Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How I Use AI As a Keynote Speaker & Facilitator (2026-09-27)

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How I Use AI As a Keynote Speaker & Facilitator (2026-09-27) :: View in Browser

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What’s On My Mind: How I Use AI As A Keynote Speaker & Workshop Facilitator

This week, let’s extend on a newsletter issue I did a couple weeks ago about how I created a speaker second brain, looking at how I use AI as a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. This issue is explicitly for people who are event planners and organizers, but also for anyone else who wants to think about how to use AI as part of the public speaking process.

When someone hires me as a speaker for their event, workshop, or conference, they’re generally looking for one of two things:

1. Better content to make the event more memorable.

2. Access to my audience to put butts in seats.

This newsletter tackles item 1. We’ll defer item 2 for another time, but the short version there is that’s a paid add-on.

How do I use AI as a speaker? How does it benefit you? Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Philosophy

I break a lot of rules when creating content for events. One of the biggest rules I break is about cognitive overload; the rule of thumb is that you generally want One Big Idea as the cornerstone of your talk or workshop, and then 2-3 supporting ideas. That makes you a memorable speaker, often motivational and powerful, easy to refer by word of mouth.

But the challenge with that approach is that also leaves audiences hungry. A properly focused One Big Idea is something you can transmit in a minute. You don’t need an hour for it. You certainly don’t need a full day for it. For example, my friend and colleague Marcus Sheridan wrote a book years ago titled They Ask, You Answer, a content strategy for businesses where you focus your time and effort on answering the real questions customers have.

Marcus’ book is so good, the idea is so good and so self contained that you don’t need to even read the book. The title alone conveys the entire strategy, tactics, and execution. I haven’t read the book (sorry, Marcus) because I don’t need to. That’s why my YouTube series that I’ve been doing for years has been titled You Ask, I Answer — because it’s literally that book brought to life.

When it comes to teaching, I follow the practices of my martial arts teachers, like Stephen K. Hayes, Mark Davis, and many others. When you attend a workshop or a clinic with these folks, you’re usually not focusing on one idea. You’re focusing on a whole bunch of ideas at a time, and the entire time, you’re taking notes, practicing, trying to soak up as much as you can.

During one seminar with master instructor Fumio Manaka, he taught the entire set of Togakure family sword techniques from all of the secret scrolls he was licensed to teach. That two and a half day workshop was pure overload - imagine trying to learn 5 or 6 big ideas, and then imagine a weekend learning several dozen including 17 techniques that normally take 2-3 years EACH to master.

When I asked Sensei Manaka why he was teaching in this manner, he said very directly, “I’m teaching you everything now because I don’t know when I’ll see you next - maybe never. This way you have enough to practice for years.”

True to his word, that workshop was in 1998. I haven’t taken a workshop with Sensei Manaka since, yet all of the material from that workshop I’m still practicing today.

That’s how I approach teaching, especially in workshops. I try to pack as much material in as practical because I don’t know when I’ll see you next, and I want you to take away as much as you can, armloads of material to go practice over time. It might be years before I see you at another workshop, so the more benefit you can get in a single event, the more you have to work with.

Is it overwhelming? Yes. Is it too much? In the days before AI, yes. But today, it’s a resounding no, and here’s why.

Part 2: How I Use AI Before the Event

I just got back from teaching a full day workshop with the Laboratory Products Association in Philadelphia, my fourth event with the LPA. I love teaching at associations and companies because it lets me do a super deep dive into a particular industry or company and think through use cases that aren’t generic. Real value from AI comes from practical application, not theory - the more relevant and specific a use case, the more someone is likely to get value from it.

Before an event, I’ll use that second brain database to explore what techniques are relevant to the audience from the over 7,000 slides I’ve built over the years. That plus the event agenda helps me decide how I’m going to approach things.

One of the most important words that I use with my second brain is scaffolding, and it comes in two varieties. The first is cognitive scaffolding, where every concept you introduce is built upon something the student already knows, or has already been taught. For example, in the martial arts, you teach the basics first - how to punch, kick, block, move your feet. Then you start scaffolding, putting together combinations of punches and kicks, blocks and parries, building on what the student has already learned. Finally, you teach the kata, the predefined routines of proven techniques so that the student understands how it all fits together.

This is an inductive style of teaching - you start small and you glue more and more together until you have something big. In educational theory, it’s one of the big theories to help teachers be more effective. There’s also its inverse, deductive, where you take a big idea and decompose it, but that’s for another time.

Alongside cognitive scaffolding is the equally important motivational scaffolding. To keep someone interested, to keep their attention these days, you need to show them early wins, early motivational boosts that reassure them and grow confidence in their abilities. Early wins, especially in a workshop, are so important to keep a person engaged in the material. Nothing’s worse in a workshop than starting out with 90 minutes of lecture and no chance to do anything.

In the martial arts these days there are many, many colored belts before black belt and promotions and tests occur much more frequently, sometimes monthly now, because of this motivational scaffolding. In the old days when I was moving up through the ranks, it could take you a year or two between small belt promotions and five to ten years