I love to dream. Combine ideas to create new ideas. I also love to read about technology and dream how to apply it to turn my ideas into reality!

For my work, I have sat through far too many boring presentations. In my determination not to give boring presentations myself, I read several books on how to deliver compelling presentations. Resonate - is a great book by Nancy Duarte that describes how to use contrasts in your storytelling to keep your audience engaged. In storytelling, contrasts often use highs and lows. In visual storytelling, one often contrasts between complex and simple. However, the best presentation book I have ever read and the only book I have ever read twice and keep turning back to is Draw to Win by Dan Roam.

Dan describes how our brains interpret what we see, which in itself is fascinating to understand! When our brains see something like this bottle of beer, we interpret it in six steps. The first three steps all happen in parallel (count on fingers). So these three things happen all at once!

1. We determine who, or what it is we see. In the case of this bottle, we see a bottle of alcohol free beer!
2. In parallel, we determine what the impact of this bottle might be. This could be relaxation, getting to know new Toastmaster friends, quenching your thirst or getting home safely whilst still having enjoyed a beer!
3. The third piece of parallel processing determines the where or location of this bottle.

After these three parallel conclusions, our brains determine three more things but this time in series – one after the other.

1. Movement – is the bottle moving and at what speed?
2. Then we start think of logical causes and effects. If I drink this then how will I feel? If I roll it off the table what will happen?
3. Finally, we create a formula to remember what we just saw and what it might mean. Drink it, quench thirst, feel good and get home safely! However, keep upright to avoid the risk of missing these pleasures!

Having taught us how our brains interpret what we see, Dan goes on to teach us how we can apply this basic concept of how we see to present anything in an engaging and memorable way!

Presenting any topic engagingly with just six slides works as follows:

• Slide 1 - A picture of what it is or who will be impacted
• Slide 2 - How much? What is the impact or benefit of what you are presenting? This might typically be one or two charts.
• Slide 3 - Where does it fit with what I already have or know?
• Slide 4 - A timeline or description of the steps for getting there.
• Slide 5 - A logical flow or cause and effect diagram.
• Slide 6 - A formula. For example, if you do A and B and combine the output with C then you will achieve D.

I started using this approach for my presentations at user conferences and to create YouTube videos that promote our products. Besides really enjoying creating presentations in this format, I also received some great feedback from my audiences!

However, the moment I got really excited was when I was creating a Draw2Win presentation for a new chat bot solution. As I was creating visuals for the six slides, I was asking myself questions like, “Who or what will be impacted?”

Then lightning struck! What if a chat bot could ask me these questions and apply machine learning, to automatically create compelling visuals for my presentations from my answers? Generative Adversarial Networking, or GAN in sort, is a machine learning technique that can combine images and even videos from a target library to create new videos and images that have the same quality as the original input images! This technique created some of the fake Trump and Obama videos that you may have seen!

How fantastic would it be, to live in a world without boring bullet-point-slides and where complex subjects can more easily be broken down into easy to understand and engaging visuals? And who knows? One day we might be able to use similar techniques to create compelling talk tracks too and maybe even train avatars that in turn train us on the optimal body language to use to deliver our presentations in the most effective way.