Making a presentation with AI: what works and what doesn't

Mr.Prezident

Knowledge

Illustration of a laptop with a presentation, slides floating up from the screen like cards

You type one sentence, and a minute later twenty slides are ready. With headings, bullet points and a photo that more or less fits. It looks polished.

Until you show it to someone. Then it turns out the presentation is about your topic, but says nothing. There is no point of view in it, no choice, no reason to say yes.

That is not the tool's fault. AI is good at making slides. A presentation is something else.

In this article: which AI tools make presentations, what they do well, where they go wrong, and how to use AI so that you end up with a better presentation, not just a faster one.

Which AI makes presentations?

There are two kinds.

AI inside the software you already use. Copilot in PowerPoint, the ChatGPT and Claude add-ins for PowerPoint, and Gemini in Google Slides. They work in your own file and, when set up properly, in your organisation's template.

Stand-alone presentation makers. Gamma, Canva, Beautiful.ai and Adobe Express. You give them a topic or a document, and the tool builds a complete presentation in its own design. Exporting to PowerPoint is usually possible, but the result is rarely as clean as it was in the tool itself.

If you work in an organisation with its own PowerPoint template, the first kind is almost always the better choice. More on why below.

Can ChatGPT make a PowerPoint?

Yes, in two ways. There is an official ChatGPT add-in for PowerPoint, also for free accounts, with limited usage. It builds and edits slides in the file you have open.

ChatGPT can also create a .pptx file in the chat itself. That file is bare: white slides with text. Useful as a rough draft, not something to stand in front of an audience with.

What AI does well

AI is strong at the work around the presentation: the work that takes a lot of time and little thinking.

From document to outline. Turning a report, memo or Word document into a first slide structure. Copilot can do this straight from a Word file. You no longer start from a blank page.
Cutting text. From a paragraph to an eight-word heading. Under time pressure, AI does this better than most people.
Coming up with options. Ten titles, three openings, a different order. You choose.
Speaker notes. A first version of what you say with each slide.
Translating. Turning a Dutch deck into English, with the formatting intact.
Reviewing. Have AI read your presentation as if it were your audience. What is unclear? Which question will come up? Where do you lose the thread? This is one of the most useful applications, and one of the least used.

Where it goes wrong

1. AI does not know what you want to achieve. A tool will happily make a presentation about your annual plan. It does not know that the board mainly wants to hear whether the budget can come down, and that the answer therefore belongs on slide two. The key message, the order and what you leave out remain your job. Why the structure of your presentation matters so much is covered in an earlier article.

2. Every slide carries the same weight. AI presentations often have the same rhythm: heading, three or four bullets, image. Slide after slide. A good presentation has hierarchy. A few slides carry the story, the rest support it.

3. The AI look. Stand-alone presentation makers have a recognisable style. Your audience sees the same cards, gradients and stock images they saw from someone else last week. For a team meeting that does not matter. With a client or an investor it says: not much time went into this.

4. Numbers that are wrong. AI sometimes invents percentages, dates or sources that look credible. Check every figure against the source, and build charts from your own data.

5. Confidential information. You do not paste annual figures, client names or a restructuring plan into a free tool without thinking. On business plans your data is generally not used to train the AI; on free accounts that is often different. Check what your organisation allows.

AI works best in your own template

The AI in PowerPoint builds with what you give it. Copilot can work with your organisation's template and with a Brand Kit that holds your logos, colours and fonts. The ChatGPT and Claude add-ins build in the file you have open, using the slide layouts inside it.

That means the quality of your template decides the quality of what AI makes. If your template has good layouts for a title slide, a section, a chart and text with an image, the AI picks from those and everything stays on-brand. If it is a collection of loose slides from five years ago, the AI starts improvising. And it shows.

How to build a template like that is covered in how to structure your PowerPoint templates. What belongs in the brand guidelines themselves is in brand book: what goes in it, and what gets forgotten.

How to make a presentation with AI, in six steps

Write your key message in one sentence. What should your audience know, think or do afterwards? Without that sentence, no tool will make a good presentation.
Write out the storyline. One sentence per slide, as a statement rather than a topic: "Margin is falling because of higher purchasing costs", not "Margin". Let AI suggest an order, but decide yourself.
Let the AI build in your own template. Give it your storyline and your source material: the memo, the figures, the previous presentation.
Cut. AI almost always makes too many slides, and too full. Remove a third and shorten the rest.
Check. Every figure, every name, every source.
Have AI review it as your audience. For example: "You are the CFO. Which three questions do you ask after this presentation?" Adjust, then rehearse out loud.

When is AI enough?

For many presentations AI is a perfectly good tool. An update for your team, a working meeting, a first version to discuss, an internal training. Speed is what counts there, and a tool delivers it.

It changes when a lot is at stake. A pitch to a new client, a funding round, a strategy the whole organisation has to carry, a keynote in a full room. Then it comes down to what AI cannot do: choosing what to leave out, a story that fits this audience at this moment, and a design that carries your message instead of filling the space.

Use AI for the groundwork in those cases, and spend the time you save on the story.

When a lot is at stake, Mr.Prezident can create your presentation. Mr.Prezident starts with the key message and the structure, and then designs in your brand.