How to actually present data using AI in 3 moves

​Read on my website here. ​

Most people don't know what to highlight for their audience.

Our default is to process everything on the screen. So we put everything on the slide. Eight bars where two would do. Every axis labeled and every data point labeled on top of that.

We figure if there's enough on the canvas, something will land.

I didn't learn a framework for this either, until about five years ago, from Miro Kazakoff — a business school communication professor at MIT Sloan. This piece expands on what I picked up from Miro and refined over years of presenting data to executives as Head of Business Development at Lucid.

AI can solve this. But only if you know what to ask for. The catch is that no one teaches you how to actually tell AI to construct a data slide.

So the default applies in reverse: you ask AI for a chart, you get the same cluttered, four-color, label-everything output. Just generated faster.

The fix is a three-part framework I use every time, in any tool: Layout, Attention, Narrative. Three principles for selecting what to put on the slide and how to walk your audience through it.

Three things every data slide needs to land

Every data slide that actually lands does three things, regardless of who built it. You. Gemini in Google Slides. Claude. Copilot in PowerPoint.

It controls layout. It directs attention. And it wraps the data in a narrative.

When AI does the chart for you, your job changes from "build the visualization" to "tell the tool which of these three things it's optimizing for at every step." That's the new presentation skill. Three principles. Each one a sentence you can hand any AI tool and get back something a senior leader will actually look at.

Principle 1: Layout

Most AI-generated charts default to noisy. They include gridlines, full borders, both axis labels and individual data labels, diagonal text on the x-axis, and bars thinner than the white space between them.

None of that earns its place in front of a busy audience.

Your job is to tell the AI to cut anything that isn't doing work.

Remove the chart border. Drop the gridlines. Pick either a labeled y-axis or labels on each data point. Never both. Horizontal x-axis labels only. Studies show diagonal text reads about 50 percent slower than horizontal. Make the bars thicker than the gaps between them.

Then lock consistency. If you have multiple slides in the deck, your titles all use the same font size, capitalization, and case structure. Your color choices repeat from slide to slide. Your legends sit in the same spot.

Every inconsistency is one more thing the audience has to silently re-parse. Every second they spend re-parsing is a second they're not spending on your recommendation.

The shortcut for the AI: "Clean styling, no chart border, no gridlines, horizontal axis labels, consistent title format across all slides."

Principle 2: Attention

A clean slide isn't enough. Once the noise is gone, you still need to tell the room where to look.

The default move is to leave every bar in its own color and let the eye land wherever it wants. That's a coin flip. You hand control of the room to chance.

Color is the obvious lever. It's also the most powerful, because color carries tone.

Blue reads as neutral or positive. Red reads as warning or aggression. Gray reads as "background context, don't focus here."

But color isn't the only tool. You can use line thickness, intensity, position (bring one bar visually forward), or sparing data labels (label only the peak you want them to remember).

The presentation move is to advance through the slide. Same chart. Different highlights. Each one matched to what you're saying out loud. Think of it less as a static slide and more as a four-frame story you narrate over one image.

Principle 3: Narrative (Top-T)

Now that the chart is clean and the attention path is mapped, you need to wrap it in narrative. Otherwise it's still just a chart with highlights.

I use a framework I call Top-T.

Four moves. Topic, Orient, Point, Transition.

Each move pairs with one moment in the chart. Same slide but different highlight, matched to what you're saying out loud.

Here's how it plays on a hypothetical example.

Say I run mid-market sales. Last quarter, we tested an onboarding redesign with a smaller team. This is the Q3 pipeline review with the leadership team.

Topic. Frame the challenge before you describe the slide. Not the title. The stake.

Now there's a question hanging in the room. Did we hit it?

Orient. Tell them what they're looking at, so they stop searching.

Three seconds. Everyone knows where to look.

Point. One number. One insight. That's what they'll walk out remembering.

Don't explain every bar. Pick the one that matters.

Transition. Connect the data to a decision or a question.

You just turned a chart into a business decision in four moves. Same slide, four moments of focus.

This is what we teach inside the Impromptu Speakers Academy: frameworks that let you speak articulately on the spot without scripting every word.

The prompt I paste into any AI tool

Here's the prompt I paste into Claude, Gemini, or Copilot before I build any data slide. It works the same in all three because the principles are tool-agnostic.

What changes when AI does the chart

Tool fluency means knowing what to ask for. Tell the AI to apply Layout, Attention, and Narrative. Pass it the business context and the decision you're driving. The speaking — Topic, Point, Transition — still lives in your voice. AI just clears the desk so you have room to deliver them.

Whenever you're ready, here are some (free) resources you can check out:

1. ​7-Day Speaking Course — A week of short lessons that fix the most common patterns I see in coaching work.
2. ​How To Get Your Message Across Busy Executives — The companion piece on framing for senior audiences.

And if you want the full system to master articulation on the spot at work...

Enroll in The Impromptu Speakers Academy, my 20-day program for going from nervous rambler to confident speaker in any high-pressure moment: executive updates, presentations, interviews, on-the-fly Q&A.