Presentations with AI

What AI presentations are

Instead of building slide by slide, you describe the topic and the tool generates a whole deck — structure, text, layout and images — in seconds. You then edit and polish instead of starting from a blank page.

It is worth being precise about what that saves, because the marketing overstates it. You are not skipping design judgement. You are skipping the layout labour: the dragging of boxes, the aligning, the picking of a font pairing that does not embarrass you. That work is real and tedious and mostly mechanical, and handing it over is a genuine win. The thinking about what to say, in what order, to whom — that is untouched, and it was always the expensive part.

The distinction that fixes most bad decks

There are two completely different documents that both get called a presentation, and almost every problem with a generated deck comes from building one when you needed the other.

A presented deck is shown while you talk. You are the content; the slides are punctuation. It wants very few words, large type, one idea per slide, and it is close to useless to read on its own — which is correct, because nobody will.

A sent deck arrives by email and is read without you. It has to carry the whole argument by itself, so it needs full sentences, context and the numbers spelled out. Shown on a screen while someone talks, it is a wall of text nobody reads.

AI generators default to something in between and leaning towards the sent deck, because a prompt gives them text and text is what they put on slides. So the single most valuable thing you can do is say which one you are making, in the prompt, and then hold the draft to that standard when you edit.

If you genuinely need both — you present it, then send it — make the presented version and write a short document to send afterwards. One artefact trying to do both jobs does neither, and this is true whether a person or a model built it.

What to put in the description

A one-line topic produces a generic deck. The generator is filling in everything you did not specify, and its defaults are the average of every deck on the internet. Five things change the output materially:

• Audience and what they already know. "Technical buyers who have used a competitor" produces a different deck from "board members with no background".
• Which deck it is — presented or sent. Say it in those words.
• The argument, in one sentence. Not the topic. The thing you want them to believe by the end.
• The action you want at the close — book a call, approve a budget, change a process.
• What to leave out. This is the one people skip and it does the most work. Naming the sections you do not want stops the model padding with the obvious ones.

And one instruction worth adding every time: no statistics or figures unless supplied. Generated decks fabricate market sizes, growth rates and percentages fluently, and a made-up number on a slide in front of a client is a different order of problem from a clumsy sentence.

Gamma — the workflow

Gamma is the standout tool for creating presentations (and documents and landing pages) with AI. The process:

1. Description: write a topic + audience ("a sales deck for a SaaS, 8 slides") or paste existing text.
2. Generation: Gamma builds a slide structure with text, design and images.
3. Editing: edit content, swap themes, adjust colors and images.
4. Sharing: export to PDF/PPT, or share as an interactive page.

open_in_newTry Gamma

The step people underuse is the second input: pasting text you already have rather than describing a topic. If you have a document, a proposal or a long email that already contains the argument, pasting it produces a far better deck than any description, because the model is now structuring your material instead of inventing generic material. Generating from a topic is the fallback, not the main path.

Approve the outline before it makes slides

Most of these tools will generate an outline first and let you edit it before committing to slides. It is the most useful step in the whole workflow and the one people click past, because the outline looks boring and the slides look exciting.

Fixing the structure at the outline stage costs seconds. Fixing it afterwards means deleting and rebuilding slides that are already written and styled, and — more insidiously — you will not want to, because they look finished. A polished wrong structure is much harder to throw away than a plain one, which is the same reason writers outline before drafting.

Read the outline against one question: does this order make the argument? Not "are these the right topics" — topics are easy and the model gets them roughly right. Order is what persuades. If the outline puts your strongest evidence at slide nine because that is where evidence conventionally goes, move it to slide three before anything gets rendered.

The editing pass, in a fixed order

Every generated deck needs the same five corrections, and doing them in this order saves rework — there is no point styling a slide you are about to delete.

1. Cut slides. Generators overshoot; ask for eight and you tend to get the eight you asked for plus filler. Delete anything that does not move the argument forward, including the obligatory "agenda" slide nobody has ever needed.
2. Fix the order. Models produce a reasonable sequence, not your sequence. Move the strongest point earlier than feels comfortable.
3. Cut words per slide — hard, if it is a presented deck. Six bullets of a line each is the default output and it is the wrong shape; it becomes one sentence and a number.
4. Check every fact and figure against a source you control. Assume nothing numeric is real until you have confirmed it.
5. Then theme, colours, logo and images.

Design principles worth keeping

• One idea per slide. Don't overload. A slide = one message.
• Less text, more visual. The slide supports you, it doesn't replace you.
• Consistency. The same colors, fonts and spacing throughout the deck.
• Hierarchy. A big title, small points — so the eye knows where to go.

Two additions that matter specifically for generated decks. First, the images are decoration by default — generic abstract shapes and stock-looking photography that mean nothing. An image that does not carry information is costing you attention; either replace it with something real, a screenshot or a diagram or your actual product, or remove it and let the slide breathe. Second, generated text likes to sit in the middle of a slide at a comfortable reading size, which is the size of a document, not a presentation. If you are presenting in a room, the type is almost always too small.

Charts and numbers

This deserves its own rule because it is where a generated deck can do real damage.

Never let the tool invent a data point, and be careful with the ones it renders. Ask for a chart and you may get a plausible-looking bar chart whose values came from nowhere — not a placeholder that looks like a placeholder, but a finished-looking graphic with numbers on it. In a deck that gets forwarded, that graphic travels without you and without the caveat.

The safe workflow is to build charts from your own data in whatever tool holds it, and paste the image in. If you do let the deck generate the chart, type the values yourself and label the source on the slide. A chart without a source line is an assertion; with one, it is evidence.

Branding, and what does not survive

Most of these tools let you set a theme — colours, fonts, logo — and apply it across a deck, which is genuinely quicker than styling slides individually and is the main reason a team version is worth paying for.

Two things to check before you rely on it. Custom fonts frequently do not survive export, so a deck that looks right in the browser can open in someone else's PowerPoint with a substituted font and broken line breaks. And brand colours applied automatically often land on text at contrast ratios that are fine on your laptop and unreadable on a projector in a lit room.

Export, and the fidelity you lose

Where the deck ends up decides which format to use, and each one gives something up.

• The interactive link is the highest fidelity — it is the tool rendering its own output — and it requires the viewer to be online and willing to click a link. Fine for a colleague, often wrong for a formal proposal.
• PDF is the safest for sending. It looks identical everywhere, and nobody can edit it. Animations and anything interactive are gone.
• PPTX is what people ask for when they want to edit or present from their own machine, and it is the lossiest. Layouts shift, fonts substitute, and generated layouts often map badly onto PowerPoint's slide masters.

One property of the interactive link catches people out: it is live. Edit the deck after you have sent it and the recipient sees the new version, including the half-finished slide you were fixing at midnight. If you have sent a link to a client and then want to keep working, duplicate the deck and edit the copy, or send a PDF in the first place so that what they received is what they keep.

If the deck matters, export it in the format you will actually use and open it on a different machine before the meeting. That five-minute check catches the font substitution that would otherwise surprise you in the room.

Readability in the room

A generated deck is designed for a laptop screen, and a laptop screen is not where it will be seen.

Check three things. Type size — stand two metres back from your own monitor; if you cannot read a bullet, neither can the back row. Contrast — pale grey body text on white is a common default and it disappears under projector washout. Colour as the only signal — a legend distinguished purely by colour fails for colour-blind viewers and on bad projectors; add a label or a shape.

If the deck will also be sent, add alt text to the images that carry meaning. It takes a minute and it is what makes the file usable for someone with a screen reader.

Read it out loud once

A generated deck has never been spoken, and that shows in a way it does not show on screen. Sentences written to be read do not survive being said; you will find yourself paraphrasing the slide, which means the slide was carrying words you did not need.

Run through it once, aloud, with the slides advancing. Three things surface immediately: the slide you have nothing to say about, which should be cut; the slide you talk over for two minutes, which should be two slides; and every place where you read the bullet instead of adding to it, which is a bullet that should be four words instead of fourteen.

What it costs

Pricing in this category is usually credit-based: a generation costs credits, and regenerating costs more. That shapes behaviour in a way per-seat pricing does not — you will iterate on the prompt three or four times to find the right structure, and each attempt is billed.

The practical implication is to spend the effort on the first prompt rather than regenerating your way to a good deck. Write the description properly, generate once, and do the rest by editing, which is free. Free tiers are generally enough to find out whether the tool suits you; check what an exported deck carries on it before you present anything externally.

Use cases

• Pitch/sales — an investor deck or a client proposal.
• Training — learning materials and onboarding.
• Reports — summarizing data visually.
• Webinars and content — quick slides for any talk.

The strongest fit is the recurring internal deck — the monthly update, the onboarding walkthrough, the training module — where the structure repeats, the standard is "clear and consistent" rather than "remarkable", and the time saved compounds every month. The weakest fit is the one deck a year that has to be excellent: there, the generator gets you a scaffold and then you are doing the real work by hand anyway.

When a deck is the wrong format

Worth asking before you generate anything, because the fastest deck is the one you did not need.

• The content is a document. If it has to be read closely, cited or commented on, write the document. Slides are a bad container for detail.
• It is three points to one person. Send the email.
• The decision needs discussion. A deck steers a room towards listening rather than arguing, which is the opposite of what you want when you need the objections surfaced.
• Nothing has been decided yet. Building slides too early hardens a structure you have not thought through, and the polish makes a half-formed argument look finished — to your audience and to you.

Tips

• Paste your own material rather than describing a topic, whenever you have any.
• Give rich context in the description — audience, tone, slide count, and what to leave out.
• Always edit. A generated deck is an excellent draft, not a finished product.
• Brand it — colours, fonts and logo — and then check the export on another machine.
• Write the talk track separately. The slides are not your notes, and a deck that works as notes will not work on a screen.

Common mistakes

• Publishing as-is. Always go over and polish — especially facts and numbers.
• Too many slides. Short and focused wins. Cut the excess.
• Design over message. Beautiful is good, but the message comes first — and a polished deck built on a weak argument hides the weakness from you as well as from them.
• Keeping the decorative images that came with the generation. If an image carries no information, it is spending attention for nothing.
• Trusting a generated chart. Type the numbers in yourself and put the source on the slide.