Presentation Lessons From Axios And GPT-3

Given the glut, clutter, and excessive clickbait of most online news sites, I have gravitated to Axios as my go-to for news. What attracted me (and I hope you) is Axios’ unique format that consists of four key steps for each story:

• Headline
• Sub-headline
• “Why it matters”
• “Go deeper”

This allows me, the reader, to decide what I want to read and how much I want to read. Granted that news organizations—all the way back to the earliest newspapers—have used heads and subheads, but not many organizations use the vital third and fourth steps.

In a moment, you’ll see the two reasons why those steps are so important but first let me add that Axios’ format is so effective that the company has developed a companion service called Axios HQ they offer to organizations—including universities, government, and commercial businesses—to help them communicate more effectively. For $12,500 a year, Axios does this with a software product and companion communications formula called Smart Brevity^® that, as the name clearly states, enables organizations to shorten their messaging. As their website states, they do it with AI-powered editing that will:

• “Rephrase sentences to be shorter and clearer.
• Reformat paragraphs so what’s key stands out.
• Removes filler words so readers stay focused.
• Style your text to be quick and easy to scan.”

This brings us full circle back to the clutter of online news site and, of particular interest to readers of this blog, bloated presentation stories.

Similar to Axios’ valuable functionality is another AI-powered language tool called GPT-3, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, third generation. According to the WeAreBrain blog, “GPT-3 can create anything that has a language structure. It can answer questions, write essays, develop summaries of longer text items and it can even translate languages.” As an example, the Guardian published an article that was composed entirely by GPT-3.

I recently attended a conference and saw a demonstration in which this exciting new technology was showcased converting a page of text to a paragraph at the click of a mouse. Another click and the paragraph became a sentence. With each click, the reduced text retained the essence of the meaning.

The point I am making here—in this age of information overload and short attention spans—is the importance of making messaging more succinct. This is the first of the reasons that makes Axios and GPT-3 so compelling. The second is Axios’ “Why it matters” step. Think of it as the benefit of the story to the reader. In this age of feature-loaded, benefit-starved pitches, “Why it matters” is synonymous to “What’s in it for you.”

One reason presenters become verbose is that they are laboring under the false assumption that, in order for the audience to understand anything, they have to be told everything. Another reason is that presenters live their business stories every day and find it difficult to distill them. But audiences don’t live those stories and they don’t need to know everything. All they need to know is why the information you are communicating is important to them.

In a previous Forbes post, you read about the Suasive method of distilling content. Try it. In spirit of Axios or GPT-3, distill your content. Your audiences will be eternally grateful that you did not make them sit through an eternity.