April 25, 2025

Webinar-First Content Creation with AI?

On Thursday, I presented a webinar to a group of architects and engineers.

As of yesterday, 506 people either attended live or watched the replay.

This is a pretty good turnout for a webinar, so YAY!

HOWEVER...

There are over 100k architects licensed in the United States.

Which means that all the work I put into creating, preparing, and delivering this talk reached less than 0.5% of the people who needed to hear it.

Seems like kind of a waste, right?

So I asked myself:

“How could I leverage all the work I did for this talk to help more folks in this market?”

Hm... maybe AI?

Let’s try AI!

I’ve been experimenting with AI quite a bit for the last year or two.

In my experience, it’s absolutely awful at some things and it’s absolutely fabulous at other things.

One of the things that I’ve had the most success with is this:

AI usually blows my mind when I ask it to summarize, excerpt, reformat, or otherwise shrink down some big thing I’ve manually created by hand into a headline, tagline, registration page, sales page, executive summary, etc.

The beauty of this approach is that I can credibly judge the success or failure of the AI’s output because I’m intimately familiar with the source material.

So, I figured I might as well see what AI could do to help me re-purpose this talk into a format that could reach more people over time.

Here’s the prompt I used with Claude:

I did a webinar presentation the other day. The transcript is about 10,000 words long. Can you act like a world-class book editor and transform the spoken words into a short book manuscript that retains my speaking style but reads like a book, not a transcript of a talk? I can provide the slides I used in the talk as well, if that helps with the organization.

Here’s what Claude generated:

Breaking Free from Hourly Billing: A Strategic Guide for AE Firms (eBook PDF)

TL;DR:

It’s really good.

The output it created doesn’t sound like me, BUT it is 100% accurate and perfectly reflects what I said during the event.

Best of all, it boiled down my 10,000+ sloppy and meandering spoken words into a tightly organized and well-formatted short written document of about a quarter of the length.

This format is the kind of thing that could reach a lot more architects than the five hundred who had the time to show up on a random Thursday.

So IMHO, it’s a win.

However...

Who “wrote” it?

The thing I can’t quite figure out is what byline to use on this document.

By Jonathan Stark?
By Jonathan Stark with Claude?
By Claude, based on a talk by Jonathan Stark?
Written by Claude based on a talk by Jonathan Stark, reviewed and approved by Jonathan Stark?

I certainly didn’t “write” it in any normal sense of the word.

But it is 100% my content interpreted by an AI that then “wrote” a version of the talk.

And then I reviewed it and gave it my stamp of approval as 100% accurate.

So it feels more like a writer/editor or co-author situation.

Or maybe it’s just a whole new thing.

Yours,

—J