What I learned as a panel moderator on storytelling and AI

public speakingstorytellingaievents

On Tuesday morning I was on stage at EFI in Tour Milano, but not to talk. My job was to make other people talk, which turns out to be a very different sport.

The event was organised by Ecosistema Formazione Italia, a non-profit association, together with MLC Presentation Design Consulting, and hosted by NTT DATA. The topic of the morning was how AI is changing communication and storytelling. About 50 people in the room, plus a streaming audience, and speakers like Joshua Freedman from Six Seconds and Maurizio La Cava from MLC.

I moderated the panel Voices that decide: storytelling, presentazioni e AI nella nuova comunicazione aziendale, from 10:25 to 10:55, with Eleonora Scatigna (HR Business Partner at Olympus Corporation), Antonio Bergero (Head of Engagement & Internal Communications Italy at NTT DATA) and Andrea Monaci (Co-Founder of Atom Digital Services). Three people with very different angles on the same problem: HR, internal comms, and someone building digital services.

The panel moderator is not the star

This is the first thing I had to get into my head. As a panel moderator you are there to make the others shine. If people leave remembering your jokes more than what the panelists said, you did it wrong.

In practice I think the job comes down to three things:

  • Keep time. Thirty minutes, three speakers. Do the math: that is less than ten minutes each, and that is before any introduction.
  • Keep the conversation alive. A panel where everybody answers the same question in turn is just three short speeches glued together. The good part happens when one answer bounces off another.
  • Ask the question the audience is thinking. Not the clever question, not the one that shows I did my homework. The one someone in row four wants to ask but won't raise their hand for.

The third one is the hardest. When you prepare, you naturally write questions that are interesting to you. Then you have to go through them and ask: would someone who does presentations for a living, and is a bit worried about what AI will do to their job, care about this?

30 minutes go fast

Everybody tells you this and you don't believe it until you are there. I had more questions than time, which I think is the right problem to have. The wrong problem is running out of things to say at minute eighteen.

The real skill is dropping questions on the fly. If an answer already covers half of your next question, you skip it, or you twist it into a follow-up. It feels a lot like running a sprint review where the plan is already obsolete after the first demo. You keep the goal, you let go of the script.

And cutting someone off politely is an art I am still learning. Nobody taught me that at Politecnico.

What I took home about storytelling and AI

I am not a communication professional. I build products and teams, currently at Bakeca.it where I run a division that launches new ventures. So my view on AI in corporate communication is the view of someone who writes a lot of decks, pitches, and internal updates, not of an expert in the field.

With that disclaimer, here is where I landed after the morning.

AI makes producing content almost free. Slides, summaries, a first draft of an all-hands email: done in seconds. But storytelling was never about producing content. It is about choosing what matters, in which order, for which audience, and what to leave out. That choice is still yours, and if anything it gets more important, because now everybody can generate ten okay slides and nobody wants to sit through them.

When I pitched investors for eKoodo, years ago, the hard part was never making the deck look good. It was deciding which three things to say. I don't see AI changing that. I see it removing the excuse that you didn't have time to polish, which means the thinking behind the story is the only thing left to judge.

The other thing I noticed: a panel is itself a form of storytelling. Three voices, thirty minutes, and the moderator decides the arc. No AI tool is going to read the room and notice that the audience lit up at one answer and went quiet at another. That part, at least for now, is still a very human job.

Thanks to EFI and MLC for inviting me, to NTT DATA for hosting us, and to Eleonora, Antonio and Andrea for making my job easy. I'd do it again, maybe with a slightly shorter list of questions.