On Presenting

Just completed a one hour customer presentation this morning. It was the culmination of a six-week project that shoud lead to bigger opportunities. I love doing presentations and I’m really comfortable doing so in front of people, especially when it is directly related to my field of expertise.

Each time I prepare such presentations, I always think about Steve Jobs keynotes. Always. He was a model for me. And still is. There is a little bit of his way into my presentation delivery: setting the stage, telling a story, and a « one more thing » whenever possible.

In my day-to-day work, I’m benefiting so much from many mentors that I had a chance to meet during my career. They don’t know it, but they helped me so much to become what I am today and how I work with my other colleagues. Someone said: we are the sum of people we met in our life. I like this a lot.

Yesterday at the office, during a web conference, one of my colleagues, probably around 24 years old, called me a boomer! I responded: Hey, young boy, consider take ChatGPT for a ride and ask him what is the “X” generation is? I felt insulted.

Yesterday, while writing and editing a report for one of our clients, I used ChatGPT for two different use cases. One use case was to ask for a summarization of what “firmware” is and how critical it is. The second use case is to define the pillars of a data management and governance policy in the enterprise. On that one, I asked for more details about managing unstructured data. The ChatGPT results were mind-blowing. I know a lot about this specific IT field, and I could validate the correctness of the answers. I saved a lot of time because of ChatGPT.

But what about my ethics?

Should I write a disclaimer in this report that says GenAI was used to put together some portions of this report? Is the client ready and mature enough to read this disclaimer? Will he understand that ChatGPT is in fact like an assistant to whom I asked to summarize what a data governance policy is? How do I cite my sources?

Yesterday I did a 20-min presentation on how to take advantage of ChatGPT and GenAI tools at work, for my colleagues. Many of them didn’t learn anything because they already experimented with these tools. For others, they learned quite a bit and I saw their enchantment in their eyes. This reminds of 1993 when I gave a similar presentation about tools like Netscape, Newsgroups, Gopher, and Mail and how to use http requests. Today, we need to learn how to create effective “prompts”.

I have been tasked to create a short presentation to my colleagues on how to take advantage of ChatGPT in day to day work. That will be a fun one to create. I love those little special projects. 😊👨🏻‍💻

I’ve been granted a Microsoft Copilot license at work for testing purposes. I have a love and hate relationship with Microsoft software in general. This will probably extend to cover Copilot as well. I shall not be deceived by this video. I will see.

☝🏻 Thought of the day: collaborative software or services enabling better collaboration within a team is overrated or overestimated. If you are a loner at work, you’ll stay a loner, with or without a collab suite. 🤷🏻‍♂️