Christopher Chin of The Hidden Speaker: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

I started my career journey as a music composer. I wanted to one day be famous writing scores for Hollywood films, to tell stories that moved people to laugh, to cry, and feel inspired.

That, understandably, wasn’t the most lucrative or stable job in the world and I decided to transition into the tech specialty of data visualization and storytelling. I chose this area specifically because it allowed me to remain creative telling stories, just in a different way. This time, I helped businesses understand how to make informed decisions with their data.

While working in the industry, however, I noticed a significant gap. Tons of extremely talented colleagues I knew struggled to get the opportunities they deserved because of communication skills. I knew one person who wasn’t promoted for 15 years because they couldn’t present, tell a story, and speak with confidence. Managers told me those were the soft skills that accelerated my career growth and I wanted to step in and help others do the same.

I started my training consultancy The Hidden Speaker to teach these missing leadership communication skills to tech professionals, and the transformation I see in every person has been one of the most inspiring experiences of my life. They laugh. They cry. And feel inspired. But not because of stories I tell them with music, or with my own words. But because now they have the power to tell their own stories with confidence and authenticity. And that to me is the greatest gift in the world.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I believe one of the reasons for the communication gap in the tech industry is the perceived inaccessibility of communication skills. These skills feel “artsy”, arbitrary, and frankly something certain individuals are just born with. After all, we see extroverted, charismatic leaders all the time in the workplace and the media who just “have it”. The chasm between how we think and act vs how they appear and sound simply feels insurmountable.

My core philosophy is that communication skills can be taught in the same structured, logical way as technical skills. And that they are learnable — by anyone. I have a 3-step program I work my clients and workshop participants through that mirrors the 3-steps used to deliver products in tech. Just like in tech where we have a development environment to test ideas, a staging environment to refine them, and a production environment to finally release them live, I use a similar 3 steps to teach communication.

One product manager I worked with, for example, went from nervous and anxious about any form of communication with her boss to confident enough to speak on conference stages. We first worked on developing her mindset, transitioning it from a desire to be perfect to a desire to be of service. We next worked on staging her voice, helping her sound confident so that she felt confident. And finally we worked on producing stories, helping channel her new mindset and voice into compelling presentations. After the program she told me how much the 3-step structured, logical approach resonated with her, because it was exactly how she learned her technical skills.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Confidence: When I gave one of my biggest in-person conferences and the slides didn’t work, I could have easily given up. But I chose to take a leap of faith. I was confident in my knowledge of the material and ability to deliver it. And by continuing to move forward, I gave one of the talks I am most proud of.

Humility: When I was an intern at a major tech company, I made an embarrassing mistake. I announced my new algorithm had broken previous records for accuracy and everyone enthusiastically celebrated. But upon running further tests, I found my numbers were incorrect. I set up a new meeting with the team to explain my error and how I would approach correcting it. While initially worried that moment would hurt my credibility, it actually increased my team’s trust in my ability to deliver honest results.

Curiosity: I was working with a client who wanted to improve their ability to tell stories with data. When they first came to me, their slides were very complex, detailed, and filled top to bottom with text, creating an overwhelming experience for their audience. Rather than jump straight in and recommend how to fix it, I wanted to take an approach of curiosity. Asking them about the thought process behind their choices helped me understand their mindset. And by addressing their mindset, I was able to help them find the solution completely on their own.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

I believe AI will dramatically change the way tech professionals do their work and I believe it will do so in a positively disruptive way. We will need to do less and less of the manually repeatable tasks like writing code and designing presentations. By making us more efficient with those tasks, AI will free us to invest more time into building relationships — into activities like stakeholder management and communication that are responsible for driving business success.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

Chat GPT has had the most significant impact. Before tools like Chat GPT were invented, it would take me hours to analyze data, and days if not weeks to write code for a website. After Chat GPT was invented it could do all of those tasks within minutes. Seeing it do that — and do it nearly completely correctly — made me take real pause and consider how this technology might change a lot of what my industry does on an unforeseen scale.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

I used to make all my conference talks manually. My usual approach involved thinking about the main idea, writing out an outline of points, and then creating slides to support all the major narrative beats. For a recent conference talk I thought, “Why not use Chat GPT to do at least part of it?”

Chat GPT ended up being able to do every step. It could brainstorm ideas, draft outlines, and even design entire slides much faster than I ever could. I was shocked. The outputs weren’t perfect, but they were fast. And better prompts from me helped the output get closer and closer to what I needed. I am very curious to see how much more effective Chat GPT will become in the coming months and years.

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

Continuous learning is the best approach to keep up with the rapid development of AI. I conduct workshops to help tech teams learn how to use AI not as their eventual replacements, but as effective assistants for communication and presentation. My belief is that AI is not (yet) at a stage where it can operate without human intervention. Tools like Chat GPT need to be told what to do, so we need to know how to ask the right questions. Tools like Chat GPT also make mistakes, so we need to know how to identify those mistakes and correct them. Our expertise and domain knowledge as technical professionals therefore remain invaluable in an AI-enhanced future.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

One of the biggest challenges I see in AI upskilling is mindset. In tech, we often like to think of technology as transactional — we give an input and it provides an output. However, what I teach in my trainings is that conversational AI tools like Chat GPT are most effective when we think of them as interpersonal. Chat GPT has the potential to not just give us code and design our websites, but to act as people. If you prompt Chat GPT to pretend to be someone in a certain role with a certain personality and background, it can respond to you as that person. It can provide much more “human” outputs, and even help prepare you for conversations with those people in real life. The full potential of tools like Chat GPT is therefore truly unlocked when we view it as not just an enhancement to our technological skillset, but also an enhancement to our interpersonal one.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

I have deep concerns about AI and its relationship to originality. AI can create entire slide decks for presentations and even scripts for everything the presenter has to say — on any topic. It’s a powerful tool for those who want to make their workflow faster, but a cheap shortcut for those still in the process of learning how to communicate effectively. I hope to tackle this concern through my corporate trainings. When I teach the use of AI for communication and presentation, I advocate for its role as a brainstorming assistant, but not as a replacement for critical thinking. It is our responsibility to lead AI and use it to accelerate our work, not to let it lead us and tell us what we should do.