---
title: "How a Keynote Speaker Should Actually Prepare | Thomas Anglero"
description: "  The WormGPT story: what real preparation looks like the night before a keynote Real preparation for a keynote does not happen weeks out in a finished slide deck. It happens the night before,..."
url: https://anglero.com/2026/06/15/how-keynote-speakers-prepare/
date: 2026-06-15
modified: 2026-06-15
author: "Thomas Anglero"
image: https://anglero.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/thomas-anglero-ai-keynote.jpg
categories: ["Uncategorized"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# How a Keynote Speaker Should Actually Prepare | Thomas Anglero

[![ Thomas Anglero presenting a current AI example during a keynote](https://anglero.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/thomas-anglero-ai-keynote-1024x573.jpg)](https://anglero.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/thomas-anglero-ai-keynote.jpg)*Thomas Anglero working a fresh AI story into a keynote.*

 

# The WormGPT story: what real preparation looks like the night before a keynote

Real preparation for a [keynote](/speaking-topics/) does not happen weeks out in a finished slide deck. It happens the night before, when a speaker who actually works with AI checks what has changed in the world in the last day or two and reshapes the talk around it. The deck is only a guide. The content has to be fresh, because an audience can feel the difference between a recording and a person who is paying attention.

## The night before Finland

Before a recent keynote in Finland, I was going through my presentation the night before, doing what I always do, looking at what had happened in AI that week. I came across something called [WormGPT](https://thehackernews.com/2023/07/wormgpt-new-ai-tool-allows.html). I had not heard of it. Someone had taken a model, forked it, and built it deliberately to do harm, to break through a company’s defences. It had been out for a day or two and already had a couple of hundred thousand downloads, and the number was climbing fast.

I took a screenshot, put it on a single slide, and the next morning I opened part of the talk with it. This is real, it is days old, and here is what it means for you. That one slide, found the night before, did more for the room than anything I had prepared weeks earlier.

## Why one fresh slide beat the polished ones

The audience felt they were hearing something current, something I had found myself, not a case study that had been doing the rounds for years. The keynote scored 4.9 out of 5 in the surveys afterwards, and the short clip of that one moment has since become my most watched video on Instagram, well past 120,000 views and still climbing, bringing new followers every day. The numbers are not the point. The point is that the freshness is what they remembered, and freshness only comes from doing the work the night before.

## Tearing the deck apart

A slide deck gets old quickly. When I have time before a talk, I tear mine apart. What has happened since I built this. What did I learn from the last audience I used it on. Which story landed and which one fell flat. I might keep the same slides, but the story changes every time, because the slides are a reminder of the thought, not a script to recite. Same slides, new talk. All of it fresh, every time.

## What this means when you are choosing a speaker

When you [book a speaker](/services/), you are not really buying a deck. You are buying whether they will walk on stage having done that work for your audience, that week, or whether they will run the same recording they gave somewhere else last month. Your people will know which one they got inside the first few minutes, and so will you.

One way to tell before you commit is to watch how a speaker opens a room. [See what that looks like on a stage.](/media/)

## Questions this article answers

- How should a keynote speaker prepare the night before a talk?
- Why does fresh, current content matter more than a polished slide deck?
- How can you tell whether an AI speaker is genuinely up to date?

 

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*Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organisations including IBM, the WHO, the World Government Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.*