appropriate use of animation. The third element is about the design. Frankly, you can make things look really nice if anyone's into Disney. Disney wrote down the rules of animation to make things feel natural and flow well. This is not something you do most of the time to be honest, but it is a nice-to-have to make things feel almost real, and just flow nicely and work well or make things pop just a little bit subtly in the way that you might have a really good website. For instance, there's little kind of flourishes on there. You can do the same thing with PowerPoint and with animations. It's very much a nice-to-have. It's definitely not vital. Just stick with pasting the flow of information and storytelling probably.

Kiran Kapur (24:04):
As a really good start. So what happens, and I get students doing this all the time where they go, it's great. I've created my slides with lots of information on it, so I can give it away as a handout at the end.

Richard Goring (24:17):
And so this is where that text into column-based structure comes in because we see this all the time. What you're trying to do there is create a real sense of hierarchy. So I've got loads of text because the text has to be there in document form. That's what people read. There's no presenter afterwards. You don't need that text. That's going to be the speaker notes, the document form to be large. If you were to shrink that down to 14 point text, that's really tiny for a presentation. If it's 14 point text, no one's going to be able to read it. But you know what, that's fine in a presentation because you don't want people to read it. That 14 point text that's comically large for a document. If you turn in an essay, it's probably more in high school, secondary school or something, and your teacher says, oh, I want a two page essay.

(25:08):
And you crank up the text size to 14 point to fill the pages. It's like, you're probably going to get told to do it again. And so it's still really large for that document. And so I think if you do that, you can tuck it down kind of out the way. Then that allows you to have a decent chunk of your slide there with the detail that's kind of larger, two, three words in a much larger point. Font 20, 24, 28 or something. It's annotated as part of a diagram, and then you can still have these little detailed boxes there that give people the ability to read it if necessary. That level of hierarchy is also really helpful if you are reading things through as a PDF later. So often people do 20- 30 slides and so 20-30 pages of PDF, and frankly no one looks at that.

(25:53):
So if you can give them that hierarchy, then as they're glancing through the PDF, if something catches the right, oh, that bit I'm interested in, then they can go and read that little bit of text that's actually relevant. This comes to the whole architecture of your slide. Your slide title in a document should probably be summarising. So this is what this slide is about, or was about, because most people might go through and they'll read the titles of all of the slides, so they get a good sense of the overall story, and then they do a deep dive into the document. If you know that you're going to do a PDF or something later on, that's probably the way to do it. However, if you are only going to be presenting, maybe change the title instead so that it's a contextualising title. This is what you are about to see.

(26:41):
It helps people to understand what they're about to see. This is again, where animation is useful. They see the title first, maybe the first piece of content, but they'll know what in general the slide is going to be about without spoiling the punchline that you're going to be delivering. But you can also take things further in terms of your document. You could create a dedicated document instead of it being 30 slides. Do a two page overview, with yes a lot of text, maybe some of the key diagrams from your presentation, but that's much more accessible. People are much more likely to do it. Or you can use the speaker notes in PowerPoint to add in all of your detail. And you've got your much higher-level visual slide at the top. And then instead of sharing just the slides, share something called the notes pages in PowerPoint. If you go to the print settings and you do file print, you've got choices to say, print what's, and you can print just your slides, or you can bring to the notes pages, which is the slide at the top and all the speaker notes underneath in a convenient document. Maybe that's what you can share instead. So a few different options there, depending upon your use case and your audience.

Kiran Kapur (27:50):
And just remember if you're going to do that, to take out any notes to yourself that you put on the speaker notes. Mine normally say, slow down.

Richard Goring (27:57):
Put those off to the side of the slide. Then they're not visible when they're printed, but they will still be there in your speaker notes bit.

Kiran Kapur (28:06):
Yes, that's a very good tip. Thank you. So for anybody listening to this and they're going, okay, so it's now 2025, we've got this thing called AI and ChatGPT. ChatHas AI changed the game? Do I just use AI now?

Richard Goring (28:22):
No, and no. Next question.

Kiran Kapur (28:26):
I was hoping you were going to say that.

Richard Goring (28:28):
So if we go think back to those guidelines of what it is you want to do, story, visuals and animations. The story is where I genuinely think AI stuff can work extremely well. If you go to ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot or something and you say, I have this presentation to do, it's on this topic, this is what I want to achieve and this is my audience, what should I be saying? It is extraordinarily good at being that sounding borg back and forth to say, oh, have you considered this? No, I wouldn't really talk about that. These are the things that might resonate with people. And then you can go back to it and say, oh, actually no, this isn't relevant because they've seen this. Or, oh, there's this thing that I completely forgot about. Thank you for the prompt. What about that? And you use that as a conversation. I mean like you would a real person as well. You can do it with a normal person too.

Kiran Kapur (29:22):
I was thinking that. But yes.

Richard Goring (29:23):
But I think in the avoidance, in the absence of anything else, those chat bot tools can be extremely helpful for that because often, they can think about things that you might not have considered. But also, quite frankly, if you're being told to use AI, this is a great use case for it because so many people don't do this at the start, but because they don't have the ability to chat to people. But because I've got it there, I can go to ChatGPT or Gemini or something. It's great for that. Once you've now got your story, translating into slides is where AI really falls down. You can ask ChatGPT, your Copilot to do it. And what you'll get back at the moment is text and picture and text and picture and text and picture. And it's really no better than what we had 30 years ago.

(30:08):
And it's because the LLMs that it's based on don't really have as a good data source. What is a good way to diagram this out? Now they are getting better. They clearly will get better. The latest version of ChatGPT is starting to do some level of infographic, which is kind of interesting, but there's still a huge amount of heavy lifting that you have to do there. It won't be a one click do it for me, but it might give you a sense of, oh, this is the type of diagram that I could do. Or it might come up with something where you go, oh, I quite like that, but how I'm going to present it? I need to modify it and change it. So maybe use it for inspiration, but it won't do it all for you. And certainly not in one click and then animating content.

(30:48):
Frankly, it's not there yet because it doesn't know the order in which you would do things. But again, animating stuff is not really a huge task. It's going to take you 10 or 15 seconds per slide if that, to animate the content with simple pacing, maybe a little bit longer if you want to do more complex storytelling, animation. So I think use it wisely, needed appropriately. And then there are some interesting AI tools that are really specific. So if you want to do image editing, for example, great all day long, AI can help with that cutting images out or expanding an image where it's quite closely cropped and you need to fill more space, or generating a particular type of image that might be helpful, but you'd then have to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of annotating it or animating it or something like that there. So use it as a tool rather than expecting it to do the whole thing. And for all the bad press that Microsoft gets about Co-Pilot, I do think they've got one thing extraordinarily, which is the name. It is a copilot. It will not do it for you. It is not designed to do it for you and never expected to do it for you. You still have to think. That golden rule that I talked about earlier.

Kiran Kapur (32:08):
I think that's a really, and I think generally that's really good advice on anything to do with AI. You should be using it as a overexcited intern or as a copilot or as a collaborator, which is how I've heard it also described. But not.. it works for you, not you work for it, I think is always worth remembering. So if there's one thing, and I think I'm fairly certain what you're going to tell me, if there's one thing you want someone to take away from this, what would it be?

Richard Goring (32:34):
It's unfair to say think, but it is that.

(32:39):
Honestly, I think for most people, if you can get that story right, everything else will flow from it. So if you can think about what is your objective, who is your audience, what do you want them to do? The types of slides that you would build out, the types of animation you'd use, the way that you would present it, all fall generally from that. Because you can frame everything you're going to do through that lens of what do I want to achieve? Who is my audience for this? That gets the level right, what do you want them to do as a result? So everything really flows from that.

Kiran Kapur (33:13):
Richard Goring, director of BrightCarbon, that was absolutely fantastic. Thank you. And I do recommend to any listeners to having a look at the BrightCarbon website, which has lots and lots of hints and tips and explainer videos. And I think you said you did masterclasses every week?

Richard Goring (33:26):
Yeah, every Thursday, Webinar masterclasses, doing lots of stuff, a lot often practical things that we can't share on a podcast, like how to do a lot of these things using PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Kiran Kapur (33:37):
Thank you very much indeed for your time.

Richard Goring (33:39):
Kiran, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.