Hello friends,
Many thanks for reading The Quest, your weekly round-up of tips and insights to help you design and lead exceptional online sessions that your group members will love.❤️
“Can’t AI just generate session designs for me?”
As I put together content for my upcoming course Live Session Magic, I realized I wasn’t entirely clear on the answer.
Today we’ll run an experiment to show you what AI can and can’t do for you when it comes to designing your live sessions.
I’ll share my top 3 AI-embedded platforms – with a special invite to a live demo session where you’ll be able to try it out for yourself. 💪
Let’s jump right in!
Can you use AI to design your live sessions?
Let’s put ChatGPT to the test.
I fed it details about a Zoom session that I designed and ran several months ago.👇
Audience –> Time-strapped professionals participating in a volunteer initiative with non-profit partners to create social impact projects.
Purpose –> To kick off the initiative and build connection among project partners.
Additional info –> The session is 75 minutes on Zoom with approx. 40 participants. It needs to be interactive and engaging.
Here’s what it came up with:
✅ What ChatGPT gets right:
1/ It gets the purpose. And that’s important. Having a clear purpose is what guides session design.
2/ It follows a structure. It flows from the welcome to the closing, though it skips over some steps like reflection and commitment.
3/ It offers new ideas. It came up with some prompt ideas and an icebreaker activity “Picture This” that helped spark some new thinking.
⚠️ What ChatGPT misses:
1/ It lacks a human touch.
Take the opening, “brief introduction and overview of the session’s goals“. If Chat GPT had its way, you’d be starting your session with a lot of talking.
When what you want to do is create a welcoming tone to ease your participants into your session.
Things like greeting your participants by name and engaging straight away. That’s what will create the conditions for engagement.
2/ It lacks creativity.
Let’s look at the sharing after the breakouts, “Each group appoints a spokesperson to summarise their discussions in the larger group.”
This is the dreaded “report back” which can be extremely boring. Especially with a medium-sized group. And especially online.
Instead, I’d be asking myself how to draw out the deeper insights from the breakouts. And how to use a few well-selected digital tools that allow everyone to contribute in addition to having a few people sharing verbally in the big group.
3/ It can get it wrong.
Take the participant intros. “A quick round robin where each person shares their name and one word that describes their vision for the partnership.”
I might do this for a smaller group of say, 20 people. But I wouldn’t do this for a group of 40 – it’s too big. It will likely drag on and participants will lose interest. That’s exactly what you don’t want.
The bottom line?
What you get with ChatGPT is a generic, basic, and flawed outline that will lead to a lackluster session.
Here’s the good news.
There are AI-embedded platforms that can help you design dynamic sessions that increase engagement. They have done the heavy lifting of “training” AI for engagement. And they generate better-designed questions, tools, and ideas than ChatGPT on its own.
Here are 3 of my favorite AI-powered platforms and how they can help you. All have free versions so you can test them out.
1) StreamAlive
An easy-to-use chat-to-screen engagement tool. StreamAlive AI can help you generate interesting and relevant questions that can be run as polls, word clouds, maps, and more.
What it’s good for 👉Zoom meetings, online workshops, live streams, hybrid and in-person meetings and conferences, and more.
📅 Join me and StreamAlive CEO Lux Narayan for a free demo on June 20 to see it in action (keep scrolling down for more info).
Butter
An all-in-one virtual collaboration platform that makes it easy to structure engagement into your meetings. It’s an alternative to Zoom with built-in interactive features, timers, a toolkit, and more.
What it’s good for 👉 Virtual team meetings, training, and workshops.
Stormz
An intuitive digital board for brainstorming, decision-making, retrospectives, large group meetings, and collaboration. It facilitates the process of coming up with the best ideas.
What it’s good for 👉 Large group meetings, virtual, in-person, and hybrid.
How are you using AI to design your live sessions? Hit reply to the email and let me know!
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Creatively yours,
Whenever you are ready there are 2 more ways I can help you:
👉Custom coaching & team training. Book a free 15-minute zero-commitment call with me to see how I can support you and your team.
👉5-week Live Online Course. The Breakthrough Facilitation course gives you tools, personalized feedback, and a proven framework for designing and leading high-engagement live sessions. Join the interest list and be the first to get the next cohort dates and discounts.
