My first week of training this year was almost entirely filled with sessions on Compact Slides and One-Pagers™. That surprised me. With AI tools now able to generate slides in seconds, you might expect demand for slide visualisation training to slow down. If anything, the opposite happened.
In class, we still see the same challenge: extremely wordy slides. As presenters, our heads are filled with context and background information. We know too much, so we try to put too much on the slide. Filtering what is truly important for the audience, and presenting it in a clear and engaging way, is still one of the most common issues in business communication.
This is where visual thinking becomes important. Research on multimedia learning shows that people understand information better when words are paired thoughtfully with visuals rather than relying on text alone. Once your visual thinking skills are honed, it also becomes much easier to get exactly what you want from your tools, because you know what you are trying to show and why.
In addition to visual thinking, learning how to grapple with the content, to simplify and clarify what is being shared, is another key skill. One moment in class captured this well. During an exercise, participants used AI to organise and tighten a slide, then tried structuring it themselves. The AI version was technically correct, but it still added more words for the audience to process. The human version was clearer, catchier, and more importantly, more personable. You could feel the difference immediately.
It was not an “AI is bad” moment. It was a reminder that AI can generate options quickly. But deciding what truly matters, what to keep, what to cut, and how to shape it for a real audience still depends on human judgement. And when that thinking is clear, any tool becomes far more powerful.
Tammy Selvam
Senior Business Presentations Specialist