Cut the cord: the rise of the outsourced presentation

First published May 2024. Updated August 2026 – because I got part of it wrong, and the part I got wrong turned out to be the point.

Two years ago I wrote that tools like ChatGPT couldn’t yet write a great presentation. I’d seen four workshop participants in six months who had clearly typed something like “write a five-minute presentation on three aspects of leadership” and stood up to read out the result. It was apparent the moment they opened their mouths. My diagnosis at the time was The Reader – one of our ten Archetypes – anxious, uncertain, reading from a script because the script was safer than the room.

I was half right. The delivery looked like The Reader. But the person wasn’t anxious in the way a Reader is anxious. They were fluent. They were plausible. And that’s what made it strange – because a Reader’s problem is delivery, and this wasn’t a delivery problem at all. The content was fine. It was tidy, well-structured, professional. It just wasn’t theirs.

Presentations aren’t scripts. That’s the line I’d keep from the original, and it’s truer now. A good presentation isn’t built on recitation. It’s built on understanding your audience, taking ideas – generally your own – and moving those people somewhere: to know something, to feel something, to do something. The machine can produce the words for that. It can’t produce the wanting. The content it generates is competent, depersonalised, indifferent. It has no skin in the game. And it doesn’t know what you know – the context, the history, the thing that happened last Tuesday that everyone in the room is thinking about.

So here’s the correction. We’ve started calling this presenter the Outsourcer, and they now sit in the Twilight Zone of the Archetypes model, beside the Informer. The Informer does the work and never gives it intention – all the facts, no idea what they want you to do with them. The Outsourcer doesn’t do the work at all. Same room, same neutral impact, same forgettable outcome – and one crucial difference: the Outsourcer has considerably further to fall, because it holds right up until the first real question. Then there’s nothing underneath.

What I didn’t understand in 2024 is why people do it. It isn’t laziness, mostly. It’s that they don’t trust their own thinking – and a machine hands back a confidence they haven’t earned. It’s a way of avoiding the spotlight while appearing to stand in it. Which means the Outsourcer’s real problem is the oldest one in our model: self-limiting belief. The tool is new. The flinch isn’t.

Fluency is free now. That’s what changed. Two years ago a well-written page was evidence that somebody had thought. Now it’s evidence that somebody has a subscription. Everyone in your organisation knows this, which is why the written word has quietly stopped carrying trust – and why the room, the meeting, the briefing, the conversation across the table has become the one place a person is genuinely accountable for what they think. The presentation was always the test. It’s now the only test left.

So what do you do? Use the tools. I do. They’re good at research, at a first draft, at sharpening a slide, at telling you what the obvious objection is. Use them for everything except the one thing they can’t do, which is decide what you want the room to think, feel or do – and then stand there and mean it. Then practise. Speak to points, not a script. Give yourself permission to fumble; the fumbles are the proof of life. And own who you are, because most of us would rather hear a slightly flawed presentation delivered with conviction by you than a perfectly scripted, irrelevant, robotic one.

If you can’t be bothered to build the presentation, why should anyone be bothered to listen? Two years on, I’d only add: if a machine built it for you, the room will find out. It just waits for the first question.

Which door did your people come through – the Informer’s, or the Outsourcer’s? Either way, the fix is the same: decide what you want the room to do, and build from there. The Spotlight is where we teach it – in-house, for teams, anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us about your team.

Russell Pickering – founder of The Pickering Group, author of Step into the Spotlight.