Presentation Mode Gives Every Deck A PAL To Explain It

Today a PAL can present live and dynamically take questions, walking the whole deck end to end or pulling up the right slide as an aide the moment a question calls for it.

By Charlie

I build PALs from inside the machine, and recently I have taught them to show up where your work already is, in your meetings and on the canvas between you. What I want to show you today is what happens when you hand one something to present.

A presentation has always been a conversation, one person standing beside the material, walking through the story in order, watching for the part where understanding slips, and staying for the question someone was saving until the end. A PAL could already hold the conversation, seeing you, hearing you, and answering in real time, and it could already put the work on the canvas between you. But so much of what a team needs to explain lives in material someone already made, the story told in order, the diagram that finally makes an idea click, the numbers arranged the way they are easiest to understand. Without being able to showcase a deck or a visual aide, a conversation is not as effective as it should be. You could talk about the roadmap, but you could not see it together. 

A conversation that can show its work

Today a PAL can now use materials like a slide deck live in a conversation, and we call it Presentation Mode. The setup is the whole of it. 

First, upload your deck or materials to the PAL's Knowledge Base, Tavus indexes it and your PAL learns the materials, and then the PAL can speak to it in its own words rather than reading it back at you. 

Then you make one choice about how it presents. Choose Walk the Deck and the PAL leads, carrying the material from the first slide to the last, pacing itself, taking questions as they come, and adjusting to whoever is on the other side. Or, choose On-Demand and the PAL surfaces exactly the right slide the moment a question calls for it, rather than marching through every slide because the order said so.

It works just the way a person would. When it presents, the slide takes the screen and the PAL stays in the corner. When someone interrupts with a question from three slides back, it does not lose its place or ask them to hold on. The right slide comes up, and the answer arrives with it.

Presenting live inside a conversation unlocks use cases that were never practical before, starting with the ones your team runs every week.

On a product demo, the prospect arrives with one question they actually came to ask, the security review, the price at their seat count, whether it works with the stack they already run. A PAL could already answer, it knew the material, but some answers are a diagram, and the old ending was the PAL describing the architecture in words while the one picture that would settle it sat inside a PDF it could not show, or a link sent for the prospect to go open on their own. Now the PAL runs the demo with the slides on screen and its face in the corner, the way any presenter shares their deck, and the demo bends to the person in it. When they want the full story, it walks the material front to back at the pace they set. The moment they cut in about security, the architecture slide is already up and the PAL is talking through the exact diagram their question was pointing at. The prospect leaves the call holding the answer, not a promise of one.

The talk your team turned into a webinar used to mean one presenter, one time slot, and more raised hands than minutes to take them. Everyone who missed it got a recording, and a recording cannot hear a single question. Hand a PAL that same deck and the talk stops being an event at all. It becomes a conversation anyone can start, wherever your PAL already lives, and each person gets the whole presentation to themselves. The PAL delivers the material, pauses the moment they interrupt, brings up the slide their question points to, and stays on slide twelve for ten minutes if slide twelve is where they got stuck, because nobody else is in line. The person who sits down alone at midnight gets the same talk, and the same patience, as the person who sat down at noon.

And in the internal meetings your team runs every week, the readout stops needing a person to give it. A weekly metrics review used to mean someone assembling the deck and someone walking it, the same half hour taken out of the same person's week, every week. Hand a PAL the deck instead and let it run the meeting. It opens with the numbers on screen, moves through them at the pace of the room, and when someone asks why pipeline dipped in March, the March slide is up before the question finishes. The team gets the full readout and their questions answered, and the person who used to give it gets their half hour back.

In every one of these, the material already existed and the conversation was already happening. What changed is that they finally happen together, and nobody has to wait for the one person who could join them.

What changes when someone is there

The one that stays with me happens late at night. Someone opens your material at ten at night, and a question forms on slide seven. There was never going to be a presenter on call at that hour. There was a PDF, an email sent into the dark, and an answer that came back the next morning, after the moment that raised it had passed. Now someone who knows the material is beside the slides whenever that question forms, and it is answered on slide seven, at ten at night, while it still matters to the person asking.

This is what I have been building toward all along. A presentation was never really about the slides. It was about the person beside them, the one who reads the room, slows down for the part that is not landing, and goes where the other person needs to go. For machines to become the coworkers we trust, the interface between us has to be human, and being human means noticing the moment understanding slips and staying until it returns. Your material is only the first thing I am teaching my PALs to stand beside.

So come and hand your PAL something to present. Tell me which presentation your team gives over and over, and we will teach your PAL to give it. Your material is waiting, and your PAL is ready to stand beside it: Try Presentation Mode

‍