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Storytelling
Words Can Save Your Life — But Only If You Know How to Use Them
Introduction: The Most Powerful Tool You Already Have Simon Lancaster opened his keynote with a parachute. Four passengers, three chutes, one plane going down — and the person who jumps to their death is the one who used his words worst. It is a brilliant, disarming way to make a point that runs through everything Simon does: communication is not a soft skill. It is the skill. The Question Nobody in AI Thought to Ask When ChatGPT launched, it changed everything. But Simon not
3 min read
11 Things That Will Take Your Technical Presentation to the Next Level
Introduction: Start with a Hook, Not a Title Luca Bruschi opened his session by quoting a Harvard research team — spanning MIT, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and "our proud sponsors, the Google" — who spent four years studying whether a picture is really worth a thousand words. Their conclusion? Some pictures are worth 500 billion words. It was completely made up. And it worked perfectly. The point: your opening does not have to announce the topic. It has to earn attention. On
3 min read
Panel Discussion: The Business Impact of Effective Presentations with Bosch, KBC & Ampeco
Introduction: Meet the Panelists The Panelists: Mario Pankov – Private Banking Sales Support Officer, KBC Asset Management Maryan Rizinski – Manager of Technology Consulting, Bosch Baycho Georgiev – Chief Marketing Officer, Ampeco Moderated by Stefani Tsolova – Software Engineering Manager, Progress Stefani: Baycho, AMPECO has attracted some serious investors — BMW i Ventures, LaunchHub. How much of that came down to how you presented the vision? Baycho Georgiev: The short an
3 min read
Lost in Translation: Bri Williams on Presenting Across Different Cultures
Introduction: The World Is Shrinking — Are Your Presentations Keeping Up? Most presentations are built through a single cultural lens — the presenter's own. Bri Williams, an Australian living in France, makes the case that ignoring cultural differences is not a neutral choice. It is a risk. The Costs of Getting It Wrong Cultural misunderstandings at work are more common than most people admit. A four-pillar framework reworked the night before a client presentation because fou
2 min read
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Design
AI Can Build Your Slides. It Cannot Build Your Connection.
Introduction: The Talk That Never Went Viral Damon Nofar opened with a hypothetical: imagine someone used AI to generate an entire TED Talk — script, slides, everything — and it went viral. Did you see it? No. Because it never happened. AI can produce a presentation. It cannot make an audience care. That is still entirely a human job. Idea #1: Be More Human The biggest mistake companies make with AI messaging? They let it write in AI language instead of human language. Gene
2 min read
The One Rule That Will Change Every Chart You Make
Introduction: The Most Boring Topic at Any Conference Data visualisation. Charts, tables, numbers. Piotr Garlej opens his session by admitting it freely: there is no more boring topic at a conference. We have all sat through slides packed with colour-coded bar charts and thought about excusing ourselves. The point of this talk is to make sure your audience never thinks that about yours. The Problem With Most Data Visualisation Rules The internet is full of rules for present
3 min read
Great Ideas Deserve Great Communication: Presentations That Land
Introduction: The Skill Nobody Teaches You We learn how to become great engineers, great designers, great product leaders. But almost nobody ever receives professional training in public speaking or presentation skills. The result is a strange imbalance — experts sitting on mountains of knowledge, communicating those ideas in an average way. Damon Nofar's session is about closing that gap, and he opens with a story that makes the stakes impossible to ignore: a bad presentatio
3 min read
Data Doesn't Speak for Itself — Artur Ferreira on the Art of Data Storytelling
Introduction: The Gap Between Having Data and Using It Business leaders make thousands of decisions a day based on data. But data, on its own, does not move people. It records the past. Leadership requires convincing people to act on an uncertain future — and that only happens when someone communicates well. Artur Ferreira's session is about closing that gap. Think of Data as Your GPS Artur frames data as a navigation tool — it shows you where you are and can point you towa
2 min read
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Public Speaking
How to Give Technical Demos That People Actually Remember
Introduction: The One Rule That Changes Everything The moment you look at your screen, you give the audience permission to look at theirs. That single insight is the foundation of everything Brent Ozar teaches about demos — and it is the reason most technical presentations lose their audience before they have even started. Brent makes his living doing demos all over the world. This session is his playbook. Table Stakes: The Bare Minimum for 2024 Before any of the creative stu
3 min read
Your Body Language Is Showing — Here's How to Use It Right
Introduction: Three Entrances, Three Completely Different People Ida Holten walked onto the stage three times at the start of her session. Same person, same words — and yet the audience reacted differently every single time. The first entrance was high-energy and bold. The second was apologetic, almost reluctant. The third was warm, grounded, and genuinely present. The words were nearly identical. The nonverbals were entirely different. That gap between what you say and how y
4 min read
You Can't Think Your Way to Confidence — Maya Jacobs on What Actually Works
Introduction: Stop Waiting for Confidence to Arrive Confidence is not something you build by reading about it or listening to someone speak about it. You build it by doing the thing that scares you and realising you are still standing at the end. That is the entire premise of Maya Jacobs' session — and why within the first five minutes, she had 850 people standing up, eyes closed, imagining the most uncomfortable thing she could ask of them. Maya is the founder of Stage Heroe
3 min read
From Nervous to Keynote: How to do Public Speaking
Introduction: Everyone Has Something Worth Saying Most people in IT have spent years building deep expertise. Most of them will never share it on a stage — not because they lack knowledge, but because standing in front of a room feels uncomfortable. Paula Januszkiewicz has delivered keynotes to audiences of 40,000 and recovered from a failed hard drive an hour before a major talk. Her argument is simple: if you have something useful to share, presenting is a skill worth learn
2 min read
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Tools
Stop Asking ChatGPT the Wrong Questions — Here Is How to Actually Use It for Presentations
Introduction: The Gap Between Using AI and Using It Well Only 21% of people give ChatGPT any feedback after they get their first response. The other 79% either ship the first draft straight away or give up entirely. That gap — between people who use AI and people who use it well — is exactly what Ryan J. Warriner came to Present to Succeed to close. His solution is the PATH framework: a four-part formula for giving ChatGPT precisely what it needs to build a presentation that
3 min read
PowerPoint Just Got a Copilot — Here's What That Actually Means
Introduction: A Revolution That's Already Started Nearly every hand in the room went up when Alex Selig asked how many people use PowerPoint. Far fewer stayed up when he asked who had used Copilot in the last three months. That gap — between the tool everyone uses and the AI sitting inside it — is exactly what this session is about. Microsoft's vision is simple to state and ambitious to deliver: you take the first step, Copilot takes the next three. From Layout Tool to Pres
3 min read
AI Won't Replace Your Presentation — But It Will Do 80% of the Work
Introduction: The Tools Are Already Here A year is a long time in AI. Robin Dohmen was back at Present to Succeed with a significantly longer list of tools, a clearer framework for using them, and a firm conviction: AI can now handle the majority of the work that goes into building a great presentation. The catch is that it only works if you know how to ask. Start With the Right Framework Before diving into tools, Robin establishes a principle that runs through everything:
3 min read
AMA Panel Discussion: 4 Presentation Experts on AI, Trends and Finding the Time
Introduction: Meet The Panel A panel conversation with Lucy Wyatt (Bright Carbon), Damon Nofar (Slides Agency), Jason Paul (Slido) and Olena Zubova (Represent). Moderated by Ash Pemberton — Present to Succeed Conference. After watching a live Copilot demo turn a Word document into a 12-slide presentation in under a minute, the audience had one question: should we be worried? Robin: You can either get scared or you can embrace it. AI won't replace humans — but humans with AI
3 min read
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