Collect the material before asking for output
My agent got a file with a year of my LinkedIn posts. That's what allowed it to find a real line of thinking instead of a generic deck about AI. Without your own material, you'll get a talk anyone could give.
Example: one tidy file sorted by date, with a link to every source. Thirty full posts beat 200 summary lines.
Write a brief of audience, goal, and time
"Prepare a talk for me" returns something generic. A brief that works answers three questions: who sits in the audience, what should they do differently after the talk, and how many minutes you have. Mine was small business owners, 45 minutes, and one goal: that they go home with a first task they can give an agent.
Ask for an outline before slides
The cheapest time to fix a talk is before it's a deck. Ask for an outline first: an arc, a core message per part, and at least one demo. After the outline is approved, ask for slides and a prep guide.
A prep guide is worth no less than the slides: what to say on each slide, how much time per part, and where to stop for questions.
Check every claim against the source
The agent phrases confidently even when it's half-accurate. Every number, date, or tool name on a slide needs backing: a link to the source in the raw material, or a current official document. An unsupported claim leaves the deck.
Example: if a slide says "companies adopting agents save 30% of development time" and there's no source, replace it with data you can show, or with a sentence about your own experience only. Anthropic's long-context prompting guidelines also recommend giving concrete examples and asking for a quote from the source before synthesis, which is exactly this check.
Prepare a short emergency version
Half an hour before the conference, things break: the projector, the power, the network. Keep a ten-minute version: three points, one example, one message. If everything collapses, you still deliver value.