Two colleagues and I recently attended a webinar for using AI tools for outlining, designing, and polishing slide decks with branded visuals to create high-impact business presentations faster and more effectively.

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As professional presentation designers, we are always searching for new tools to supplement our efficiency and creativity. Will AI replace Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Photoshop? Just as these programs replaced 35mm slides and a pen knife? Will they replace graphic designers? We needed to see what’s what and we hope our summary helps you in your work.

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What is a high-impact business presentation?

Professionals know that to succeed, their time on stage must engage, persuade, and drive consensus while being authentic, specific, and differentiated. It needs to clearly present authority or a competitive advantage.

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They understand the power of a great narrative and presentation. It is indisputable that they must knock it out of the park and that is exactly what all of them intend to do. The success of their enterprise, position, advancement or even employment status depends on it.

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These high-stakes require high-impact.

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Generating talking points and enhanced storytelling with AI

It is absolutely true that AI tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot can help you quickly create main talking points for your presentation. These capabilities are impressive. You can simply provide your key objectives and relevant data, and the AI will summarize your ideas and highlight important points. Writer’s block? Gone. AI excels at outlining, drafting content, and building the foundation of your presentation. I see this as being most helpful with organizing the flow of a presentation. There is no need to struggle with “turning a phrase”. Quite frankly, AI is a better author than those of us who didn’t major in English.

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Can AI write a high-impact business presentation?

Our clients tend to be speaking about something in which they have specific expertise and almost always, a unique vision, strategy, and differentiated product or service. AI references a publicly available data set which is essentially the wisdom of the crowd. While that may be sufficient for casual use, someone speaking from a place of authority will likely have insights and information that the AI does not have access to.

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Asking the AI to come up with specific talking points from thin air will rarely if ever produce content that they would want to present. Moreover, our own Security Officer forbids us from entering this level of information into any AI tool. It is still a mystery whether confidential material gets assimilated into a shared data set. We have no proof, just a bit of paranoia.

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Our conclusion is that while AI tools can speed up the writing process, they cannot generate the level of high-impact presentation content our clients need.

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Polishing slide decks and creating visuals that align with your brand

Once you have your talking points or script, you can use various services to generate slides. In this workshop, the instructor demonstrated ChatGPT, Canva, and Gamma. These services are intended to quickly generate slides for your presentation. Are they polished? Are they aligned with the brand? Are they ready to go? As presentation designers, we were excited for this part of the webinar!

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ChatGPT and the other services may or may not allow you to upload image files, fonts, logos, brand guidelines, etc. Some platforms limit the number of files and file type, which is largely insufficient. Detailed, multi-page brand documents exist for a reason. They cover many different use cases and edge cases while providing a granular level of specificity, right down to the pixel.

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The vast majority of our clients require that their slides perfectly align with their existing branding, be it their corporate branding, a specific company event, or both. How will these applications perform in this regard? Read on.

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Can it design a high-impact business presentation?

In our previous explorations, my colleagues and I have gotten inconsistent and subpar results when trying to get AI created slides to align to our own brand guidelines. It’s important to note that we are looking at this through the discerning eyes of professional presentation designers.

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A client may not catch the subtle, but important ways in which the AI does not align to a brand properly. While us professional presentation designers have the expertise and vocabulary to use brute force to get an AI to correctly use the brand guidelines, we couldn’t achieve the results we needed over the course of too much time, which we could do in two seconds in PowerPoint. I have my doubts about whether a speaker or executive communications manager would bother going back and forth trying to tell an AI to use rounded corners on a shape or place a logo with a buffer equal to the height of the first letter of the logo, for example.

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At this point in time, the results have been far from an acceptable standard and will never get past the brand police. Our conclusion is that while an AI presentation design tool can generate a presentation, it is not at the level a high-stakes business presentation needs to be.

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What about ensuring quality and reviewing output?

After the AI generates the slides, it’s important to review them closely. From our experiments, and as evidenced (embarrassingly) by the speaker in our webinar, AI-generated presentations frequently contain minor (or major) alignment issues and misplaced elements. Even more concerning, charts and graphs may generate incorrectly and include false or misleading information.

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In the workshop, the speaker’s method of fixing these issues was to go back and forth using prompts, trying to get the AI to fix these errors. An experienced presentation designer would have been able to fix these errors much more quickly while applying advanced design theory.

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Again, much like a given client may not catch more subtle issues with brand alignment, one may also not catch little design issues. Some of those little design issues, like graphs that are misleading or incorrect, become major issues if broadcast to a large audience. And this is to say nothing about ensuring accessibility and including alt-text.

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Our conclusion is that you absolutely must review an AI’s output. Can you place your trust in it to design, and polish slide decks with branded visuals for a high-impact business presentation? Not yet.‍

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In summary

AI may be a useful tool for a client to get a head start. We regularly have clients asking us to take a rough talk track or notes and turn them into slides. Those projects tend to have longer run times with a lot of collaboration, and the first step is for a designer to create a rough framework in slides, using their notes as a guide. AI may very well be able to do this and do it quickly, however I have not found any evidence that AI goes much further than that, at this moment in time. With the kind of work our clients ask us to do, and the expectations they have in terms of quality, it is quite apparent that a human designer is still very much necessary. And this only becomes truer as the design ask increases in customization, conceptualization, and creativity.