5 Questions I Use AI to Deepen Rapport with Audiences in My Speaking

"You're a phenomenal public speaker. But you're even better at the Q&A afterwards." (Because I spend more time on preparing for the audience than I do on preparing the talk)

I'm a physician and a hypnotherapist. I teach at Georgetown. I run a company called Influence Everywhere. Most of what I do for a living is help people who do good in the world get better at moving others... through influence, communication and connection.

I do a ton of public speaking. And before I get in front of those rooms, I run five AI prompts.

Here they are:

1. Build me a glossary of the language this audience uses.

I ask a generative AI tool for 70 to 75 terms - words, phrases, and acronyms - with brief definitions. Even when I think I know an audience, I find distinctions I would have missed. (I went into a talk for palliative care providers thinking I understood the spectrum of palliative care. I did not.) Misusing a word an audience uses costs more rapport than not using it at all.

2. List the current challenges and opportunities facing this audience.

I ask for the live pressures the group is facing right now. The list is uneven... some are obvious, some are wrong... but three or four will be true. When I allude to one of those challenges in the first ten minutes of a talk, the room feels addressed.

3. List the objections this audience will have to my topic.

This is Rule 3 of how to move people: remove objections early. There is a voice in the back of every listener's head saying "yeah, but…" until you answer it... and they don't really hear a word until you do. Surfacing the likely objections in advance lets me address them directly or indirectly in the structure of the talk.

4. List the FAQs - and the questions they should be asking (SAQs) but don't know to.

The frequently-asked questions are useful. The should-ask questions are where the real teaching lives. When you raise from the stage a question the audience didn't know to ask, you create the experience of someone in the room realizing they've been thinking about their problem wrong. That's where transformation lives.

5. List the limiting beliefs this audience holds about my topic, and the false assumptions that led to those beliefs.

This is the layer most people skip and the layer that does the most work.

A belief is a false assumption that has been repeated until it earned the status of truth. When you can undo one (from the stage, in a coaching conversation, in a sales call) you can change how someone sees the next twenty years of their work.

I read all five lists. I mark what's clearly true. I let the rest go. The talk that comes out the other side is more for them and less about me.

That, more than any technique, is what makes a room move.

Then something I wasn't planning for started happening.

A few years ago I built an AI version of myself. You can find it at DrTori.ai. It runs on a couple of decades of my talks, my frameworks, my notes, my coaching language. People can chat with it, call it, or interact with it in video form.

I built it to keep the conversation going for the 9,997 people in a 10,000-seat venue I never get a chance to meet in the hallway.

What I didn't plan for is what would happen on the other side. People started texting me. Your clone helped me prep for my CFO meeting and I felt like I'd already talked to you. I asked your clone about a hard conversation with my boss and it walked me through it. I hadn't done those things. The clone had. But the connection they felt came back to me. The relationship deepened... and I wasn't even in the room.

The same tools we have been bracing to dehumanize us can be used to give us more bandwidth for the things only humans can do.

The AI doesn't do the listening for you (it can, of course, but that's not the point)

AI points you to where the listening is needed.

You still do the work.

You just walk in already knowing what to listen for.

If you want to meet my clone, it's at DrTori.ai.

The full episode behind this post is on the Influence Every Day Show, Episode 21.

Get your Listening Score with an assessment I created to help you improve every relationship you have without saying a word.