How to Use AI to Land Public Speaking Gigs
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.
Landing public speaking gigs is rarely about raw speaking ability. It is primarily about how clearly you are positioned, how well you understand the audience you are pitching to, and how effectively you communicate your value to event organisers under time pressure. Many capable speakers struggle to get booked not because they lack insight or presence, but because their expertise is poorly framed, inconsistently presented, or misaligned with organiser priorities.
AI can support this process when used intentionally and strategically. It can help you research opportunities more efficiently, clarify your positioning, and communicate your value with greater precision. However, when misused, AI can dilute your message, remove human nuance, and create generic outreach that damages credibility rather than enhancing it. The difference lies in whether AI is used to sharpen thinking or to replace it.
You should be thinking about how to use AI to land public speaking gigs by strengthening the strategic and commercial side of speaking. The focus is not on automation or scale, but on clarity, alignment, and credibility. Used correctly, AI becomes a decision support tool that helps you get booked more often without compromising trust, authenticity, or long term reputation.
Understanding What Event Organisers Look for When Booking Public Speakers
Before using AI to pursue speaking opportunities, you will want to provide AI with the context of the event, podcast or channel you are targeting and what the host or event organiser is looking for. You need to shape any outreach to how event organisers actually make booking decisions. Most speaking rejections are not reflections on the quality of your speaking or the depth of your expertise. Instead, they are decisions made under conditions of uncertainty, risk management, and extreme time pressure. Organisers often have only a few minutes to evaluate multiple proposals, and they must make decisions that protect their reputation, programme quality, and audience satisfaction.
Many talented speakers fail to land bookings not because they are incapable on stage, but because their profile, messaging, or proposals do not immediately communicate fit or reliability. Understanding this dynamic is critical to using AI effectively because it is not about producing better content in isolation, but about shaping materials that align perfectly with how organisers actually make their decisions on speakers. AI can help you scan patterns across past events, accepted proposals, and audience feedback to reveal what organisers reward in practice. The trick is to do this before diving in and asking AI to produce your response.
What Event Organisers Prioritise When Selecting Speakers
Event organisers are optimising for three interrelated outcomes: audience satisfaction, programme coherence, and personal reputation. They are not searching for the speaker who is objectively best at public speaking. Instead, they are looking for someone who is clearly aligned with the audience, topic, and intended outcomes, and who conveys reliability and safety to book.
AI can be used to analyse event agendas, session titles, speaker bios, abstracts, and even social proof from past events to identify patterns in what gets selected. For example, AI can detect recurring language in accepted proposals, common themes in topics, or phrases that correlate with repeat bookings. It can surface the factors that organisers go for, such as specificity of audience, clear takeaways, and relevance to current challenges, rather than aspirational or ambitious claims that may sound impressive but feel risky.
Using AI in this way transforms your approach from pitching yourself to persuading organisers into demonstrating alignment. You are no longer trying to convince organisers that you are good enough; you are providing evidence that you already fit their criteria, which significantly increases the likelihood of acceptance while reducing guesswork and wasted effort.
Why Speaker Clarity Matters More Than Charisma at the Booking Stage
Charisma is largely invisible at the booking stage. Organisers cannot feel your stage presence or energy through a form or an email. What they do evaluate first is clarity: can they quickly understand what you speak about, who it is for, and why it belongs in their programme?
AI can help stress test this clarity by rewriting abstracts and bios, identifying any complicated or unclear language, and highlighting statements that are vague, generic, or interchangeable with other speakers. For instance, phrases like ‘innovative solutions for modern challenges’ may be technically accurate but fail to differentiate your session. AI can give you alternative phrasing, sharpen focus on outcomes, and ensure that every sentence communicates value and relevance.
Clarity reduces perceived risk for organisers. When they can immediately understand your session, audience, and outcomes, they feel safer booking you. They do not have to imagine your impact or invest time decoding your materials. Every extra second you put into being clear, you increase the chances of getting booked because you are removing friction for the event organiser.
Using AI to Identify the Right Public Speaking Opportunities
Opportunity selection is one of the least utilised skills in public speaking. Many speakers focus on quantity by submitting proposals to every possible event rather than quality. AI is most powerful when used to say no faster, not yes more often. By helping you identify opportunities that truly align with your expertise, audience, and long term goals, AI reduces wasted effort and increases your chances of being accepted.
Strategic opportunity selection is not simply about choosing bigger events. It is about fit, relevance, and potential impact. Speaking at the right event can accelerate your career, strengthen your credibility, and generate leads which can result in revenue for your business. Speaking at the wrong event, even if high profile, can be a waste of your time, not convert leads, and generate a generic audience. AI can help navigate these trade offs by processing large volumes of event data quickly, highlighting high potential opportunities, and flagging low value options that aren’t worth your time.
Researching Speaking Events, Audiences, and Themes Using AI
AI can analyse speaker lineups, event themes, attendee profiles, and sponsors to determine opportunities that are the right fit for you. This goes far beyond surface level keyword matching as it delves into audience intent, event culture, and commercial context. For example, AI can flag whether your session aligns with the current industry trends or recurring conference pain points, ensuring you pitch solutions organisers are actively seeking.
By identifying recurring themes, underrepresented topics, and gaps across events, AI allows you to position yourself as a strategic solution rather than a generic contributor. You can highlight expertise that complements existing sessions, fills unmet audience needs, or addresses trending topics. This increases acceptance rates because organisers perceive your participation as valuable, not just available.
AI can also help you understand audience composition and expectations: Are attendees decision makers, technical practitioners, or academics? Who else is exhibiting or speaking at the event? This insight allows you to tailor proposals to specific audience needs, increasing relevance and impact.
Avoiding Misaligned or Low Value Speaking Engagements
Not all speaking opportunities are worth your time. Some dilute your positioning, attract the wrong audience, or consume energy that could be used elsewhere. Accepting these opportunities can lead to brand drift, wasted preparation time, and reduced confidence in future pitches.
By analysing audience seniority, industry relevance, historical speaker calibre, session themes, and event reputation, AI provides a data driven perspective on which engagements are worth pursuing. You can identify whether an event will expose you to the right decision makers, align with your expertise, or offer meaningful exposure.
Using AI in this way allows you to make strategic trade offs rather than emotional or reactive decisions. For example, a smaller event with a highly targeted audience may offer more tangible career benefits than a large, generic conference. Similarly, recurring events where your expertise fills a gap are often more valuable than one off appearances at misaligned shows.
Selective pitching is how strong speaker brands are built. AI helps ensure that every engagement you accept reinforces your positioning, strengthens your credibility, and contributes to long term growth. By integrating AI into opportunity selection, you can focus your energy on events where you can make the most impact, while avoiding distractions that dilute your messaging and preparation effort. For more on ensuring you are approaching the right public speaking opportunities using AI, check out the Ultimate Guide to Using AI for Public Speaking.
Using AI to Position Yourself Clearly as a Public Speaker
Positioning is not about what you say in a long bio or list of achievements. It is what organisers immediately remember about you after scanning your materials for thirty seconds. Clarity, relevance, and specificity determine whether you are perceived as the right fit. AI can help refine messaging, reduce cognitive friction, and highlight unique value, but human judgment remains critical to ensure authenticity.
Well positioned speakers are easy to understand, feel aligned with the organiser’s objectives, and stand out in memory without requiring additional effort to decode their expertise. Mispositioned speakers, by contrast, can appear generic, confusing, or overly ambitious, even if their skills are strong. AI helps bridge the gap between raw expertise and perceived relevance, creating positioning that resonates immediately.
Refining Your Public Speaker Positioning Statement with AI
A clear positioning statement communicates who you are, what you speak about, and why it matters in a concise, memorable way. AI can assist by compressing complex experience and insight into a single, outcome driven statement that is specific without being narrow. For example, AI can flag hedging language (‘I cover a range of topics…’) or over explanation (‘I have 15 years’ experience across multiple industries…’) that dilutes impact.
The process works best iteratively: generate multiple phrasing options with AI, then use human judgment to select versions that balance clarity, relevance, and personality. AI helps accelerate this refinement, revealing patterns in wording, highlighting jargon, and suggesting structure, but it cannot judge nuance, tone, or resonance with a particular audience.
The goal is to help your audience understand quickly, not trying to sound clever. A well positioned speaker is instantly understandable, and organisers can see why their audience would benefit from booking you. AI accelerates iteration, but decisions about what to retain, emphasise, or discard remain human. This ensures that positioning is not just technically correct, but strategically compelling.
Differentiating Your Speaker Brand Without Overcomplicating the Message
True differentiation comes from clarity, focus, and relevance, not complexity. Over differentiation often looks like overthinking: too many claims, unnecessary frameworks, or overlapping points can complicate rather than clarify value. AI can help identify redundancy, surface weak points, and simplify messaging, revealing the core elements that organisers need to remember.
AI can also analyse competitor speaker materials to identify common phrasing, repeated claims, or generic themes. This enables you to highlight what is unique about your perspective, style, or experience, without overcomplicating the message. Differentiation is about being recognisable and relevant, not about ticking every box.
When done well, your speaker brand is repeatable and memorable. Organisers should be able to summarise your value proposition in one sentence after a quick glance. AI can help streamline and sharpen this process, but human insight ensures authenticity, tonal alignment, and audience resonance. Remember that memorability beats cleverness every time. A simple, clear, and audience focused positioning is far more effective than a broad, convoluted one.
Using AI to Write Strong Speaker Proposals and Pitch Submissions
Speaker proposals are not creative writing exercises. They are strategic decision making tools for organisers who are short on time, under pressure to deliver a coherent programme, and accountable for audience satisfaction. A strong proposal signals relevance, authority, and clarity, allowing organisers to make confident booking decisions quickly.
AI can significantly accelerate and enhance this process, but only if it is used to clarify, structure, and surface unique insights, rather than replace the judgment and nuance that human speakers bring. Misused, AI can produce generic or overly polished proposals that fail to convey your distinct value and audience relevance.
Structuring Speaker Proposals Using AI for Clarity and Flow
AI can assist in organising proposals around three critical dimensions: audience outcomes, practical value, and programme fit. By analysing past accepted proposals, successful speaker bios, and event objectives, AI can identify common structural patterns that resonate with organisers.
A well structured proposal communicates what the session delivers, how it fits the event’s goals, and why the speaker is uniquely qualified, all in a format that can be processed quickly. This reduces mental friction for the organiser, increases the likelihood of acceptance, and demonstrates consideration for their time and decision making constraints.
AI can also help stress test readability and coherence by highlighting long sentences, jargon, or abstract language. It can suggest ways to break complex ideas into digestible bullet points, subheadings, or modular sections, making your proposal easier to scan and evaluate.
Avoiding Generic or Over Polished Speaker Pitches
AI naturally produces neutral, polished language, which can often come across as robotic. Overly polished proposals often read like templates: they feel interchangeable, impersonal, and forgettable. Organisers will scan their speaker proposals quickly, and so anything that comes across as inauthentic will fail to stand out.
Depth in proposals comes from context and experience. AI can help by prompting reflection on past projects, audience challenges, and measurable outcomes. For instance, it can generate variations that emphasise practical examples, insights from real world experience, or audience specific benefits. You then choose the version that best communicates your unique perspective.
AI should amplify your strategic thinking rather than smooth away individuality. The language should highlight why you are uniquely qualified, the relevance of your content, and the anticipated audience impact.
If a proposal could belong to any speaker, it will belong to none. Your proposals should feel authentically yours, specific to the event, and immediately understandable, while AI serves as a tool to polish structure and clarity, it can’t replace you or your experience.
Using AI to Build Credibility Assets for Speaking Gigs
Credibility is not about listing credentials or asserting authority. True credibility is about reducing uncertainty for event organisers. It answers their unspoken questions: ‘Can this person deliver value for my audience?’ and ‘Will booking them reflect well on me?’ AI can help articulate, organise, and emphasise credibility.
Using AI to Clarify Speaking Experience and Authority
AI can act as a mirror, showing you how your existing experience aligns with what organisers value. By analysing your past presentations, publications, professional achievements, and client outcomes, AI can reframe these in terms that matter to the audience and event organisers. Often speakers underestimate their own credibility because their accomplishments are described in internal or generic language. AI can help you restructure these in a way that generates impact to the person on the other side of the proposal.
Authority does not come from titles or qualifications. It comes from understanding how to communicate what matters to a specific audience segment. AI can help you to identify and communicate the aspects of your experience that resonate most with specific event types, sectors, or audience demographics, strengthening your perceived reliability and suitability.
Supporting Speaker Credibility with Case Studies and Social Proof
Event organisers respond strongly to evidence backed claims. AI can synthesise testimonials, client outcomes, session feedback, or media mentions into concise, impactful proof points. This ensures that your credibility is visible and digestible without overwhelming organisers with excessive detail.
For example, AI can extract and summarise key metrics from post event surveys, highlight patterns in audience satisfaction, or identify the most persuasive quotes from testimonials. This makes your credibility tangible, while maintaining authenticity and avoiding overstatement.
Used strategically, these AI generated credibility assets signal reliability and trustworthiness, reducing perceived risk and booking anxiety. Organisers are more likely to book a speaker when they can clearly see prior success and alignment with their audience’s needs.
Using AI to Streamline Speaker Outreach Without Losing Personalisation
Outreach is one of the most common points where speakers undermine themselves. Messages that are generic, inconsistent, or poorly targeted reduce booking likelihood and damage professional perception. AI can help maintain personalisation at scale without sacrificing too much of your time.
Drafting Personalised Speaker Outreach Messages Using AI
AI can generate outreach drafts that are precisely aligned with the event, audience, and organiser priorities, focusing on value rather than self-promotion. Instead of writing ‘I’m an expert, and here’s my CV,’ AI can help craft messages that emphasise why your talk benefits this specific audience and contributes to the organiser’s goals.
For instance, AI can:
Identify shared themes between your expertise and the event agenda
Suggest phrasing that highlights relevance without exaggeration
Flag generic or filler content that reduces impact
The result is a series of messages that are personal, clear, and immediately actionable, while saving you time and mental effort.
Maintaining Human Judgment in Public Speaking Outreach
While AI can streamline drafting and suggest improvements, it cannot replace human judgment. Nuance, timing, context, and relationship dynamics are all factors that require your input. AI should be treated as a preparation and ideation tool, not the final decision maker.
Ultimately, the success of outreach depends on how well a speaker integrates AI outputs with their own understanding of the organiser’s needs, previous interactions, and broader event context. AI amplifies preparation and ensures clarity, but judgment and relationship management remain entirely human responsibilities.
Using AI to Support Long Term Growth as a Public Speaker
Speaking opportunities, audience building, and credibility compound over time when approached strategically, with a clear sense of positioning, audience alignment, and personal brand growth. AI can support this system by helping you with the tasks that are creating friction for you in finding opportunities to speak in public and preparing presentations.
Tracking What Helps You Land Speaking Gigs Using AI
AI can go beyond simple analytics to identify meaningful patterns in your speaking opportunities. By analysing accepted and rejected pitches, audience demographics, event themes, and even the phrasing or structure of your proposals, AI can reveal what consistently resonates with organisers. This will help you to shape future proposals to land more speaking opportunities.
For example, AI can highlight:
Which positioning statements generate higher acceptance rates
Audience segments where your expertise generates the most traction
Event types where your talks achieve strong engagement or post event requests
Long term growth comes from understanding what works specifically for you. Copying or trying to emulate others’ successes rarely translates into repeatable results, because audience fit, event context, and your unique voice all matter. AI helps you map these nuances using the data you provide it which will help give clarity on where to target next.
Building Speaking Momentum Without Burnout Using AI
Momentum with public speaking is important, not just from continually getting booked, but from a confidence perspective as a speaker. AI can reduce low value friction by automating repetitive tasks like:
Researching events and organisers
Drafting personalised outreach messages
Summarising audience insights or post event feedback
By removing these time consuming tasks, AI allows you to spend your time on the elements that are important to drive impact for your brand and business such as crafting specific messaging for your next presentation.
AI can help plan and prioritise your schedule strategically, ensuring you engage with opportunities that build visibility, credibility, and relevance, rather than chasing every possible speaking gig.
TL;DR: How to Use AI to Land Public Speaking Gigs
AI can help you land public speaking gigs by improving clarity, positioning, and strategic alignment, provided it strengthens judgment rather than replacing it.
Use AI to understand organiser decision making and audience fit
Select speaking opportunities strategically, not emotionally
Clarify positioning so organisers understand you instantly
Write proposals that reduce risk and cognitive load
Use AI to support systems, not shortcuts
More From Liam Sandford
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