Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with John Polk

John Polk is the coauthor of Presentation Pitfalls: 10 Traps Business Professionals Fall Into and How to Avoid Them. He is President of John Polk & Associates and a former Data Visualization Professor at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business. John designed the “Creating Effective Presentations” workshop for Capital One, which over 10,000 associates have attended. John now teaches workshops and coaches leaders to design and deliver presentations that engage, influence, and drive action.

In this conversation, John talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: John, your session this year is Power Prompts, about elevating AI from chatbot to collaborator. What’s the difference between a prompt that treats AI like a chatbot and one that treats it like a real collaborator? Also, what takeaways can the audience get from your session at the Presentation Summit?

John: A key strategy for making your AI tool collaborative is giving it the right context. In our workshops, we share worksheets with questions to help presentation designers assess their audience, purpose, and setting so they can make design decisions. Feed your AI tool your completed worksheets to give it context. For example:

I’m presenting to the results-focused CEO. My goals are to share the problem to get funding for my recommendation and ensure the C-Suite trusts that we have the right team to pull this off. The meeting is in person, but the CIO will be on Zoom. My design needs to be simple, but professional. I want to use analogies and stories to illustrate complex concepts.

By the way, your human collaborators benefit from this context too.

The key takeaways from my Presentation Summit session fall into three categories:

1. Understand AI’s limitations and how prompt engineering can help. For example, AI agrees with you 50% more than humans agree with you (Stanford Report). That’s great for your ego, but less great for your decision-making. To address that, include prompts that encourage AI to stress-test your ideas.
2. Leverage AI’s roles and provide context. I describe six roles AI can play (e.g., thinking partner or creator). When prompting AI, you’ll get better results if you tell it what role you want it to play.
3. Apply the POWER-prompt framework. POWER is an acronym for Prepare, Orient, Write, Explore, and Refine. My favorite Prepare Prompt is, “What do you know about me?” AI remembers information you provide to make answers more relevant. That includes information about you. That means it can remember things that are unhelpful or wrong. On the flip side, if you ask it to store useful information about you, it will give more relevant answers. For example, I encouraged a client to share that she recently received her PhD. From then on, AI included complete citations whenever she asked it to do research. The rest of us non-PhDs just get a link to click if we want to verify a source.

Geetesh: Between conducting workshops, coaching speakers, and writing books, where does AI actually save you the most time in your own work today?

John: I’m still amazed at how much time AI can save. But for every time-saving story, I typically have a time-wasting story. And sometimes that’s from the same exercise. Image and video creation can be a huge time savings, especially when you want an image that stock photographers would never think of.

For the cover slide of my POWER Prompts presentation, I wanted to cycle a short video of a Tesla coil, like in the old Frankenstein movies. I wasted an hour with Microsoft Copilot’s Create. I even asked Copilot how to prompt Copilot to get what I wanted. After several failed attempts, Copilot admitted it couldn’t do what I wanted. But then it recommended a free tool that could do the job. It was impressive that AI referred me to a competitor. And hats off to Pika, which nailed it on the first try with this simple prompt: “Create a 10-second video of a Tesla coil with electricity sparking off it.”

A powerful way AI saves time is by cutting through my writer’s block. In the early days of AI, I wrote an article, and the publisher asked for a 300-word abstract. It was hard enough for me to cut my draft article down to 3,000 words, and now they wanted me to summarize it in 300. Impossible! But AI doesn’t care. It quickly gave me a 350-word summary (AI wasn’t good at counting words back then). The summary was subpar, so I changed nearly every word. But it was much faster to edit AI’s subpar summary than to write one myself.

For the record, I wrote the first draft of our book, including the illustrations, without AI.

Geetesh: In Presentation Pitfalls, you and your coauthor Justin Hunsaker wrote about traps like the Frankenstein Trap and the Black Hole Trap. Without giving away too much, which of these traps do you see presenters fall into most often, and what’s the simplest way out of it?

John: That’s like asking me to choose my favorite child! We constantly see presenters fall into all 10 traps. The Expert Trap is certainly one of the top three. Presenters fall into the Expert Trap when they fail to translate their knowledge in a way the audience can understand. When you are an expert on a topic, you forget what it was like to not understand that topic. Experts are passionate about their area of expertise, so they want to share everything they know. Experts also develop jargon, acronyms, and other shortcuts that make it easier to communicate with other experts but harder to communicate with non-experts.

We share three ways out of the Expert trap: analogies, visuals, and frameworks. Analogies are the simplest way out. Analogies are effective because they build on your audience’s existing knowledge. Let’s say you’re a tech startup building a platform that lets homeowners rent their bathrooms. By comparing your idea to Uber, your audience understands that the platform connects bathroom owners and people who need a bathroom. And, just like Uber (usually) provides a better experience than a taxi, your service provides a better experience than a gas station bathroom. AI is a great tool for brainstorming analogy ideas.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.