Presentation skills have always been critical to career success. From a functional perspective, strong communication skills help leaders outline vision, motivate followers, and coordinate collective action. From a symbolic perspective, good presenters just look more like leaders. They come across as competent, capable, and charismatic. Indeed, some evidence suggests that their delivery matters more than the content they present. 

But presenting in public can give people nightmares. They can’t sleep the night before because they fear stumbling over their words or drawing a complete blank. Public speaking is so reliably anxiety inducing that psychologists use it as a means of creating stress in their laboratory studies. In the Trier Social Stress Test, for example, subjects are asked to prepare a free-form presentation to deliver in front of an audience. In one study, just a few minutes of preparation triggered spikes in heart rate and stress hormones like cortisol. 

For those who fear public speaking, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news first. These presentation skills recently became more important, and I mean a lot more important.

AI has crept into our workflows—conducting background research, providing feedback, and, in some cases, even writing on our behalf. However, recent research suggests that people heavily discount others’ work when they think it is produced by AI. In one study, participants read identical pieces of writing, but some were told a human wrote it while others were told AI wrote it.

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