How to Use AI Tools to Create PresentationsHow to Use AI Tools to Create Presentations
👋 Hi, I'm Libby. I help rising leaders and executives communicate with clarity and confidence. Each month I share frameworks and real talk on presentation skills, storytelling, and executive presence. For more: The Slide Master | The Presentation Lab | LinkedIn.
AI can speed up presentation creation, but not in the way most people expect. The magic isn't in asking an AI tool to "build my deck." It's in using AI for specific stages of the process where it actually helps: organizing information, generating outline ideas, and preparing your delivery. The rest still requires your judgment and strategy.
Stage 1: Outlining Your Presentation
The first stage is about organizing information into a logical sequence that tells a story, not just dumping data onto slides.
This is where AI shines. Use Gemini or Perplexity for AI-powered research that synthesizes top findings. Use ChatGPT for organizing information.
Here's a real workflow that works: while driving, use talk-to-text to voice-dump ideas into your phone's Notes app. Don't edit yourself. Just get the thoughts out. Later, paste that into ChatGPT with a prompt explaining your presentation topic. Ask it to organize the information into an outline with suggested slide divisions. Ask for help with descriptive slide titles. Ask for suggestions on slide visuals.
The point isn't that ChatGPT's output is perfect. It's that you're not staring at a blank page anymore. You have something to react to, edit, and shape into your actual outline. That's much faster than starting from zero.
Stage 2: Building Your Slides
This is where AI helps least. There's no magic tool that creates a flawless, ready-to-present deck.
Beautiful.AI and Gamma are worth exploring if you want inspiration and layout ideas. Both offer free trials. They work best for simpler, broader topics or intro-level presentations. They struggle with corporate, data-heavy decks with specific brand guidelines. You'll spend more time editing their output than you'd save.
The real time-savers aren't AI-powered. Keep a deck of inspiration slides from your past presentations. Borrow ideas from earnings call decks. Shopify and PepsiCo have great examples. Canva has good templates with increasingly integrated AI features. These approaches work because they let you build on something concrete instead of starting from nothing.
The hard truth: slide building still requires your strategic thinking. AI can help with layout suggestions and formatting. It can't decide what should go on your slide or how to tell your story. You have to do that.
Stage 3: Preparing Your Delivery
After your slides are built, you need to decide what you're actually going to say when presenting them. This is where AI helps again, but in a specific way.
Structure your talk track like this: one sentence per slide that summarizes the key point, then two supporting bullet points highlighting essential data or takeaways. Concise and to-the-point.
Use ChatGPT or Claude to distill your brain-dump thoughts into core points for each slide. Copy these into your PowerPoint speaker notes. This gives you a reference without forcing you to memorize or read from your slides.
Here's the pro tip: upload your finished presentation to ChatGPT or Claude. Include detailed audience descriptions. If you're presenting to "Jane, the Director of Finance who asks detailed budget and timeline questions," tell the AI that. Then ask for the five most likely questions or objections based on your material and audience. You'll be prepared for the questions that actually matter.
Think of AI as Your Intern
AI is not replacing what you do. It's helping you speed up certain tasks. It's often easier to edit AI-generated content than create from scratch. AI gives you another brain to bounce ideas off when you're stuck.
But AI doesn't do your strategic thinking. It doesn't decide what matters. It doesn't craft your narrative or make the judgment calls about what belongs in your presentation and what doesn't.
The presentations that actually land are the ones where you know exactly what you're trying to communicate, you've curated what belongs on your slides, and you've prepared what you're going to say. AI can help you do those things faster. It can't replace the thinking that makes them work.
Use these tools where they help. Skip them where they don't. Your job is figuring out which stage you're stuck on and finding the right tool for that stage, not trying to find one magical AI solution that does everything.
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