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One of my favorite ideas from his writing is the number 42.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, a supercomputer named Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

The answer?

42.

There’s just one problem. Nobody knows what question 42 actually answers.

I’ve always loved the absurdity of this story. But there’s also an important lesson. We do something similar in business all the time. We spend enormous amounts of time, money, and energy searching for solutions without questioning whether we’re solving the right problem.

And now, with AI, we can generate answers faster than ever. But faster answers to the wrong questions just help us solve the wrong problems faster.

In my book Invisible Solutions, I explore how reframing problems can reveal solutions we couldn’t see before.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of 42.

Before investing 7.5 million years searching for an answer, make sure you understand the question.

Otherwise, you might end up with another 42, with absolutely no idea what to do with it.

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I find that reading from them often comes across as less relaxed and authentic.

That said, there are times when you need to get the words just right.

I recently discovered and started using NotchPrompter.

It’s a simple Mac app that displays your script in a narrow box right below the notch where the camera is.

I’ve recorded several videos with it, and there’s no noticeable eye movement. And it looks like I’m speaking directly into the camera rather than looking down at a script.

It even has a voice activation mode that adjusts the scrolling speed based on your speech.

And here’s the best part. There’s a free version on GitHub. I paid $4.99 for the Mac App Store version to support the developer.

Below is a screenshot showing what the script looks like in the notch area.

I also tested it in my studio, where I use a Sony A6100 with a monitor positioned just below the lens. Works great there too!

If you occasionally need a teleprompter but don’t want to look like you’re reading, check it out.

The post The $5 Teleprompter That Surprised Me appeared first on Stephen Shapiro.

Now imagine doing all of this while standing in the middle of the audience, looking someone directly in the eyes, and having a conversation with them.

That’s exactly what I do during my keynotes. And my secret weapon is something surprisingly simple: an iPad mini.

But here’s an important point. My iPad isn’t running the presentation or sending video to the projector. My MacBook Pro handles everything, including the slides, music, videos, and animations. It’s connected directly to the venue’s projection system using HDMI, just as it would be for a traditional presentation.

The iPad is simply a wireless remote control for Keynote running on my Mac. The two devices communicate over a private Wi-Fi network that I bring with me. This gives me the flexibility of wireless control without the risks associated with wirelessly transmitting the entire presentation.

I’ve been using this setup for twelve years, and it has fundamentally changed how I interact with audiences. There are two reasons I love it.

One is the ability to draw directly on my slides.
The other is the freedom to completely change my presentation on the fly.

The Power of Drawing in Real Time

There’s something powerful about watching an idea being created rather than simply seeing the finished product.

Research supports this. A 2016 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology by Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer found that, under certain conditions, people who watched an instructor draw diagrams performed better on learning tests than those who saw completed diagrams.

One explanation is that watching a diagram develop directs attention and allows people to process information as it unfolds. Rather than trying to absorb an entire framework at once, the audience follows the thinking behind it, one element at a time.

But I believe something else happens during a live presentation. When I show a polished, prebuilt diagram, the audience knows it was created before they arrived. When I draw that same diagram in real time, it feels like we’re creating something together. It’s happening right now, in this room, with these people. The experience becomes more personal.

For my Personality Poker keynote, this is a game-changer. Rather than simply showing a completed framework, I can build on it as I explain the concepts. One suit at a time. One combination at a time.

Using an Apple Pencil, I can circle personality traits, connect ideas, draw arrows, or emphasize something someone in the audience just said.

Everything I draw appears immediately on the giant screens. And because I’m using an iPad mini, I’m not tethered to a lectern or computer. I can walk into the audience, engage someone in conversation, and draw while maintaining eye contact. It’s like having a giant interactive whiteboard that follows me wherever I go.

The Freedom to Change My Presentation on the Fly

The second major advantage is flexibility.

Most speakers use a traditional clicker to advance through a predetermined sequence of slides. That works well enough until something unexpected happens. What if you need to skip five slides because your timeslot was cut at the last minute from 60 minutes to 45 minutes? What if someone asks a question about a topic you hadn’t planned to cover? Or what if the event organizer suddenly changes the amount of time you have available and asks you to go longer?

With a traditional clicker, you might find yourself rapidly advancing through slides while the audience watches. My iPad eliminates that problem.

I typically have 50 to 100 slides loaded into Keynote, more than I expect to use. On my iPad, I can see thumbnails of every slide. I simply scroll through them, tap the slide I want, and instantly jump there. The audience never sees me navigating.

This allows me to adjust the presentation based on what’s happening in the room. If the audience is particularly interested in a topic, I can go deeper. If someone asks a question, I can jump directly to a relevant slide. If we’re running short on time, I can skip entire sections without anyone noticing.

And if the client wants me to go longer, I’m ready.

That happened recently. I was originally scheduled to deliver a 75-minute presentation. At the last minute, the client asked if I could extend it to 120 minutes. Fortunately, I already had additional material loaded and could expand the presentation without having to redesign anything.

Or one time, I realized at the last minute that there was a more relevant presentation I should give rather than the one I had prepared. I was able to shift direction without ever touching my MacBook Pro, which was already connected.

At a recent event, while listening to the speakers before me, I realized I had a story that would perfectly reinforce their message. Although I hadn’t planned to share it, the relevant slides were already in my deck. I was able to incorporate the story seamlessly, making my presentation more relevant to what the audience had just heard.

It’s like having a library of content at my fingertips rather than a fixed script. This is particularly valuable during Q&A sessions, when I can access slides that address questions I might not have anticipated.

How the Technology Works

The setup is surprisingly simple, but there are a few things I’ve learned over the years that make it more reliable.

I use Apple’s built-in Keynote Remote functionality to connect my iPad mini to Keynote running on my MacBook Pro. I configure the iPad to display the current slide, the upcoming slide, and a scrollable list of thumbnails that allows me to jump anywhere in the presentation.

Both devices connect to a private Wi-Fi network using a router that I bring to every event. This is important because I don’t want to rely on a hotel’s or conference center’s Wi-Fi network to control my presentation.

For larger venues, I use a router with a wireless repeater that extends the range. This allows me to move freely around the room, even when the Mac is positioned far from the stage. Ideally, I prefer having the HDMI connection somewhere near the front of the room, although it doesn’t need to be directly onstage.

When I need internet access, I use a portable travel router that can connect to the venue’s Wi-Fi while maintaining the local connection between my Mac and iPad.

This is particularly useful when I’m using Full Deck IQ, a tool I’ve developed to help organizations understand the personality dynamics of their teams. Audience members participate using their phones, and I can display their collective results in real time. Imagine hundreds of leaders participating in an activity, seeing their results appear on the screens, and then exploring what those results mean together.

Another benefit of this configuration is reliability. Since the Mac is running the presentation and connected directly to the projector, a temporary loss of the iPad’s wireless connection doesn’t interrupt the video signal. The presentation remains on the screen, and I can always control it directly from the Mac or use a traditional clicker as a backup.

Of course, I test everything before the audience arrives. The last thing I want is for technology to become a distraction during a keynote.

Making Presentations More Human

For me, the biggest benefit of this setup has nothing to do with the equipment itself. It’s about changing the relationship between the speaker and the audience.

Instead of delivering a rigid, predetermined presentation, I can respond to what’s happening in the moment. Instead of displaying finished diagrams, I can create them with the audience. Instead of standing onstage clicking through slides, I can walk into the room and have conversations.

The technology becomes almost invisible, allowing the experience to become more personal, spontaneous, and engaging.

I often say that the best presentations aren’t really presentations. They’re conversations. And the more we can make audiences feel like they’re part of creating the experience, the more meaningful that experience becomes.

My iPad mini isn’t just a better clicker. It’s a tool that helps me turn a presentation into a conversation.

And once you experience that freedom, it’s hard to go back.

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While working for the BMW Williams F1 team from 1999 to 2001, I had some amazing experiences.

I went to several Grand Prix, including two at Silverstone. I also visited during testing days at various tracks, including Circuit de Catalunya, where I hung out in the pits.

But maybe the coolest were the driver days. For these, we invited our best Accenture clients to Brands Hatch. In addition to my driving around the track in various race cars, I got to sit in the passenger seat with Jenson Button one year and Juan Pablo Montoya the next. Each time, we were in a modified BMW M5.

The year Button drove me around, it was raining and the course was slick. He was still going at a fast pace and his hands never stopped moving to keep the car on the track. He seemed calm. I wished I were wearing Depends.

When Montoya took me around the track, it felt like he was pushing the car to its absolute limits. I couldn’t imagine going any faster without ending up in a ditch. But apparently, he thought there was plenty of room to go faster.

I asked him what the biggest difference was between an F1 car and a road car. I thought it might be the acceleration or downforce. But he told me, “It’s the brakes.”

He continued, saying the BMW he was driving was a beast that could accelerate well and grip the road relatively well. But the main reason he couldn’t push it to full throttle was that he knew the car couldn’t decelerate quickly enough.

An F1 car can go from 100 miles per hour to a full stop in about 2 seconds. Most sports cars, like a Porsche 911 or a BMW M5, take approximately 3.5 to 4 seconds, depending on conditions. Nearly twice as long.

Going fast depends on being able to slow down.

And the same is true in business.

Sometimes the key to moving faster isn’t a bigger engine. It’s better brakes.

Learn more about my keynote, Stability in an Uncertain World.

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I tend to approach it differently. I usually already know what I want to accomplish and I use AI to remove whatever is standing in the way.

In an earlier article, I talked about how I needed to cut my 60-minute Personality Poker speech down to a 12-minute experience for a showcase I was doing. I could have asked AI what to cut, but that would have meant letting AI decide what a good Stephen Shapiro speech should look like. I know what works. I know what’s important. I can remember audience reactions and questions they ask after an event.

So instead of asking AI to edit, I gave it a time-coded transcript from the full-length 60-minute version that I knew worked well. That became the baseline. Then I rehearsed the new version over and over, feeding each time-coded transcript (an SRT file) into AI and asking it to compare my performance against the baseline. Where was I spending too much time? Where was I speaking faster? What sections had expanded? What could I tighten without changing the experience? Where was I stepping on the punchlines?

On the day of the event, I delivered the experience in 11 minutes and 55 seconds. AI didn’t create the speech. It coached me on something I had already created. That’s an important distinction.

Another example started with an audience member’s question after I gave a Personality Poker speech. He asked me if I had looked at the best way to configure teams.

I’ve been researching this topic for two decades. I’ve looked at when teams outperform individuals, when individuals outperform teams, and how the complexity and ambiguity of work influences how we configure the people doing it. I had already written numerous articles on the research and had several chapters in You’re Not Playing with a Full Deck about how the nature of the work influences team configuration.

While flying back home, I started playing with the idea of how I could “automate” the decision-making process. Sitting in the airport lounge, I laid out the strategy. What did I want the system to do? What were the inputs? What were the outputs? What was the process?

On the plane, we had Wi-Fi, so I started developing the app with Claude Code while flying at 30,000 feet. By the time I landed, I had a working interactive application that let people explore the concepts and apply them to their own work. Ten years ago, that probably would have required finding a developer, explaining what I wanted, getting a proposal, spending thousands of dollars, waiting weeks or months, testing it, and making revisions. More likely, I simply wouldn’t have built it.

Now, instead of binge-watching Netflix on the plane, I build a fully functioning app.

The point is that the idea wasn’t created by AI. The research wasn’t created by AI. The intellectual property wasn’t created by AI. AI simply allowed me to go from idea to implementation in one afternoon.

My favorite example goes back even further. More than a decade ago, I envisioned taking my Personality Poker experience and creating a system that could “read” people’s hands. The idea was simple: take a photo of your five Personality Poker cards, upload the image, and then interpret what it meant. Who you are. Who you are not. Who you need. Your blind spots. And more.

More importantly, I wanted to aggregate all of that information in real time so I could provide insights into the composition of the teams and organization while on the stage, and then provide the data to the client after the event.

Twelve years ago, I spoke with a developer about this idea. Some of what I wanted wasn’t technically practical at the time. Other parts would have cost well into six figures. So the idea sat there. The idea didn’t suddenly become better twelve years later. My ability to get it done did.

Today, I’ve built what I call the “Full Deck IQ” system. It does all of the things I imagined years ago and quite a bit more. During a live event, hundreds of people can participate, receive individualized insights, and collectively create organizational data that I can use in real time.

Again, AI didn’t give me the idea. It made the idea possible.

These experiences and others have changed the way I think about AI.

I see three particularly powerful roles for it.

1. It can be a coach, helping us improve things we already do. For example, it helped me improve the timing and pacing of my speech.
2. It can be a builder, helping us turn our ideas, expertise, and intellectual property into things that previously required technical skills, significant money, or large teams. The configuration software I built on the plane is one example.
3. It can also be an amplifier, extending the value of what we do beyond a single interaction, meeting, workshop, or speech. My Full Deck IQ system does this well and has also enabled me to find new revenue opportunities.

But there is another side to this. As AI makes creation easier, the ability to create something becomes less differentiating. Judgment becomes more important. Anyone can generate an app. Anyone can create an assessment. Anyone can produce a framework that looks polished and impressive. That doesn’t mean it’s good.

You still need to know what problem is worth solving. You need experience, expertise, and a point of view. You need to know what you are trying to accomplish before you start building. And perhaps most importantly, you need the judgment to recognize when something AI produces looks impressive but isn’t actually useful. I’ve seen plenty of AI-generated output that looks fantastic on the surface but falls apart once you start examining what’s underneath.

That’s why I don’t think the most interesting question is, “What can AI create for me?” I think a much more interesting question is, “What have I always wanted to create that I couldn’t?”

Maybe it was too expensive. Maybe it required technical skills you didn’t have. Maybe it was too complicated or too time-consuming. Maybe you had the idea years ago but couldn’t justify the resources required to make it real.

Go back and look at those ideas again.

AI may not give you your next great idea. It may make one of your old great ideas possible.

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I ask this as someone who loves AI. I use it in nearly every aspect of my business, from coding and analysis to strategizing and research. It has changed how I work, and I suspect we are still in the very early stages of what it will eventually do. But that is also what got me thinking. If I have access to these capabilities, so do you. And increasingly, so do our competitors.

The models will keep getting better. The tools will get easier to use. What feels extraordinary today will eventually become expected. We’ve seen this movie before. Technologies start out as an advantage because only a few people have them. Then access spreads, prices fall, and eventually everybody has them. AI is just getting there very quickly.

So I don’t think the interesting question is, “Should we use AI?” Of course we should use it. The more interesting question is, “What still makes us different when everyone is using it?”

That question has led me to something I’m calling Human-Driven Innovation. It isn’t a rejection of AI. Actually, it is probably the opposite. It is about figuring out what people need to drive so that AI can be used where it has the greatest value.

The Problem with Everyone Getting Smarter

More than a decade ago, I wrote a book called Best Practices Are Stupid. The title was intentionally provocative, but the idea behind it was pretty straightforward. If you copy what everyone else is doing, you might improve, but you probably won’t become different.

There is nothing wrong with best practices when the goal is efficiency or consistency. But if every company studies the same competitors, hires the same consultants, follows the same benchmarks, and adopts the same practices, eventually everyone starts to look alike.

AI can magnify that problem. It is incredibly good at giving us access to what is already known. Ask for a strategy, an idea, an analysis, or a solution and you can get something useful in seconds. But your competitors can ask too.

That is why I don’t think AI decreases the importance of people. I think it increases the value of the things your people can make uniquely yours.

It’s Less About Having the Answer

For years, expertise was valuable partly because experts had answers other people didn’t have. Now answers are becoming cheap. If I can generate 100 possible solutions in a few seconds, the hard part is no longer producing solutions. The hard part is deciding which problem is actually worth solving.

If AI can identify dozens of opportunities, someone still has to decide which ones matter enough to pursue. And if AI can provide different viewpoints, we still need actual people with different perspectives to challenge one another, make choices, and do something together.

AI can help with all of this. I hope it does. But there are certain decisions I don’t think organizations should outsource.

Three Decisions

The first is where do we actually need to be different? Most companies spread innovation everywhere. I think that is a mistake. Some things simply need to work. Some things need to be efficient. And then there are a few things that actually influence why somebody chooses you instead of somebody else. Those are the places where being distinctive matters.

The second decision is what problem are we really trying to solve? I have spent years talking about the importance of the questions we ask. That becomes even more important when AI can give us an almost unlimited number of answers. A great answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer.

The third decision is who needs to be involved? We tend to surround ourselves with people who think like we do because it is easier. Meetings move faster. There is less friction. But the person who sees the world differently may see something the rest of us are missing. Sometimes the person who drives you crazy is exactly the person you need.

Why I’m Bringing This Together Now

I’ve been working on these ideas for years, but mostly as separate pieces. PIVOTAL is about knowing where to differentiate. Invisible Solutions is about asking better questions. Personality Poker is about getting people who think differently to work together.

But the rise of AI forced me to look at these ideas through a different lens. As more of what we once considered uniquely valuable becomes available through technology, I started asking myself what people bring to the table that becomes even more important in an AI-driven world. That’s when I realized these weren’t three separate ideas. They were three parts of the same philosophy.

That is why I am bringing them together under the umbrella of Human-Driven Innovation.

I’m not suggesting we put humans on one side and AI on the other. That makes no sense to me. Use AI wherever it helps. Let it handle routine work, analyze information, challenge your thinking, and help you move faster.

But the faster the technology moves, the more intentional we need to be about what we want our people to own. Access to intelligence is becoming easier. Being distinctive isn’t.

That is the idea behind Human-Driven Innovation.

Innovate where humans differentiate.

Learn more at HumanDrivenInnovation.com

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