Gulrez Khan

The art of telling Stories with Data

Microsoft

PayPal

UCLA

Harvard University Belfer center

Seattle University

Award-Winning Author| Data Science Leader (Ex-Microsoft, PayPal)

The first 2-minutes of any presentation determines whether your audience stays engaged or reaches for their phones.

Tell Stories to captivate your audience

Discover how to simplify complex information and reduce cognitive load for your audience.

Polishing your visuals

Learn how to use AI tools to transform raw data into stunning visualizations for high-impact.

Bonus: Leverage AI as your assistant in Data Storytelling

Learn storytelling systems proven for any occasion. 🪜 Identify your strengths to create, deliver and refine your first story 🎬 Start building a portfolio of stories to draw upon. 📚

Engage your audience and gain their buy-in consistently!

Course syllabus

11AM-1PM EST<ul><li>Session 1: Storytelling &amp; You - good &amp; bad storytelling in real life</li><li>Session 2: The Science of Stories - concepts and why they work</li><li>Session 3: Scripting &amp; Toolbox - applying what you've learnt</li><li>Session 4: Delivering</li></ul>

Weekly Workshop 

You will work on one primary storytelling project throughout the class. You'll begin with an introductory storytelling exercise. Subsequently each week you'll work on the identified talk/presentation/story continuously refining towards a final presentation.

Personal Project

Each week, we'll have one discussion board to review takeaways from pre-readings and learnings from previous session. Separately you will also provide peer feedback on others' work during live meetings and in-between classes.

Weekly Discussion

Optional office hours follow the 1st and 3rd workshops.<ul><li>AMA with Sri &amp; Bikash</li><li>Peer networking session in week 1</li></ul>

2 Bonus Session (optional)

Course schedule

You are a Product Manager who would like to consistently get buy-in from your teams for your winning ideas.

You are a Marketer who is tired of trying to persuade leadership about your strategy and inspire consumers about your product.

You are an Engineering Manager who finds it a challenge to persuade non-technical execs and project stakeholders.

Who is this course for

After taking this course you'll...

You’ll learn to overcome anxiety whether addressing small work groups, or large professional or social audiences, through practice and feedback in small groups. You’ll learn and practice techniques to build on your strengths.

Become a confident presenter

You’ll learn to make audience-specific cases through structured storytelling. You'll practice a simple 3-step framework to identify your audience, intent and message, to build a compelling script and delivery. Hone this with feedback from your peers and me.

Advocate your cause effectively

Collect and curate a library of personal stories to draw upon at will. You’ll unearth the stories you already tell and identify more that you can tell. Practice repurposing and retelling the same stories for different audiences and outcomes.

Build a flywheel

You'll learn to recognize how persuasive speakers utilize stories. Apply them to your own vignettes and stories. Continuously learn from everyone around you, business leaders, politicians, actors, stand up comics, sportsmen and anyone you encounter.

Sharpen the saw

If you want to communicate your ideas effectively, get buy-in and drive decisions, this 4-week course is for you!

Sri Srikrishna

Entrepreneur, author, professor

Bikash Chowdhury

Entrepreneur, marketing leader

Spring 25-AML-Cohort-2

Summer 25 Cohort 1

"The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come." – Steve Jobs With ever-increasing amounts of data 📈, do you find it challenging to: - Find yourself drowned in data cleansing &amp; prep exercise 🧹- Rapidly conduct deep analysis to identify key levers and root causes 🔍- Precisely and swiftly identify the key insights that can move the needle 🎯- Tell a persuasive story with data that moves your audience and gets you what you want 🗣️ You are not alone, McKinsey estimates most organizations capture less than one-third of the value from their data. The good news! You now have an AI Sidekick 🤖, which will give you unprecedented speed, scale, and quality to turn your data into gold. ✨ This course will teach you the step-by-step secrets to go from asking the right questions to crafting the most powerful narratives using data to achieve whatever professional and personal goals you set. 🎓 Imagine this: You're presenting your latest project, armed not just with data, but with a powerful story that captivates your audience. They're hooked on every word, every chart, every insight. &nbsp;📊 This is the power of AI-driven data storytelling.✨ 💡 About the Course By the end of the course, you'll become adept at using AI to turn complex data into compelling stories that drive action and impact. 🚀 You'll learn how AI can augment your analytical capabilities, automate tedious tasks, and provide deeper insights that were previously unimaginable 🧠. You’ll get step-by-step guidance and 50+ prompts to go from identifying the right questions to weaving data into an impactful narrative. 📝 Specifically, we will cover: 1. Enhanced Data Processing: AI can handle large datasets more efficiently than traditional methods, enabling faster and more accurate analysis. 📊 2. Predictive Analytics: AI models can predict future trends based on historical data, allowing for proactive decision-making. 📈 3. Automated Insights: AI algorithms can automatically generate insights from data, highlighting patterns and anomalies that might be missed by human analysts. 💡 4. Natural Language Processing (NLP): AI-driven NLP tools can convert complex data into easy-to-understand narratives, making data accessible to non-technical stakeholders. 🗣️ 5. Personalized Storytelling: AI can tailor data stories to specific audiences, ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right people. 🎯

Unleash your data storytelling potential with AI

Module1: AI Ecosystem &amp; Predictions 🌐

Live Session 1

Module 2: Supercharge Productivity &amp; Quality with AI 🚀

Live Session 2

Module 3: Hands-on Case Study - Real-life example to test the power of AI 💪 🤖

Live Session 3

Integration, Live AMA, and Wrap Up.

Live Session 4

Business Leaders and Managers: Who want to leverage AI for better decision-making &amp; greater influence

Data Analysts and Scientists: Looking to enhance their analytics &amp; storytelling skills

Marketing Professionals: Seeking to use data to craft compelling narratives.

What you’ll get out of this course

Explore the current landscape and future trends of AI in data analytics to stay ahead of the curve

Deeper Understanding of the Gen AI Ecosystem & Predictions 🌐

Evaluate and select the most effective AI models to enhance your data analysis and storytelling capabilities

Comparison of the Best AI Models Suited for Data Analysis & Storytelling 🤖

Follow a comprehensive framework that combines AI techniques with proven data analysis methods for making informed decisions

A Robust Framework for Making Data-Driven Decisions Using AI 🧠

Learn actionable steps to leverage AI tools for boosting productivity and improving the quality of your data analysis

A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Supercharge Your Productivity and Quality of Output 🚀

Utilize a collection of 50+ AI prompts designed to help you start your data analysis and storytelling projects efficiently

Prompting Best Practices with Over 50+ Prompts to Get Off the Blocks Quickly ⚡

Master storytelling techniques and frameworks that incorporate AI to create compelling and impactful narratives

Storytelling Best Practices and Frameworks Along with Strategies to Leverage AI to Tell Powerful Stories 📚

Receive a 50-page playbook packed with 100+ AI prompts and a unique prompting framework to guide you on your journey

Your Data Storytelling Playbook 📖

Get free access to Custom GPT with personalized guidance and support from Amit Rawal, your expert data storytelling mentor

Your Personal AI Coach 🤝

Learn how to master AI 🤖 tools & frameworks to become 10X faster 📈 and smarter 🧠 at analyzing and storytelling with data. 

Amit Rawal

Chief Product & AI Officer, Ex-Apple AI/ML Product Leader, Stanford Fellow

Cohort 3

Cohort 4

Your design ideas are worth a promotion. The problem is that your promotion is probably going to someone else. Why? Because others aren't buying into your ideas. Your designs might be good (or even great), but if you can't convince your stakeholders, it doesn't matter.Great UX will be overlooked, deprioritized, or even dismissed in favor of what's easier in the moment. Sound familiar? It's because you aren't tying your design to business outcomes. If executives don't see the business value, they won't invest in it. If you struggle to communicate the business impact of your designs: &nbsp;• Your best ideas will get deprioritized or shelved, limiting the impact you have to make a difference&nbsp;• You’ll have to constantly justify your role and fight for recognition, while others (who 'speak business') will get promotions and raises&nbsp;• Your career will hit a wall, because businesses only invest in designers that demonstrate measurable outcomes&nbsp;• Your job security becomes uncertain, because your contributions aren't directly tied to business results. With AI tools commoditizing basic design skills and layoffs targeting 'nice-to-have' roles, designers who can't prove business impact are at risk. As one design leader said, "The Difference Between Good and Great Designers is that Great Ones can Use Data to Sell your Ideas." In 2025, top companies aren't hiring Good Designers. They're hiring Great Ones, that know how to communicate how design impacts business outcomes. Design Professionals who can do that jump to the top of the priority list. When you become a designer that communicates how design affects business outcomes, you'll: &nbsp;• Use concrete numbers to bypass office politics and skeptical stakeholders&nbsp;• Consistently secure stakeholder buy-in, making your design initiatives a top priority.&nbsp;• Have Influence with executives and cross-functional partners who value clear ROI and measurable outcomes.&nbsp;• Get the promotions and salary increases you deserve by proving your designs drive measurable business results This intensive program transforms overlooked designers into strategic business partners in just 4 weeks. Spots are capped at 15 students to provide every student with 1:1 time. --Training Your Team?Email kai@datainformeddesign.online for bulk pricing and personalized course options.

Feeling undervalued? Ideas getting ignored? Design presentations falling flat?

I will have live lectures with Q&amp;A, reviewing this week's lessons. These will also be where I review student's exercise and provide live feedback

Mondays and Thursday

In these lectures, I'll dive into the specifics around Data, Narrative, Visuals, and more. This will be a more detailed videos on the stuff I cover live on Mondays and Fridays

Pre-recorded lectures

These exercises, paired with the lecture, will help you practice the concepts you learn from lectures

Weekly projects and exercises

Designers who want to use data to bypass office politics and prove their value immediately

Designers tired of watching 'strategic' roles like PMs get promoted while their insights are ignored

Designers in low-UX maturity environments where relationship-building isn't enough

Mid-level designers whose great ideas get dismissed by skeptical executives

What you'll walk away with 

Have clear frameworks to immediately show your design impact in meetings, presentations, performance reviews, and interviews.

Data-Informed frameworks that make even skeptical stakeholders approve your designs

Stop talking in hypotheticals and opinions. Show experiments that prove your design value in business outcomes

ROI experiments that prove your design value in business outcomes, not opinions

Not sure how to talk about your design work in an effective way? You'll get templates that provide you with step-by-step instructions

Templates to turn any design project into a compelling business case study

Not sure what to say when talking with decision-makers or executives? You'll get scripts to help you in crucial situations

Scripts to present user research that gets immediate executive buy-in

You won't just learn theoretical concepts. You'll learn how to apply it to your work with 1:1 coaching with a Data-Informed Design expert.

60 minutes of 1:1 Data-Informed Design coaching

Connect design to business goals, manage stakeholders with clarity, and lead with a stronger, more strategic voice.

Christopher Kai Wong

Top Design Writer on Medium (325+ design articles). Data-Informed Design Expert.

June Cohort

August Cohort

In four 90-minute sessions, we'll explore a range of storytelling frameworks and learn the tools to build influence and create impact in settings of all kinds. Whether in a high-stakes presentation, all-hands meeting, or everyday conversation, you’ll learn how to connect more personally, powerfully, and effectively in a one-on-one conversation or in front of a room full of people. This is not a writing workshop (though we’ll do some writing—and lots of brainstorming). This is not about optimizing AI to tell stories for you (though we’ll dive into how to use AI thoughtfully and effectively). This practical, human-centered course helps you sharpen your storytelling skills and expand your influence and impact across your organization. You'll learn how to more effectively: • Turn high-stakes presentations—from all-hands meetings to campaign pitches—into compelling narratives that capture attention, build credibility, and persuade audiences to stay engaged from start to finish.• Simplify the message you're trying to deliver to drive more understanding and alignment in any situation.• Create a company culture where everyone is aligned on mission, vision, and values. Bonus: The same tools apply far beyond work—toasts, job interviews, first dates, even eulogies. More than anything, this workshop isn’t just about your next speech, deck, or all-hands. It’s about seeing storytelling as a powerful part of leadership—and life. We'll learn tools, yes, but also build the confidence needed to share stories that make people lean in, trust you, and say those three magic words: tell me more.

Great Storytelling Is a Tool for Influence, Shaping Culture, and Team Connection

We'll meet for 90-minutes live sessions for four consecutive Thursday from September 4th — September 25th.

Thursdays

Each student will spend time working on a story or presentation between sessions and get weekly feedback from me and the other students.

Weekly projects

Leaders in start-up and early stage companies who want to nail their story for team alignment and client pitches.

Founders, comms officers, HR directors, and other leaders navigating transitions such as funding rounds, growth, M&amp;A, hybrid workplaces.

People managers (HR, Marketing, Comms) with a mission to create a clear, compelling story for team focus and connection.

Professionals looking to change jobs or in a career transition who want to refine and reframe their story for interviews, etc.

Anyone who has asked this simple, vital question as they navigate their own path or company journey: How do I become a better storyteller?

Effective and concise storytelling to enhance team leadership, client interactions, sales calls, pitch presentations, and job interviews.

Confidence in storytelling for diverse settings, from high-stakes presentations to casual interactions like dates and dinner parties.

How to communicate the story of your "Why?”—the underlying purpose of your personal brand or your company's. 

How to use AI to enhance storytelling without losing your authentic voice.

Benefits of storytelling as a meta-skill: it doesn't just make you a better communicator—it elevates how you show up in every part of life.

​How to master the craft of great storytelling that prompts these three magic words: tell me more.

Harness the power of storytelling to make your message clear, powerful, and impactful in all parts of work and life

Lightning Lessons

The art of telling Stories with Data