How I Team Up with GenAI to Craft Conference Talk Proposals

An Incomplete List of GenAI Tells My Process Step One: Brainstorm Buddy Step Two: Shape the Story Step Three: Write the Abstract Prompt 1: Brainstorm Buddy Prompt 2: Shape the Story Prompt 3: Write the Abstract Enjoy the Result! Before you Submit LMKWYT! References Posted on August 22, 2025 by Whitney Lee, CNCF Ambassador and Senior Technical Advocate at Datadog TL;DR: GenAI can help you write conference abstracts, but if you use it without injecting your own curiosity and humanness, reviewers can tell. This post walks through my personal process for co-writing abstracts with GenAI in a way that preserves my voice and experience. I developed this process for technical talks, but it adapts well to other formats too. I’ve spoken at a lot of conferences, big and small. I’ve given keynotes. Breakouts. Workshops. I’ve been around the block and written many conference talk proposals. I’ve also been on program committees and reviewed others’ proposals. There’s always room for improvement, but I like to think I know what good is. In my view, here are some elements of a good talk proposal: – A clear, engaging idea (or a run-of-the-mill idea with a compelling angle) – Some clear details about the talk, like concrete examples or stories, or talk format and tools covered – Clear audience – Clear takeaways As you can imagine, the widespread use of GenAI to generate talk proposals has changed the game for both submitters and reviewers. As a submitter, you can type just one line into ChatGPT, for example: Write me a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon talk abstract on Validating Admission Policy And it produces something that, on the surface, looks pretty good!* Title: Enforcing What Matters: Building Safer Kubernetes with Validating Admission Policies Abstract: As Kubernetes adoption continues to grow across organizations, ensuring workloads meet security, compliance, and operational standards before hitting the cluster is more critical than ever.