#3 Stop Building Slides, Start Building Magic – AI Dashboards That Sell
Why PowerPoint is dead
Hello everybody and willkommen to the AI Cookbook. My name is Malcolm, and you know what I find still very, very fascinating? During my keynotes, I often showcase how to do dashboards using Claude or Gemini or our own company platform, chat.werchota.ai. And I will take the transcript of the person who presented just in front of me and just put it in and say, make me a sexy React dashboard. That's it.
That's the recipe that changes everything. And today, I will show you why I think that PowerPoint is dead and how 30-second dashboards have created a very, very big impact in my company, but also for closing deals, facilitating workshops, and making McKinsey consultants fall off their chair.
The Skoda Octavia Moment
Last week, I was driving my Skoda Octavia. It's a fantastic car. My Skoda Octavia is roughly six, seven years old. It's got 300,000 kilometers on it. It still runs really, really well.
And I had to stop on the side of the road. You know, messy. I had to find a parking. I was late for a call because I should have arrived somewhere to be able to take this call, and I could not. And basically, the customer sees that I'm in my Skoda Octavia. And the customer presents for about 20 to 25 minutes, you know, a couple of PowerPoint slides on their AI architecture, their plans on what they want to do with AI, and all of these things.
And I am really, really allergic to PowerPoint. I believe that most people are also. Now, the beauty is I have Copilot running that transcribes everything.
And after about 20 to 25 minutes, I take the transcript from Copilot and I throw it into Claude. And I say to Claude, hey, build me a sexy React dashboard that will make the customer fall off their chair. So this building of a dashboard takes about a minute roughly.
And then I say to them, can I share my screen and see if I understand what you spoke about? And then I share my screen and I show the dashboard that I built live during their presentation, their data, their problems, their use cases, how we can help and support them. And not as slides where everybody falls asleep, but as an interactive, multi-dimensional story. And I do this more or roughly after 20, 25 minutes, where anyway, you can be sure they are always, always flabbergasted.
And then I do this towards the end of the call, around the minute 50, 55, to be able to close the call. And, you know, we have a very, very high close rate when we talk to potential customers.
Why Dashboards Beat PowerPoint Every Time
The reason being is because first of all, when you try to show AI to a customer, try to get as far away as possible from slides, try to open your laptop and show them right away what you do with AI.
And most of the time when I build a dashboard during a presentation, the customer will be able to say, can you send me that? Very, very often we get the request, can you send me that dashboard that you just created? And the second question is often, how do you do that? And this has been roughly one of the biggest impacts that I have seen in being able to work with generative artificial intelligence in the last two to three months, since two models came out, the latest Gemini models, which is Gemini 2.5 Pro model and the latest Claude models, which is Claude Opus 4.
Now dashboards are more or less storytelling on steroids. It's not about data because the customers have data. The customers are able to show you reports or analysis that they've done or reconciliations of ideas, but not always are they able to articulate the problems that they have.
Even ourselves in the company, when we do a meeting at the end of it, we will take the transcript, throw it into Gemini or throw it into Claude and say, build me a sexy react dashboard.
Multi-Dimensional vs Linear Storytelling
And if we think about it, what is PowerPoint? PowerPoint is a linear storytelling and it doesn't matter if you create your PowerPoint with Canva, if you create your PowerPoint directly into PowerPoint, it's slide one, slide two, slide three. It's very, very boring. It's like reading a book where you can't really skip chapters, yet a dashboard is multi-dimensional storytelling.
What you do is often you don't only say, build me a sexy react dashboard. You say, build me a sexy react dashboard with a tab for the problem, a tab for the solution, a tab for the impact, a tab for the timeline and a tab for the investment. In the moment where you show the dashboard to your customers, you say, ah, you can look at my screen, but here is the link, please go and click on it and you can follow on this at your pace whenever you want and you can click through it.
So it's really getting away from a presentation to kind of an experience. So your audience doesn't just hear your story, they can live it, they can click through it, they can touch it. If you say, build me a dashboard with a slider between zero and 50% of the costs and another one between zero and 50% of the revenue and build me three different scenarios, they are able to move the sliders and see the cost calculation in front of them.
And now this is really, and now I'm going to sit up on my chair, that's why you might hear some noise, but this is the bomb. Because while a presentation takes you hours to build, a dashboard takes you minutes to build. And it's something that the customer in the moment where you present it to them, the very first time they will never forget.
So you build the presentation for hours and the customers forget it after minutes and with a dashboard you reverse this. This is crazy and it's fantastic.
Even Kids Can Do It
Now, often people stop a bit and say, yeah, that's you, Malcolm, you are really good at all this AI stuff. Guys, when I do my keynotes, one of the things that I do is I show a video of my seven year old and my nine year old building a dashboard.
And this is the prompt, okay, the prompt is they will say, hi, we are seven and nine years old. We have to do the Austrian bicycle test. Could you please go online and search the questions that are relevant to it and build me a React dashboard with a multiple choice with 20 questions.
So wait, my seven and nine year old can build themselves a multiple choice question based on a test. Yet, what are we doing when we are going into companies? We still have web based training. We still have multiple choice tests for topics that are archaic, that nobody cares about.
Don't you understand that when you have a dashboard, you have 8 billion individual ways to learn and teach the same thing to 8 billion different people. Hi, I am a CFO. I want to learn topic A. Hi, I'm the head of marketing. I want to learn topic A. Hi, I am the secretary of a CEO. I want to learn topic A.
So what I really don't understand is you can go into Claude or you can go into Gemini and at the bottom press the button canvas and build yourself a crazy dashboard, which my daughters are able to do. And we go into companies where 99.999% of all employees have never done that. It's crazy for me. It's absolutely crazy.
Security and Tools: Claude Max
Now, why Claude Max? So Claude Max, I understand often when I show this in workshops, Claude Max is the tier that costs you $200 a month. Now, for me, it's very important to use. I have the team's subscriptions and I also have the max plans.
And Claude Max, the data is not used to train their models unless you give them explicit permission. So when you build a dashboard and you want to very quickly visualize something, don't forget, you might have company data. You might have data from your customers. So please try to use systems which are secure.
For example, in our company GPT, chat.werchota.ai, which I'm not advertising for because you can’t use it and you can’t buy it. This is our own company GPT. It is hosted on Azure. And there we use a system called OpenAI Azure, where again, you can use ChatGPT without your data being trained on.
Finding the Best Models: LM Arena
And if now I've said a lot of things and you're trying to understand, yeah, what did he say? Or maybe you're reading this in a month or two or three, where everything again would have changed. Don't worry. Who is really winning? There's a place to go to it.
The place is called the LM Arena. So the LM Arena is to see more or less how hot are the models. It's kind of like the Olympics for AI models.
So you go into there and there's a category called web dev models. And here you will be able to see that web dev models, these are the ones that are good for building visualizations, dashboards, et cetera. At the moment where I'm writing this, beginning of July, Gemini is the best, followed then by Claude, DeepSeek, and then much later, ChatGPT.
And ChatGPT can do dashboards. You can press on the bottom on code, but honestly, they look really, really, really bad. Somehow OpenAI hasn't put too much focus on this element of web dev, of building web apps or dashboards.
How to Actually Do It
So how to do it again? Gemini, at the bottom, you press the button canvas, and then you say, make me a sexy React dashboard. Claude, you don't need to do anything. Just say, make me a sexy React dashboard, and try to add a pro tip.
The pro tip is often like, make it on a white background for professionalism. And what I really like to do is make it so that the best McKinsey partner falls off his chair. And there you get really, really, really, really cool output.
Beyond Sales: Meeting Facilitation
Now, dashboards are not just for selling. They're not just for sales. They're also great for facilitation.
So how often does anybody attend a team meeting? Most of you reading this are jumping in the day from team's meeting to team's meeting to team's meeting. And we exit the team's meeting, and we forget 99% of what was discussed, even just a couple of hours later. So you will have an AI notetaker, and the AI notetaker will send you three lines. These are the top three action items. These are the top three things that we should do.
But when you have a meeting where you create a dashboard during the meeting, this is really when you are able to take a step back and say, hold up, what have we really discussed?
AI-Powered Board Meetings
So one example for you to try to picture is we run so-called AI-powered board meetings. What is that? When a board of a company meets, these are $50,000, $100,000 meetings. Wait, why $100,000? Because they meet in an exclusive place. Their hourly rate is super high. Everybody normally comes with the right hand also. So basically, you have quite a high amount of people when you have a board meeting for, let's say, a full one or two days.
And we say to them, stop. Just vomit all your thoughts into an AI. Just speak about the things following an agenda. And after two hours, go and take a coffee break and build yourself dashboards, which means you come back with the extracted OKRs that you didn't even realize you actually defined, with the KPIs that emerged from the conversations, with the four or five critical points you forgot, and the next step of the visualization of maybe even an interactive roadmap.
And you know what I'm going to say, so I'm just going to repeat it again. The only thing we do is we take the recording of the board meeting of the first two hours when they take their coffee break, and we say, build me a sexy React dashboard with these elements.
So which means when they come back, the next two, three hours are not spent discussing some random stuff. They're spent extrapolating and amplifying on what was said. The dashboard does not just show you what you said, but often also what you meant to say.
The Keynote Magic Trick
And you can use it in sales, you can use it to augment your board meetings or your meetings in general, but the keynote trick is the one that always drops jaws. You know, it's like that magician that I was telling you about. This is really, really my favorite.
And as I told you before, you know, when I do keynotes, I record the speaker before me, like literally they will get off stage, then the presenter will come and say, Malcolm Werchota is here today, he's going to talk about ABCD, and I don't need more than these 30-40 seconds to copy the transcript and make myself a dashboard.
And then I walk on stage, and then I'm a bit provocative, right? I say, okay, everybody here, may I ask you what the previous speaker said? And you get two, three points, somebody is very clever, puts up their hand, or makes the mistake of putting up their hand. They say two, three points.
And then I say, that's fine, but that's a very human answer. Because as humans, we're not capable of dissecting and understanding in-depth data as the way that AI is able to do it. And then I say, now let me show you what that person really said. And I click myself through a dashboard with five, six tabs, multidimensional key themes, interconnections, radar plots, and you can be sure that in that moment, the room is quiet.
Humans are not able to do this in this timeframe. And who is the one person who always asks for that dashboard? The previous speaker. Afterwards, they'll come to me and they say, can you send me that dashboard that you put?
What to Do with Your Dashboards
So now we have dashboards, but we built them, what do we do with them? No, you continue using it. That asset that you created in a minute or two, use it and host it, for example.
So when we do a workshop, a strategy session, even a brainstorming result, and lately we've been sending our quotes to the customer, not as a boring PowerPoint and not as a Word file or PDF, but as a dashboard. And we host these dashboards on our website.
But what does it do? It does many, many things for you. A: It's your portfolio. B: It generates traffic. You send a dashboard of, for example, the strategy or the meeting, it generates traffic coming to your website. It's a bit something like a lead magnet. And it differentiates us from 90% of all the consultants that are still sending boring PDFs or PowerPoint presentations.
Master Prompting Tips
So let me give you two, three master prompting tips as we come towards the end of this article. So how do you get your dashboards to be really good?
One of them I already told you about it. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and say something like, create a dashboard, if it's, for example, a financial analyst, that would make a financial analyst fall off their chair. If it's a CEO, then you say that would make a senior McKinsey partner fall off their chair.
The second one is try to be minimalistic about the style, because if not, often Gemini and Claude really go crazy. So say something like, I want a minimalistic style with few animations. Something like, think Apple meets Bloomberg Terminal.
And the third one is try to really, really give context, because you're going to paste in a huge bunch of data and the AI sometimes finds it a bit hard to understand what you want with all of this data. So there you're going to say something like, this is for a board presentation, or this is for a sales pitch, etc.
How Dashboards Change Collaboration
Now let's think a bit about the dynamic of collaboration, which has changed. Dashboards change the entire dynamic of collaboration.
In the traditional manner, what do you do? There's a meeting, someone takes notes, days later slides are sent, and an email, forgotten. Because we know as sales people, if you don't send things within 24 hours, you lose a competitive edge.
But dashboards, you do a meeting, live you create your dashboard, you have immediate validation from the customer, Malcolm, the dashboard is not bad, but this point is wrong, I don't like this, it forgot that. Okay, let's do the next iteration of the dashboard. And in this moment, you have shared ownership with your customer.
It's not just faster, it's collaborative. People see their ideas transformed into something tangible while they watch. They become co-creators of your sales meeting.
Key Learnings
So the key learnings from today:
Learning one, dashboards aren't just visualization. In my eyes, they're multi-dimensional stories that people can touch.
Secondly, yes, they cost money. Premium subscriptions are not cheap, but one dashboard that closes the deal pays for years of subscriptions.
And stop documenting the meetings learning, start amplifying them during your meetings, build your dashboards, ask is this what the customer wanted, and augment yourself.
The End of an Era
PowerPoint had a good run. 30 years of boring billions and millions of presentations. PowerPoint, it's time to retire, okay?
Most wonderful greetings from Austria. And my Skoda Octavia still has 300,000 kilometers on it. It still runs perfect. And unlike PowerPoint, some old things are really worth keeping.
Take care, everybody. Have fun. All the best.