Democratizing Great Business Communication with AI with Vikram Venugopal

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:00.962) Welcome back to the Winner's Circle, everybody. I am here today with Vikram from Present. He is a site for sore eyes for all of us who deal with presentations and PowerPoint and Google Slides and all those things to make presentations. They are AI-ifying the world of presentations, which is long overdue, in my opinion. So Vikram, welcome to the Winner's Circle and congratulations on the award. Vikram V Venugopal (00:23.43) thank you so much for having us. It's an honor to just been nominated but to actually win the award is truly a blessing. So we're deeply grateful. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:30.88) It is a lot of fun doing this business and rewarding people like you. So give us a little bit of background on you and Presley. Vikram V Venugopal (00:38.314) Yeah. So present is an AI native agency focused on communication for life sciences companies. And we've been in business now five years celebrating our five year anniversary, just a couple of weeks ago. And we do business for 45 of the top 50 pharma companies and over 150 life sciences companies overall, whether you're small, just emerging, or you're all the way to one of the big ones. We've been privileged to work with them for several years now and it's been an incredible journey with Present. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (01:11.19) Now, everyone, not everybody, but almost everybody creates presentation and in my experience, very few people are good at creating presentations. Why is that such a persistent problem? Vikram V Venugopal (01:24.392) Yeah, you're you're asking a really powerful question right off the bat. And it's not just a presentation, Russ. It's the way in which we communicate. Most of us go to school and we're taught a technical function, even if it's journalism, even if it's you learn how to write. But then the art of communicating, which is what we're doing, is rarely taught. Even speech and debate. You learn how to do it with specific things, but not in the corporate setting. And when you get to the corporate world. you have to translate your technical knowledge, that expertise, to actually have your audience find value in what you're saying. Now you have to add the layer of, how does everyone communicate in the corporate world? PowerPoint. So when you have PowerPoint, now you have to take something that you've thought about, that you've codified, and actually translate it onto a slide. And the training doesn't exist. Some of us were privileged to work as consultants and that rote work of making slides day in and day out for years made us great at it. But most people have not. And so what do they lean on? They lean on agencies or consultancies. We said, you know what? We want to democratize great communication. That's it. That's our mission. Democratize great business communication. And so we built that platform. for life sciences companies, because that's where our background was. Myself, I've spent decades at companies like Abbott Laboratories, Genentech, AbbVie and Novartis, teaching teams how to bring drugs to market. And as part of that, I had the privilege of bringing therapeutic agents to market that changed the lives of cancer patients, cardiovascular. But I had to learn how to communicate so that I could move not just internal hurdles, but I could also move physicians and patients to actually get the therapy that was best for them. And we wanted to democratize that here at present. So for the last five years, we've been perfecting that. And we found AI and the platform we've built to really be something that our agencies and the people and the companies to benefit from. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:33.73) When you step back and you look at a typical corporate presentation, and it is about telling that story and having kind of a flow to it, in my experience, but in your experience, what's usually broken about corporate presentations? Vikram V Venugopal (03:48.971) Yeah, I think you know where I'd start is first. What's right? Which is intent. When people want to communicate and they've given the opportunity to present something. The intent is I want to make this a great presentation. I want people to understand it and agree with either the decision or the request, right? What breaks down is understanding the audience and how they need information communicated to them. Most of us think. Well, this is the way I'd like it. So let me build a slide this way. And here's the data. Our platform thinks about the audience first. So if I'm talking to Russ and I recognize that, you know what? Russ really loves imagery. He loves colors. He loves the lot of visuals. Russ has got a marketing background, but I'm more technical. I like the data. I like the numbers. Well, my audience is Russ. I need to move him. The platform allows you to to take what Russ needs, take your content, and build the presentations that you're successful with Russ, with your audience. In the corporate world, that's the first place we see that people have the opportunity to fall down, where present can actually help you climb back up. From there, then it's the confidence that whether you need your brand templates, whether you need to match all the different options, of showing Venn diagrams or graphs or charts, it's all done with the click of a button. Once you have that, Venn would present. Instead of falling down where it's broken, you have the chance to actually show up as a hero for your audience. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:26.926) Well, we don't build these presentations and content like that kind of in a vacuum. Usually there's multiple people involved, and you're usually doing it for a specific purpose, right? And almost always there's some sort of decision-making act at the end of that presentation. Are we moving forward with this? Is this a good idea? Have you presented it well? How does a good... you know, a good presentation actually influenced that decision making process versus a poor one. Vikram V Venugopal (05:58.643) Yeah, you know, it's an excellent question and something that in the couple of decades that I worked in life sciences, moving to a decision is one of the most critical, critical points in any employees life, right? Because they want to say, Hey, I've made a recommendation. I want this decision to happen. And the speed at which we make the decision allows pharma companies and the people working there to bring drugs to market. And that's what I think about as a patient, as a North star. So how quickly can we move to a decision so we can then get about the business of actually impacting patients lives? And that's the North Star for most pharma companies that I've worked for and most that work with us. What we find is poor communication slows that down dramatically. Either they didn't understand the question that was asked or they didn't present it the right way or there's information missing. So what happens? Hey, that was great presentation. We've got these questions. Can you come back with a B and C? Well, the next time we're all available to we meet is two weeks from now. OK, well, two weeks from now. Now things have changed. That's OK. But now you delete things. With present, you have the ability to understand your audience. Think about that empathy, what they need to hear so you're prepared for you know what I'm presenting to some of the VPs. And I now understand what they're going to need. I understand what questions they're going to ask. Let me be prepared for that. Have the story ready in the platform, in PowerPoint, so that when I get there, when they ask the question, I'm confident to give that answer. And we move to decision making faster. What that means for patients and physicians is they can actually help impact lives of people that are suffering with a lot of really powerful diseases. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:46.968) So let's step back into the platform a little bit. So when I'm coming out, I'm in one of your life science customers. How am I changing the way that I'm building presentations from? I used to go, I'll tell you, in a technical world, not scientific, but in my technical background, we would hunt for slides and different presentations. We would use tools to make sure. presentations and slides were in sync. We would come up with a master and then syndicate that. So how does it change in the present world as I go in to build this presentation? Vikram V Venugopal (08:22.42) Yeah, it's an excellent question. one things I would encourage everyone to do is go check out our website, present, P-R-E-Z-E-N-T dot A-I. what you're going to see there is the capabilities of our platform. And immediately when you join the platform, the first thing we try to understand is what is your fingerprint? What we mean by fingerprint is how do you like information presented to you? Now remember what I said earlier, the next question we'll ask is who do you commonly present to? Let's build a fingerprint for them. So now we have a sense of how do your audiences like information? And you can either send them a quick 30 second survey or fill it out for them. Once you have those things completed, You now go in and you get to choose from hundreds of templates, whether it's a brand plan, long range plan, financial documents, a clinical study. You've got hundreds of templates ready for you. You get to build out your story. You get to choose how you want to show the information. And then the slides are built. They're built in your brand template, your brand colors, so that all of that, when you present, you don't have to worry about. Now what you focus on is the storytelling. So in the platform, you're starting already elevated and it only gets better. One of the key things that people love here is our auto generator feature. You're able to upload your documents and our platform can look at your documents and build slides for you based on that with the prompts that you have. We've actually have a team of presentation engineers that will work with you to make sure your prompts are really focused, targeted and optimized. And when they do that, Now you're taking all of that extra work about thinking and you're getting a great first draft to start with. So all that time is reduced, all that cost is reduced, and you have the opportunity now to tell a fantastic story. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:11.79) So you mentioned this kind of survey. imagine that's where kind of the audience context comes into play. You're giving a little bit of background. Hey, I'm the finance manager for the company or I'm the scientific advisor or whatever your role is. How does the system know who the presentation is for and what matters to them? Vikram V Venugopal (10:31.911) Yeah, it's it's an excellent question. It relies on you as the expert to say, hey, I'm building a presentation for Bob or I'm building it for Barbara. And once it understands those individuals and their fingerprints, you can differentiate how you build those presentations. You know, I've had experiences at companies where I've had to make finance focused presentations for asking for budget. It's a very different type of presentation. For the same project, I now need to make a strategy presentation for someone that's more strategy focused. Although it includes numbers, it's a flip. And you've got to change that. It's a lot of work. Our platform allows you to tailor that to two different audiences, take the content and flip it. So just with spending a few moments, the platform bills that for you. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:19.762) Now, again, in my experience, in a marketing role, you're often conveying information maybe that you're not expertise in, maybe you've got a working knowledge of, but you're responsible for presenting that information as if it's yours. And it's really kind of drawing that institutional knowledge out of the organization and putting it into slides. What role does that play in generating better presentations? Vikram V Venugopal (11:44.776) Yeah, it's something that we've seen that our users are getting better and better at understanding how to be successful in the presentation. When they deliver the presentation, there's now an opportunity for them to take the time to think about how did that go? Which slides were their great reactions? Where do I need to optimize that? And rather than the burden of, I wish there was a better way to show this, they can go into the platform and find different options. It may be as simple as data in a table that needs to be a chart. Or maybe there was too many words on the slide and instead we need an image. Or it can be that, you know what? didn't flow. In the platform, you have a chance to look at that and understand before you build all the slides how the story comes in and then reflect not just as an individual, but we encourage as a team to think about how is this going to flow, what questions are going to come up, and do we have the right slides and the right story to make sure we actually achieve what that presentation was about. And so that's where the enterprise knowledge comes in to make people successful. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (12:53.902) And now I know you guys are becoming AI native and really moving in that direction. And I think what I just literally had a webinar where we were talking about how, you know, AI has evolved from kind of, you know, two years ago, it like a fourth grader. Maybe six months ago, was kind of an 11th grader or, you know, kind of late high school. Now we're kind of into college and maybe some postgraduate work. But at the same time, you say that... A lot of times when you put information in, you're really getting kind of generic responses. How do you ensure that you're actually improving the quality of those presentations and AI is not really kind of just dumbing it all down? Vikram V Venugopal (13:35.074) Yeah, that's that's something that we found with a lot of the reasons why people come to us So because they say hey, I've tried AI and it's it's just basic right and generic AI doesn't understand the difference between like if you're doing a phase three clinical chart or a sales graph We've built a purpose-built AI. We call our AI Astrid The only AI built to meet the unique demands from life science perspective Our AI understands the difference between a clinical trial and a sales graph. It understands when you're giving it that information, how you can take that complexity and the nuances and build the slides that's needed. I'll give you a perfect example. We're working with a startup that's working on their clinical trials and they need to present the clinical trial information. So they've got all of it and it's just a lot of data. And our AI was able to take all of that and simplify it. So they're able to tell a simple, piece of story that was actually impactful for discussion. So now their advisory board, they actually were able to have more of a discussion that was more robust versus people trying to say, what does that slide mean or how did you do that? And that's where our AI becomes really powerful to move your business forward. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:50.958) And now that you guys are kind of using this, and I know you started out kind of building presentations maybe with AI as a helper, where are you finding now that AI is helping the most in that presentation process? And I guess the real question is where do humans still need to step in? Vikram V Venugopal (15:08.138) Yeah, it's an area that we say AI is only going to make our humans better. AI is not going to replace humans, but humans that understand how to use AI are going to be that much more impactful. We actually recommend that AI and humans work together, right? That's where you have the power. The humans understand the context. They understand the background. As you had mentioned earlier, they understand all of the enterprise knowledge that comes in and how you're using our AI. to then move it forward. A great example is medical affairs teams at biopharma companies. They're responsible for scientific communication. It's very technical, very detailed and very important for decision making on the front lines with physicians. How do you simplify that, but make sure that there's powerful information that's conveyed? That's where the humans come in. Where the AI can help is now, how do you take that and present it in ways and give people options? We have human experts that work with customers and our AI so that you have the workflows that moves medicine. And you can actually move that forward faster. And we understand what the goal standard looks like because we've now indexed millions of slides to understand it. And we can see, okay, here's a great way to tell that story. So that's where still you need the combination of both humans and AI to just be better. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:30.126) I love the idea. How do you get at the balance of the creativity that you want and the automation that you really need to Vikram V Venugopal (16:42.321) Yeah, it's the balances is is something that is different for each person. A lot of people want to pump in their data and just give me the options, right? Let me just see it and I'll choose. We find that a lot of people also spend time crafting the right prompts, understanding and really thinking about every slide and how that's going to evoke emotion. Right. I'm a marketer at heart. And when you build a slide and you tell the story, you want to create emotion. We see that our You can take complex ideas, create these visual stories to tailor the narrative, create the visual for specific audience, and that allows that meaningful scientific exchange. So now people aren't wasting time on trying to understand. They can actually have that conversation and truly understand. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:30.606) Well, and I imagine your customers kind of dig into this platform and build it out with this goal of kind of this productivity gains, time savings type of thing. But it's really more than that. Are you seeing improvements in decision making speeds and alignment of teams and stuff like that? Vikram V Venugopal (17:48.606) It is, it's not just a time savings and a cost savings. It's actually, you have high stakes moments and you want to be successful your first time. So that's where you have a strategic communication partner and a designer in your back pocket. You've got, you've got a platform and you've got the services where we have experts that can work with you to make you successful in that presentation. So what does that mean for your corporate identity? Well, when you walk into a room and you now are confident, you're able to convey clearly and a decision happens, that audience is going to recognize you as that expert. They're going to look forward for you to come back with the next either decision or question, and they're going to trust that they can give you more complicated things. That's only going to help your corporate brand. that's only going to help you rise in the organization. And we've seen that time and time again with people that focus in on their development and understand the power of brilliant communication. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (18:50.062) Now, one of the problems I always ran into is everybody's their own person. And as a marketer, you kind of hate that because you want them all to be you. You want them because you're great. And I imagine a lot of organizations kind of really struggle with that kind standardized communication kind of style. How do you do it at scale and keep everybody happy? Vikram V Venugopal (19:17.832) Yeah, I think that's one of the areas of great opportunity is that every human is different. So when they come, when they come, they want to present, they have a style. What they learn, especially in the corporate world is you need to understand your audience and our platform adapts to your audience. So you don't have to do that hard work. It'll remind you that, Hey, you're presenting to Roger. Roger wants an executive summary upfront, get straight to the point. Then he's going to want the details. So when you have that reminder, you have a secret chief of staff that's helping you be successful. Now in that, you're also going to understand, the last time I presented to Rajat, here's what he liked. Here's where I can improve. Got it. I can get better each and every time. That's going to make you not just more efficient, but also more effective. So now Rajat is going to be excited about seeing you there while you have your own style. It's going to make you successful in front of him and he's going to appreciate that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:16.558) Well, it's amazing because you can, you know, in my experience, I've built presentations for CEOs and board members and everything. you kind of run into two different types of people in that same example of everybody kind of wants to be unique is you can build a presentation that tells a great story. And then the person struggles to kind of get that story and tell it as their own. I wonder how you're helping them kind of, you know, move. either evolve the presentation or help them evolve to kind of into that flow and into that great story. Vikram V Venugopal (20:51.165) Yeah, there's the part of building the presentation is the first part. You have to know your content, you have to build the presentation and then delivering it. We actually offer Zenith master classes in presentation. We've worked with some of the top experts. That knowledge exists on our platform and you can take that and get better at your own presentation. We actually also offer in executive coaching on this. have coaching avatars where you can go in and you can submit your presentation, get feedback on that. Our AI will recognize it. And we have humans also that can come and help you become extraordinary at presentation. It's very different presenting to you virtually, whether you're up on a big stage presenting a national sales meeting, two different types of presentations. And we want to take the end to end there and make you successful regardless of the presentation, whether it's a WebEx, whether it's in a conference room, or if it's at the national sales meeting in front of thousands of people. Each one of those is different and unique, and our platform allows you to be successful in each and every one. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (21:59.107) It's such a neat time to be in this space. Obviously, the content engines are exploding with AI. You can do all this really interesting stuff with it. I'm wondering how long do you think it's going to take before every business communication is kind of AI assisted? Vikram V Venugopal (22:19.836) Yeah, it's already happening. You know, as I mentioned, we have 45 of the top 50 pharma companies and over 150 life science companies. So we know in the life science space, we had a great story the other day of a brand that was launching a very important product to their company. And, you know, the commercial team came up and they had a great story, great slides. The medical affairs team came up and they had a great story, great slides. The communications team had a great story, great slides. And then, you know, the leadership team was really impressed. And what they found was that each of the teams was using our platform. And they were so successful differently, because the styles are different, the content was different, but the focus on democratizing great business communication was there. So each of the teams, each of the individuals were successful, and cohesively as a team, they were successful. So that's where we're seeing now is that it used to be that you stood out when You know you didn't have great presentations. Now when you have a great presentation, it's expected you're using present and people understand. OK, I'm going to expect a great presentation. We're going to make this efficient, effective, and we're going to be successful because we have that platform that we're using. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:34.39) So in this AI world, I think about it a lot because there's, as a marketer, as a business person, I'm now a coder, I'm now a graphic artist, I'm now a data analyst. I can do all these things. Do you think we're kind of leveling the playing field or do you think we're raising expectations on humans? Vikram V Venugopal (23:57.515) I think we're doing both. Our mission is to democratize great business communication. That means making it available to everyone. At the same time, we're seeing that we have super users that are taking it a step further. They're understanding more and more of the nuances. They're helping us actually with our product roadmap. They're saying, hey, one the we need is actually notes when I present. Can you take my slide and help create notes? Absolutely. We were one of the first to do that. Now you have a fresh start there. Hey, I want the imagery to move this way or incorporate these things. And so people that now have a baseline, it's a great, it gives everyone the same place to start from. But those that are going to invest the time in their own education, their own expertise are only going to set themselves apart, which is going to be a powerful way for them to have an impact on their own corporate brand identity. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (24:50.242) Well, and now your background is consulting, and you've been in life sciences for a long time. What advice would you give other executives who are trying to get their entire teams to communicate more effectively? Vikram V Venugopal (25:01.66) It's take it one step at a time. Be very clear about where your team is and what the goals are over 30, 60, and 90 days. Bring us in, let us partner with you so we customize not just the solution, but how and what success looks like for you. We've got a lot of great leaders that come in and they understand that they're going to have people that are going to jump in right away and be really successful. Let them go quickly and show the rest of the group the way, but maybe there's still a group that needs to a little bit more time. And the platform allows for that. People can move at their own speed and be successful their own way. We work on site, we were off site, we were virtually so that we're making it successful. I was just on site last week at a, on the East coast, giving a training to an insights and decision team, a lot of analytics, a lot of data. How do they take that, simplify it to help the organization move forward? Brilliant investment of not just resources, but also time to get people raised up to that level. So that's how we partner with you, not just from the platform, but also from a training perspective. So you're getting the most out of this each month and raising the bar for your entire team and organization. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (26:11.993) Now you've been at this five years with Present and before a few other years in consulting. And you've kind of seen this evolution from the drawing on PowerPoint to these libraries in a very regulated environment. If you step back and you see kind of where we've come from and where we've been, if you could tell executives or leadership teams one thing they could fix about how their companies communicate, what would it be? What do you see that's most broken still? Vikram V Venugopal (26:44.446) I think the opportunity for companies is to recognize time, the amount of time it takes to build a simple meeting presentation. And when teams are empowered, not just with the clarity and the purpose, but also the tools to be successful, you're going to have a much more impactful meeting and outcome. And often, you know, we find the teams come to us and say, I've got to present an update on the business. Great. You know, what are the critical things you need to show? And that's where immediately they don't have an understanding. They don't know. And they come with a list. Well, how do we prioritize this? How do we show what's critical? So you have that discussion. Our platform allows you to prioritize that and build a presentation for your audience. That's going to make you the most successful to move that forward. investing in this platform, investing in the capability for your team is going to allow you to move your business faster. And that's what we want to do. We understand the important work that life science companies do and we want to enable them to bring drugs to market much faster. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:49.256) It's interesting you say one of the things you said I'm picking up on it just, you know, there's difference between showing and presenting too. I remember, you know, you might have a very dense slide of stats and facts and figures and everything. And it's almost more of a validation. It's like, Hey, we've done all of this, by the way, we can move on. You know, it's, it's that it's part of that storytelling of show, maybe not talk about it, but at least show it. then, and then almost assuming that they're, they're reading it and incorporating that into their decision-making. It's super interesting to to think about that in the storytelling process. Vikram V Venugopal (28:21.673) Yeah, yeah, think adult learning is very interesting, right? Most of us go through K through 12 and college. The way into the corporate world, everyone learns differently. Some people need to be able to see it and read it. Some people want that presentation. Some people want to hear it. So when you're presenting, you have to think about your audience in the different ways a whole group soaks in that information. Now with our platform, it allows you to do that intuitively. and it sets you up to be much more successful. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (28:52.835) Super interesting. What's on the roadmap ahead, if you want to give us a little bit of a preview? Where are you guys headed next into this new AI world? Vikram V Venugopal (28:59.731) Yeah, the future is evolving into more of a life sciences where we're thinking, you know, a life sciences, AI enabled communications agency where people have been using us in our services for different things. And we realized that wow, we didn't intend for that, but they've been massively successful. How do we bring that to the masses? whether you're in the, if you're on the commercial side, you're bringing brand plans or big presentations or updates or town halls, or you're on the medical affairs side, you're doing medical affairs decks or medical science liaison training or scientific exchanges, publications to planning. Bringing all of that together under one communication life science agency is what we're seeing on our roadmap with an AI layer that not just simplifies it, but also reduces cost and time. And so we're excited about what the future is going to bring because we want companies and the individuals there to be massively successful. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (29:54.831) Well, Vikram, can't thank you enough for making presentations better. know, it's long the bane of existence in corporate America with crappy presentations. Sorry for the French. But, you know, it really is when you're in front of one and you're spending your time, you know, dealing with one, dealing with a bad presentation, it really is, it's really depressing and mind numbing. So I appreciate the effort you guys are taking to improve this situation. Vikram V Venugopal (30:24.907) We love it. I love the work we get to do and hearing the customer feedback and their success stories only drives us to move even faster and work even harder. So we love it. It's a privilege to be in this space. Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (30:35.299) Yeah, and make everybody better. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. And we really appreciate the nomination and look forward to rewarding you guys some more in the future. Vikram V Venugopal (30:45.868) Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here.