How Not to Use AI for Public Speaking: Avoid Common Mistakes and Preserve Confidence
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a public speaking coach, marketing leader, and 2x Best Selling Author, including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps introverted professionals and leaders take control of public speaking anxiety and use speaking to market themselves, build influence, and communicate with impact.
Using AI for public speaking can accelerate preparation, sharpen delivery, and improve confidence, but misusing it can quietly ruin your speaking performance and connection with your audience. Many speakers unknowingly fall into traps by treating AI as a shortcut rather than a support tool. Recognising these pitfalls ensures AI amplifies your thinking instead of creating dependence, rigidity, or superficial content.
AI should be your assistant, not your replacement. When used correctly, it can speed up research, spark ideas, and help you structure talks more effectively. But when misused, AI can lead to rigid scripts, generic content, over reliance, or preparation that looks polished on paper but falls flat in front of a live audience. Understanding how not to use AI ensures it strengthens your public speaking rather than quietly weakening it.
Why Treating AI Outputs as Complete Speeches Undermines Public Speaking
AI outputs are starting points, not final products. Treating them as complete speeches can limit flexibility, reduce ownership, and make you dependent on text rather than ideas. Over time, this reliance erodes natural delivery, engagement, and your ability to adapt to live scenarios.
How Complete AI Scripts Limit Flexibility
Lifting content word for word from AI ignores authenticity, context, and audience specific details. AI generated scripts may seem polished, but in practice, they can make you rigid, unable to respond naturally to interruptions, timing changes, or unexpected audience questions.
Over time, this rigidity creates mental patterns tied to words instead of concepts. If relied on it can make speakers lazy when it comes to actually delivering public speaking. Speakers become fixated on recall rather than ideas, reducing eye contact, vocal variation, and presence. Even subtle changes in audience reaction may throw off delivery because AI cannot anticipate every live variable.
Using AI as a Source of Ideas Instead of Final Material
Instead, treat AI as raw material for inspiration and insight. Extract ideas, refine arguments, and contextualise examples using your knowledge and understanding of the audience. Combining multiple AI suggestions, then adapting them to your tone, style, and voice, ensures that your speech is authentic, flexible, and audience focused.
This approach maintains ownership and confidence, while AI accelerates preparation by providing a broad range of possibilities, uncovering gaps, or offering alternative perspectives. You remain in control, using AI to support critical thinking, not replace it.
Why Over Reliance on AI for Creative Ideas Can Limit Originality
AI can generate ideas rapidly, but leaning too heavily on it for creativity can stifle originality, reduce authenticity, and limit your unique voice. Ideas only have impact when filtered through your judgment, aligned with audience context, and shaped with personal insight.
Risks of Generic AI Generated Ideas
Excessive reliance on AI often produces predictable or uninspired content. AI lacks emotional nuance, cultural context, and human intuition, so ideas can fail to resonate with diverse audiences. Presenting outputs without adaptation can erode credibility and reduce engagement. Repeated dependence also risks convergent thinking, where multiple presentations start to feel similar. This reduces novelty, making it harder to surprise, captivate, or leave a lasting impression on the audience.
Using AI to Enhance, Not Replace, Thinking
Use AI as a creative accelerator, not a decision maker. Let it challenge assumptions, explore multiple angles, and surface ideas you might not have considered. Then filter and refine using your judgment and expertise. Integrating personal stories, examples, and experiences ensures content is authentic, audience relevant, and compelling. This approach balances efficiency with originality, allowing AI to amplify your thinking without eroding your personal voice.
Why Memorising Full AI Generated Scripts Reduces Connection and Confidence
Some AI tools encourage memorisation, but reciting scripts can seriously undermine presence, adaptability, and audience connection. Over reliance on word for word output shifts focus from engaging with the audience to recalling exact wording, which increases stress and limits spontaneity. Memorisation may initially feel like preparation, but in reality, it can reduce your natural expressiveness, vocal variation, and non-verbal communication cues that are critical for effective delivery.
Memorising scripts also discourages thinking on your feet. When you are tied to exact wording, you may struggle to adjust your speech if a question arises, an anecdote needs expanding, or timing changes occur. This can result in awkward pauses, rushed sections, or skipping important points because your focus is on memory rather than the message. Over time, reliance on memorised scripts can destroy your confidence in public speaking and create a fragile sense of preparedness that only becomes apparent under pressure.
How Memorisation Impacts Audience Engagement
Memorised scripts drastically limit your ability to adapt in real time to audience reactions and cues. Your eye contact may be reduced, your gestures may feel mechanical, and your pacing may become uneven. Audiences subconsciously pick up on rigidity, which can reduce engagement and weaken the connection between speaker and listener.
Even minor disruptions, such as skipping a line or misremembering a phrase, can break the flow of the presentation and erode confidence. This over focus on recall transforms public speaking into performance rehearsal rather than meaningful communication. The speaker becomes a reader of words instead of a communicator of ideas, which diminishes emotional impact, reduces relatability, and limits the ability to improvise examples or explanations that arise spontaneously.
Memorisation also restricts responsiveness. Live audiences provide energy, cues, and feedback that are impossible to predict in a static script. Sticking rigidly to memorised content prevents you from adjusting tone, emphasis, or sequencing based on audience engagement, meaning opportunities for connection and persuasion are lost. Over time, this approach can reinforce anxiety and dependency on notes, creating a cycle where natural confidence never fully develops.
Using AI to Support Understanding Instead of Recitation
Instead of producing text for rote memorisation, AI should be used to clarify ideas, structure content, and highlight key points. Its value lies in helping you internalise the material so that you understand the concepts deeply enough to explain them in your own words. By focusing on comprehension rather than exact wording, you build confidence that comes from mastery, not memorisation.
Internalising concepts allows you to speak flexibly and authentically, adapting examples, pacing, and emphasis to audience reactions. AI can suggest phrasing, structures, or transitions, but your role is to interpret, personalise, and weave these into a coherent narrative that resonates. This ensures your speech remains engaging, dynamic, and credible, while still benefiting from AI’s support in preparation.
Ultimately, using AI in this way enables freedom, creativity, and responsiveness. You are no longer bound by words on a page but empowered to focus on audience needs, spontaneous insight, and natural delivery. Memorisation becomes unnecessary because understanding replaces recall, and authenticity replaces rigidity.
Why Choosing AI Based on Features Instead of Fit Can Backfire
Not all AI tools are equally suitable for public speaking. The most feature rich or popular tool is not automatically the best choice, especially if it does not align with your preparation workflow, thinking style, or the readiness of your presentation. A tool that excels at generating slides or voice outputs may add complexity without improving your clarity, structure, or audience connection.
Selecting the wrong AI for the wrong reason can quietly erode confidence, create unnecessary work, and even reinforce bad habits in preparation. What matters most is how well the tool supports your thinking, strengthens understanding, and integrates with your natural workflow. Without this alignment, even powerful AI can become a distraction or crutch rather than a genuine aid.
The Danger of Chasing Features
Focusing on flashy features such as automated slide decks, summaries, or text to speech outputs can distract from the true goal of public speaking preparation, which is thinking clearly, structuring ideas, and connecting with the audience. Over featured tools often fragment attention, increase cognitive load, and encourage passive consumption of AI outputs rather than active engagement with your own material.
This reliance can create a false sense of progress. You may feel prepared because a slide deck is polished or a speech looks complete on the page, but true readiness requires understanding, adaptability, and practice. Chasing features can also encourage overproduction, where outputs are impressive in appearance but lack substance, clarity, or alignment with your message. Over time, this undermines confidence and reduces flexibility when responding to live audience dynamics.
Relying on features alone may also foster dependency. Speakers may defer to AI for decisions they should be making, reducing critical thinking and ownership of content. This increases the risk of speeches feeling generic, disconnected, or overly rehearsed, and may limit your ability to improvise, adapt, and engage naturally with your audience.
Choosing AI Based on Alignment with Your Process
Instead of being seduced by features, prioritise tools that align with your workflow and genuinely enhance preparation. The right AI should clarify ideas, streamline organisation, and provide support where friction exists, without forcing you into a pre-defined process. Evaluate tools for how they integrate with your thinking style, whether they save time without sacrificing comprehension, and whether they help you feel more confident and in control.
A well chosen tool simplifies decision making, helps prioritise content, and allows you to focus on meaning rather than mechanics. It should act as a partner in preparation, supporting brainstorming, structuring, and refinement while leaving ownership of ideas, voice, and delivery firmly in your hands. Alignment over novelty ensures that AI enhances your preparation rather than becoming a source of distraction or anxiety.
Why Using Multiple AI Tools Without Clear Purpose Can Create Confusion
Using multiple AI tools simultaneously can sometimes add unnecessary complexity rather than efficiency. Without clear roles or boundaries, tools may duplicate work, generate conflicting outputs, or require excessive synthesis on your part. This can create friction, slow preparation, and erode the confidence that comes from feeling in control of your material.
Adding AI should simplify preparation, not increase it. Too many tools without a clear framework can overwhelm even experienced speakers, creating the illusion of productivity while increasing cognitive load. Intentional workflows maintain clarity, focus, and a sense of ownership throughout the preparation process.
Assigning Roles to Different AI Tools
Effective use of multiple AI tools requires defining distinct roles for each. One tool might specialise in audience research, trend analysis, or idea generation, while another excels at structuring, refining language, or stress testing arguments. Clearly assigning functions ensures outputs are complementary rather than overlapping, which reduces noise and maximises utility.
Boundaries between tools also prevent confusion about which outputs to prioritise and how to integrate them. This structured approach keeps preparation intentional, efficient, and aligned with your goals, allowing each AI to enhance specific aspects of the process without overwhelming the speaker.
Signs Your AI Workflow is Overcomplicated
Overcomplication often becomes evident when preparation feels heavier, slower, or more cognitively demanding after introducing AI. Red flags include duplicated outputs, conflicting suggestions, or an inability to synthesise insights efficiently. Multiple tools doing similar work can create noise instead of clarity, undermine confidence, and reduce your ability to focus on core ideas.
Intentional AI workflows minimise cognitive load, maintain clear focus, and ensure each tool adds tangible value. The right AI configuration reduces friction, speeds up preparation, and strengthens confidence, rather than introducing ambiguity or dependency. Efficiency, clarity, and alignment should guide every AI choice, ensuring your preparation workflow enhances thinking, ownership, and delivery.
How Relying on AI Can Give a False Sense of Preparedness in Public Speaking
AI can generate polished outputs quickly, but this convenience can create the illusion of readiness. If speakers adopt AI generated content without critical engagement, personal reflection, or practice, it can lead to overconfidence and poor delivery. Polished outputs alone do not lead to good public speaking delivery, and over reliance may mask gaps in knowledge, reasoning, or ability to connect with an audience.
While AI can save time and provide structure, it does not automatically translate into performance competence. Mistaking completed outputs for true preparation can cause hesitation, reliance on notes, or rigidity when unexpected questions or scenarios arise. The more a speaker depends on AI outputs, the greater the risk of a disconnect between written content and live performance. To create a good balance of using AI in your public speaking preparation, check out the Ultimate Guide to Using AI for Public Speaking.
The Risk of Skipping Internalisation
When speakers skip the process of internalisation, AI outputs may feel ready to deliver, yet comprehension remains shallow. You may be able to recite points or follow a script, but without deep understanding, flexibility is lost. Adjusting to audience reactions, answering spontaneous questions, or emphasising key points in real time becomes challenging. You need an understanding below the surface level that AI can’t provide you with. That depth of understanding is how you answer a tricky audience question or say something that generates a lead or a sale.
Over time, repeated reliance on AI without engagement can remove your ability to think independently during presentations. It can also reduce awareness of pacing, tone, and emphasis critical elements for audience connection. This risk is particularly high for beginner speakers or those unfamiliar with the topic, as reliance on AI can obscure gaps in knowledge or reasoning.
How Internalisation Supports Confident Delivery
Internalisation transforms AI generated content into personal insight and adaptable knowledge. By actively processing, rehearsing, and integrating ideas, speakers gain control over structure and narrative. This allows for natural pacing, responsive adjustments, and authoritative delivery.
Engaging deeply with content ensures that even when faced with interruptions, unexpected questions, or technical issues, the speaker can maintain composure. Internalisation also strengthens confidence because the speaker is prepared to explain concepts in multiple ways, adjust phrasing to audience cues, and maintain authenticity. AI should act as a tool for enrichment, not replacement, accelerating preparation without substituting for understanding or personal ownership.
Why Ignoring Audience Context in AI Outputs Reduces Effectiveness
AI outputs are only as effective as the context in which they are applied. Ignoring audience characteristics such as background, experience, expectations, cultural norms, and motivations can produce content that is technically correct but irrelevant, disengaging, or even inappropriate. A speech that fails to resonate undermines authority, connection, and impact, regardless of AI polish.
AI cannot automatically account for subtle nuances such as humour, sensitivity to terminology, or emotional triggers. Treating outputs as universally applicable can alienate portions of the audience, reduce trust, and diminish the effectiveness of even well researched material.
Aligning AI Outputs With Audience Needs
To maximise effectiveness, AI outputs should be filtered and adapted through audience insights. Consider cultural context, prior knowledge, interests, and current concerns. Tailor language, examples, and framing so that ideas resonate, feel relevant, and are actionable for the audience.
This process requires translating AI insights into human language that aligns with audience expectations. Incorporate anecdotes, metaphors, and real world references to bridge the gap between AI generated content and meaningful communication. Thoughtful alignment ensures that AI serves as a preparation enhancer rather than a delivery crutch.
Maintaining Audience Engagement
Even the most well written AI content requires human input to engage an audience. You must actively shape delivery, adjust tone, emphasise key points, and select examples that connect with listeners. AI cannot sense body language, energy levels, or emotional cues, only you speaker can.
Transforming AI generated content into impactful performance involves using AI insights as a foundation for creative, responsive delivery. This approach allows the speaker to maintain attention, establish trust, and create resonance. By blending AI outputs with personal interpretation, speakers can maximise engagement, retain authenticity, and communicate messages that are memorable, credible, and effective.
Why Overcomplicating Workflow with AI Can Undermine Preparation
The benefits of AI can be lost if it complicates rather than streamlines your preparation. Using too many tools, toggling between multiple features, or layering processes unnecessarily can create cognitive overload, diverting attention from high value tasks like refining ideas, practising delivery, and adapting to audience needs. Overcomplication often leads to longer preparation times, mental fatigue, and reduced confidence on stage.
Even well intentioned workflows can become counterproductive if AI use is not integrated with care. For example, stacking multiple AI tools without defined roles or combining outputs from different platforms without alignment can generate redundancy, inconsistent insights, and confusion about what to prioritise. In this context, you end up spending more energy managing the tools than preparing the content, which diminishes the overall effectiveness of AI assistance.
Simplifying AI Integration
Intentional and purposeful use of AI is key. Identify exactly where AI adds value in your preparation process, whether it is research, audience analysis, idea generation, structure, or refining language, and focus efforts there. For aspects of preparation that require judgment, empathy, or improvisation, step back from AI entirely to rely on your human insight.
Streamlining integration also involves setting clear boundaries for each tool. Decide in advance which AI supports brainstorming, which assists with structuring, and which aids in clarity and polishing. By avoiding overlap and redundancy, you ensure outputs remain actionable and relevant, making preparation more efficient and less mentally taxing.
Clarity Supports Confidence
A simplified AI workflow reduces mental clutter, giving you space to focus on mastery, practice, and engagement rather than managing multiple toolchains or deciphering conflicting outputs. When your process is clear and purposeful, your mind is free to absorb content, experiment with delivery, and anticipate audience reactions.
Clear, intentional workflows also reinforce confidence. You are adding AI at the points where you usually feel friction in your preparation to make it more effortless. This means you can focus more time on the important bits like planning out your nano speeches, thinking about audience engagement and delivering a clear message.
Simplifying AI integration supports efficiency, engagement, and performance. By focusing on clarity, intention, and human judgement, you ensure that AI acts as a true enhancer of preparation rather than a source of distraction or stress.
TL;DR: How Not to Use AI for Public Speaking
Avoid misusing AI to protect your confidence, clarity, and audience connection.
Treat AI outputs as raw material, not complete speeches
Use AI to enhance thinking, not replace creativity
Avoid memorising full AI scripts
Choose AI based on fit and purpose, not features or popularity
Keep workflows simple, intentional, and controlled
More From Liam Sandford
Read my book: Effortless Public Speaking. Learn how to speak confidently, reduce stress, and turn public speaking into your competitive advantage. These actionable public speaking tips will help you improve your presentation skills for any audience.
Join the free 5-day email course: Get daily lessons packed with practical strategies to deliver effective presentations and speak confidently. This course is designed to build your public speaking skills step by step. Sign up below: