The Road to UNBOUND - Season 2, Second Stop: AI-Native Teaching and Learning: Ask for an Immersive Experience, Not a PowerPoint Deck

Chris Carolan opened the second stop of Season 2 on what unbound teaching and learning looks like now that "we can all create the most visual, the most engaging, the most experiential assets to help with teaching and learning." Kyle Jepson set expectations early: "I don't think we're going to have simple answers to anything we talk about today."

Chris drives this week with Kyle, George B. Thomas and Casey Hawkins; Rob Jones was not on. Chris started from feedback he keeps getting, "Chris, you need some slides," and his own doubt about the easy fix: "And I don't think just handing off slide decks is the answer either, right?"

Kyle, answering from HubSpot Academy's side, said video is great for learning a topic and terrible for reviewing one. Casey raised something she and Chris had talked about on Office Hours the day before: clips get attention, but "clips are not great for walking through things." George disagreed: a creator he follows teaches him in clips, because "it depends on the creator, but I also think it depends on the learner." Kyle's answer: "that's not because it's short form. It's because of where it's placed."

George told the story of his UNBOUND talk. His first, AI-focused submission was turned down, and the talk he built with the UNBOUND team instead, Stop Chasing Tactics, meant teaching himself first: deep research across several AI models, merged into one source of truth that he read and listened to. His assistant then built the presentation from the UNBOUND template and that research, and he submitted that first draft untouched: "Now, notice I, the human in the loop, had given it a massive amount of context." He turned the same context into a scorecard site and an interactive scorecard in the room, and before the hour was out his assistant was building a new deck on getting cited in AI answers.

Kyle got the same template and built his talks in HTML instead: feature tags pulled from HubSpot's product catalog and refreshed right after the HubSpot keynote, an interactive credits pricing tool, and setup guides as web pages rather than PDFs. "I defy anyone to build something like this in PowerPoint, right?" George asked everyone watching to take a page out of Kyle's book and put two words in the prompt: immersive experience. Kyle was honest about the cost, from sharing a file to putting it on a dashboard: "I want people to navigate with their eyes wide open."

Chris showed the same lesson inside Breeze. Asked for a PowerPoint, it gave him a PowerPoint, and the interactivity only arrived when he released that constraint and asked for HTML. "If you show up and say, I want a PowerPoint deck, you're going to get a PowerPoint deck." George then opened the deck his assistant had built while the show ran, with his brand, his characters and his full speaking notes.

Casey opened the can of worms the hour did not have time to close: "I find the struggle when I use AI to create decks like that is I get so disconnected from the content. It gets further ahead than I do." She said it was worth discussing next time.