290928 - You Are the Art : Notes from Six Years of Becoming a Speaker
Jeremy Visa, a Business Central MVP from Sweden, shares speaker development lessons from six years of speaking. It covers talk structure with anchors and accordion topics, slides as memory anchors, a four-gate preparation workflow with Claude, and AI-based talk evaluation with a local eval kit.
- Welcome and housekeeping
- Introduction and the art of becoming a speaker
- AI tools and avoiding the meat proxy trap
- Talk design philosophy and audience expectations
- Trial by fire: first speaking experience
- Development as speaker: MCT, dungeonmaster, and mentoring
- Days of Knowledge Nordic: Last-minute preparation for a 90-minute talk
- Talk structure: Anchors and accordion topics for flexible pacing
- Slides as tools: Using them as anchors rather than scripts to read
- Recording and evaluation: Using AI tools to assess talk effectiveness
- Tools of the trade: Timers, clipboard management, and prepared AI sessions
- Talk composition: Index cards, flexibility, and audience engagement
- AI assistance for talk preparation with Claude
- Four gates framework and talk preparation stages
- Real example: agentic development talk with timing expansion
- Pacing table iterations, accordion stretches, and agent training
- Moving beyond PowerPoint creation and handling live technical issues
- Practice review kit for measuring talk quality and self-assessment
- Learning from evaluation metrics and publishing insights
- Small audiences, lasting impact, and agent tool usage
- Designing talks for audience action, retention, and co-speaking strategies
- Co-speaking versus solo speaking approaches
- Rehearsal techniques, demo pacing, and timing tactics
- Preparation efficiency, practice strategies, and story repositories
- Session closing and next webinars
Overview
Jeremy Visa, a Business Central MVP out of Sweden, describes how he became a speaker, starting with his first time on stage in 2022. He argues that a deck is only a receipt, and that each talk should start from what a person should leave thinking or with. He also warns against becoming a “meat proxy” who passes AI output along without adding value.
The session covers practical methods. Talks are built from anchors and accordion topics that can stretch or shrink without losing the plot. Slides serve as prompts, not scripts. He demonstrates a four-gate preparation workflow with Claude (24 conversation turns for this talk), Copilot fixing 237 font issues in PowerPoint, and a local talk eval kit that uses Whisper to report pace, fillers and pauses. He also covers co-speaking, demo pacing and rehearsal tactics.
Key points
- Structure a talk as anchors at known moments, with accordion topics at the end of each moment so you can flex timing without losing the narrative.
- Use slides as prompts for memory, not scripts. This takes practice. Write talks as small individual pieces, for example on index cards or post-its.
- Four-gate preparation: time blocking and brainstorming, markdown slide layout, deck building, then review, practice and delivery. Each stage has its own cost of change.
- For live demos, pre-record AI agent sessions, because responses can take 30-60 seconds and connections can be flaky. Preload snippets with the Windows multi-clipboard. Record long demos and play them back at 2x speed.
- The talk eval kit runs a local model and uses Whisper to transcribe. It reports words per minute, fillers, pauses and engagement, and compares you with other speakers. Its suggestions may not fit your style.
- Copilot fixed 237 glitchy font issues in a PowerPoint deck in about 30 seconds. You need to know the shape of the output you want.
- Co-speaking is recommended for new speakers, because a seasoned co-speaker can hold the audience and the moment when things go wrong.
Features
| Feature | Status | At |
|---|---|---|
| Using AI to build presentations | status not stated | 5:59 |
| Talk deck as receipt philosophy | status not stated | 7:20 |
| Talk structure using anchors and accordion topics | status not stated | 15:53 |
| Using slides as anchors rather than scripts | status not stated | 17:34 |
| AI-powered talk evaluation using audio and presentation materials | status not stated | 19:16 |
| Windows multi-clipboard for preloaded content | status not stated | 21:29 |
| Prepared AI session walkthroughs | status not stated | 21:29 |
| Flexible talk composition using index cards or post-it notes | status not stated | 23:38 |
| Reading the room and flexible content selection | status not stated | 24:57 |
| Accordion content structure for talks | status not stated, demoed | 26:42 |
| AI-assisted talk building with Claude | status not stated, demoed | 27:22 |
| Four-gate talk preparation framework | status not stated, demoed | 28:28 |
| Copilot for PowerPoint tasks | status not stated, demoed | 39:05 |
| Talk evaluation kit | status not stated, demoed | 39:49 |
| Talk performance metrics analysis | status not stated | 42:06 |
AL objects mentioned
As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.
Quotes
- 5:03 “meaning that the output the product of what we’ve produced is just the result”
- 6:14 “we have these days for someone who just takes AI output hands it to the next person down the line and that is a”
- 7:20 “the decks are just a receipt. The the process that you are trying to uh do is have your audience leave with what they’re”
- 8:04 “every talk that I build starts from the question of what should a person leave thinking or what should a person leave with tools”
- 9:01 “I’m Jeremy Visa. I’m a Business Central MVP out of Sweden. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now.”
Presenters (as heard): Jeremy, Luke, Steve Endo, Tina, Stefan Maroon, Jeremy Visa, Tobias Fster, Arthur Vandervort, Arthur.