How to Use AI to Generate Public Speaking Ideas
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.
Coming up with strong public speaking ideas is often harder than delivering them. Many speakers are not short of knowledge, experience, or opinions, but they struggle to decide what to speak about, how to frame it, or which angle will actually resonate with an audience. This uncertainty often leads to generic talks, overstuffed presentations, or last minute changes that can impact your confidence levels.
This is where AI can be particularly valuable. Not as a creative replacement, but as a thinking partner that helps surface, organise, and challenge ideas. AI is useful when you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or too close to the topic to see it clearly. It helps you move past the blank page and into structured exploration.
When used intentionally, AI reduces friction at the idea generation stage. It allows you to explore multiple directions quickly, compare perspectives, and test ideas before committing to them. The goal is not to outsource creativity, but to expand it. AI works best when you stay actively involved, using it to explore options rather than just adopting everything it says.
How to Use AI to Generate Public Speaking Ideas
AI produces better ideas when it is given clear direction. Without boundaries, it tends to generate content that is broad, generic, or disconnected from your real context. This often leads people to believe AI ‘isn’t very good,’ when in reality it was never given enough information to be useful.
Before you ask AI for ideas, you need to do a small amount of thinking yourself. This preparation stage is not about doing the hard work twice. It is about setting constraints so AI can operate effectively within them. When you skip this step, AI becomes noisy. When you do it well, AI becomes focused.
Clarify the Audience and Context First
Ideas do not exist in isolation. A strong idea for a conference keynote may fall flat in a team meeting. An idea that works for beginners may frustrate experienced professionals. Before prompting AI, you should be clear on who the audience is, why you are speaking, and what situation you will be speaking in.
Context includes more than just demographics. It also includes emotional state, expectations, and constraints. Are people attending voluntarily or because they have to? Is this a high stakes decision meeting or a learning environment? What outcome do you want from the presentation? Clarifying these factors dramatically improves the relevance of the ideas AI produces.
You do not need perfect answers, but you do need constraints. Even simple guidance such as audience experience level, industry, time limit, or goal helps AI generate ideas that are usable rather than abstract. This also prevents you from being overwhelmed by ideas that sound interesting but would never work in the real setting you are speaking in.
Define the Outcome You Want From the Speech
Ideas are only useful when they serve an outcome. Before asking AI for ideas, decide what you want the audience to think, feel, or do differently by the end of the speech. This outcome becomes a filter for every idea that follows.
Defining the outcome also prevents idea drift. Without it, AI may generate interesting but unfocused concepts that pull your speech in multiple directions. When you are clear on the outcome, you can immediately see which ideas support it and which distract from it. This clarity protects your audiences attention. When you are focused in your delivery, your audience will be able to follow and are more likely to land your message with the audience.
Using AI to Generate Core Speech Ideas
Once the foundations are clear, AI becomes far more effective at idea generation. This stage is about breadth before depth. You are not looking for the right idea yet. You are exploring the landscape to see what is possible. At this point, AI is most useful as a creative accelerator. It allows you to explore directions you may not have considered and to step outside your habitual thinking patterns.
Brainstorming Broad Topic Areas With AI
AI is particularly strong at helping you zoom out. You can ask it to generate broad themes, recurring challenges, emerging trends, or common misconceptions within a topic area. This is especially helpful when you feel too close to the subject to see it objectively.
Familiarity often limits creativity. When you know a topic well, you tend to default to the same talking points. AI helps disrupt that pattern by offering alternative lenses and surfacing ideas you may have subconsciously filtered out. At this stage, volume matters more than precision. Treat the outputs as raw material rather than decisions. You are gathering possibilities, not committing to content. The goal is to widen the pool before narrowing it.
Exploring Fresh Angles on Familiar Topics
Many speakers worry their topic has already been covered extensively. AI can help you find fresh angles by reframing familiar material in new ways. You might explore how the topic affects different roles, industries, or levels of experience, or where common advice oversimplifies reality.
You can also ask AI to inform you of tensions, trade offs, or contradictions within a topic. These often make for compelling speech ideas because they reflect real world complexity rather than polished theory. Fresh angles do not come from novelty alone. They come from relevance and honesty. AI helps you identify angles that feel more grounded, distinctive, and aligned with how the audience actually experiences the problem.
Developing Stronger Ideas From AI Outputs
Raw ideas generated by AI are rarely strong enough to speak about without your experience and knowledge added. They are often vague, overgeneralised, or disconnected from a real audience. Ideas need shaping, testing, and narrowing before they are ready to be spoken aloud. This is the stage where many speakers either rush forward with something underdeveloped or overcomplicate the idea until it loses clarity. Both approaches weaken confidence and delivery.
AI is particularly useful at this stage because it allows you to slow down your thinking without stalling momentum. It helps you interrogate what AI has generated, identify gaps, and understand where an idea holds up or falls apart. Instead of relying on instinct alone, you can use AI to examine your ideas from multiple angles before committing to one.
This phase is about moving from interesting to useful. Interesting ideas may sound good in theory but fail to land in practice. Useful ideas are clear, relevant, defensible, and aligned with the outcome you want from the audience. AI helps you make that distinction earlier, which saves time and reduces uncertainty later in the process.
Stress Testing Ideas for Relevance and Impact
Once you have a shortlist of potential ideas, AI can help you test their strength before you ever step on stage. You can ask it to explore potential audience objections, surface weaknesses in reasoning, or explain why an idea might fail to resonate with a specific group. This is not about tearing ideas down for the sake of it, but about understanding their limits.
Stress testing reveals whether an idea has depth or whether it collapses under scrutiny. Weak ideas often sound compelling at first glance but lack substance when examined closely. They rely on assumptions, oversimplify reality, or fail to account for audience context. Strong ideas become clearer, sharper, and more resilient when challenged. They improve through friction rather than falling apart.
This process also builds confidence as a speaker. When you understand the limitations of an idea, you can address them directly rather than being caught off guard during delivery or Q&A. You are no longer hoping the idea works. You know why it works, where it might be questioned, and how to respond if it is challenged.
Narrowing Ideas Into a Clear Core Message
Many speeches fail not because the ideas are weak, but because there are too many of them. Speakers try to communicate everything they know instead of deciding what matters most. AI can help you narrow a broad idea into a single, clear core message by summarising complexity, prioritising points, and identifying what can be removed. Too much context is the killer of attention. Switching between ideas creates context switching which also drains the attention of your audience.
You might ask AI to express the idea in one sentence, identify which supporting points are essential and which are optional, or clarify the central insight the audience should remember a week later. This process forces prioritisation. It also exposes where you may be holding onto ideas out of attachment rather than relevance.
The aim here is not perfect wording. It is clarity of intent. When you can clearly articulate the core message, everything else in the speech becomes easier to build. Examples become more focused, stories become more purposeful, and delivery becomes more confident because you are no longer juggling competing ideas in your head.
Using AI to Generate Supporting Material for Ideas
Once you have a clear core idea, AI can help you build around it in a structured and intentional way. This stage is about depth and reinforcement. The goal is to make the idea easier for the audience to understand, remember, and apply after the speech ends.
Supporting material should always serve the idea, not compete with it. AI can help you identify which elements strengthen understanding and which simply add noise. When used well, it ensures every example, explanation, and clarification earns its place in the speech.
Generating Examples and Analogies
Examples and analogies help bring your idea to life for the audience. They allow the audience to visualise what you mean and connect it to their own experience. AI can help you brainstorm examples that align with your audience’s context.
You can also use AI to test multiple analogies for the same idea. Some will feel intuitive, others forced. Seeing them side by side helps you recognise which ones actually clarify the point rather than distract from it. This is especially valuable when explaining frameworks, processes, or conceptual ideas that might otherwise feel abstract.
AI provides options, not answers. You should always adapt examples so they reflect your language, experience, and perspective. Authenticity does not come from originality alone. It comes from ownership. An example becomes powerful when you can deliver it naturally and stand behind it with confidence. It helps you meet the audience where they are at.
Identifying Common Questions and Misunderstandings
Strong ideas anticipate confusion before it happens. AI can help you identify where an audience might misinterpret your message, what questions they are likely to ask, or which assumptions may need to be challenged or clarified.
This improves both content and delivery. When you know where confusion might arise, you can address it proactively rather than reacting defensively in the moment. This reduces pressure during delivery and helps the audience feel guided rather than lectured. It also makes your speech feel more conversational. Instead of delivering information at people, you are responding to what they are already thinking. This creates trust and engagement, because the audience feels understood.
What to Avoid When Using AI for Public Speaking Ideas
AI can be a powerful tool for generating public speaking ideas, but without interrogation it will tell you what you want to hear. The way you use AI directly shapes the quality, relevance, and usefulness of the ideas it produces. When misused at the idea generation stage, AI often leads to speeches that feel generic, disconnected from real experience, or overly engineered to sound impressive rather than meaningful.
Many speakers fall into the trap of assuming that because an idea sounds polished, it must be good. In reality, AI is very good at producing language that feels confident, even when the underlying idea is weak or poorly aligned with the audience. This is why understanding what not to do with AI is just as important as knowing how to use it effectively. Avoiding these common mistakes helps ensure that AI strengthens your creative thinking rather than diluting your message or undermining your credibility as a speaker.
Avoid Treating AI Ideas as Finished Content
AI generates starting points, not conclusions. One of the most common mistakes when using AI for public speaking ideas is treating its outputs as finished, ready to use content. When ideas are lifted directly from AI without further thinking, they often lack depth, conviction, and personal relevance.
Ideas become powerful through understanding, not generation. You need to know why an idea matters, how it applies to your audience, and what makes it worth sharing. AI can accelerate the early stages of this process, but it cannot replace your judgment, experience, or values. If you have not questioned, reshaped, or pressure tested an idea, it is unlikely to hold up in delivery.
A useful rule of thumb is this: if you would struggle to explain the idea clearly without notes, it is not ready to be spoken about. Finished ideas feel owned. They feel flexible. You can adapt them in real time without losing confidence. That level of ownership only comes from active thinking, not copying AI output.
Avoid Chasing Novelty Over Relevance
AI is excellent at producing unusual or unexpected ideas which can be great for public speaking, but only in the right contexts. While this can be tempting, novelty alone does not make an idea effective for public speaking. Chasing originality for its own sake often results in content that feels disconnected from the audience’s real challenges or priorities.
Audiences care far more about relevance than cleverness. They want ideas that help them understand something, make a decision, or see a problem more clearly. An idea that feels new but irrelevant will undermine trust faster than an idea that feels familiar but deeply applicable.
When using AI to generate public speaking ideas, focus on clarity and usefulness before originality. Ask whether the idea genuinely helps this audience in this context. The strongest presentations are rarely built on shocking insights. They are built on simple, grounded ideas delivered with clarity and intention. Remember it is not about you as the speaker, it is about the audience. Relevance and clarity of your ideas is the most important thing for successful public speaking.
Using AI to Support Creative Thinking, Not Replace It
AI works best as a creative support system, not a replacement for thinking. Used well, it helps you explore ideas faster, see patterns you might miss, and move through the early stages of idea development with less friction and self-doubt.
The danger comes when AI becomes the source of your ideas rather than a tool for developing them. AI can assist with exploration and refinement, but the insight must still come from you. The outcome of using AI well is not an AI generated idea. It is a speaker who has thought deeply about their message, understands why it matters, and knows how it will land with the audience. AI simply makes that thinking process more efficient and less intimidating. When you stay intentional, curious, and in control, AI becomes a powerful ally for generating public speaking ideas that are clear, relevant, and genuinely worth sharing. For more on using AI to generate public speaking ideas, check out the Ultimate Guide to Using AI for Public Speaking.
TL;DR: How to Use AI to Generate Public Speaking Ideas
AI can help you generate stronger public speaking ideas by expanding thinking, testing relevance, and clarifying direction without replacing your creativity or judgment.
Clarify your audience, context, and outcome before using AI so ideas are focused and relevant
Use AI to brainstorm broad themes and fresh angles rather than finished speech topics
Pressure test and narrow ideas with AI to arrive at a clear, memorable core message
Generate examples and anticipate audience questions to strengthen understanding and delivery
Treat AI as a thinking partner, not a creative replacement, and keep ownership of the ideas
More From Liam Sandford
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