Owning the Room in the Age of AI

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.

According to the author 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.

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.

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.

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, virtual live format, virtual asynchronous formats, facilitated formats, and staged formats.

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