How I make slide decks with AI (WITHOUT letting it write my content)

Prompts included inside!

The complete guide to making professional presentations fast

Slide decks used to be one of the most time-consuming parts of my job. Hours spent fiddling with formatting, resizing text boxes, and trying to make charts look eye-catching. It was an annoyingly slow process, to say the lease.

I’ve worked out a 5-step process for using AI to make professional slide decks fast, and I wanted to share it with you. The big thing to call out upfront: AI is great for the structure and the visual polish, but the actual content still has to come from you. I’ll explain why as we get into it.

Alright, let’s jump in.

Step 1: Use Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT to brainstorm the outline

Pick your favorite AI chat tool and use it to come up with an outline for the presentation.

Use this prompt:

Help me brainstorm an outline for a presentation. I'll write the actual slide content myself later. For now, I just want help with structure and flow.

- Topic: [what it's about]
- Key points I want to cover: [the main ideas, findings, or arguments — bullet them out]
- Audience: [who they are and what they already know]
- Goal: [what I want them to think, feel, or do by the end]
- Format: [live meeting, async share, conference talk, exec review]
- Length: [slides or minutes]

Ask me any clarifying questions first. Then give me a slide-by-slide outline with a one-line purpose for each slide, and name the through-line the deck is making.

The reason I love this prompt is that it forces the AI to ask clarifying questions first, instead of just spitting out a generic outline. You’ll get a much better starting point.

Step 2: Finalize the entire presentation on your own (no AI!!)

This is the most critical step in the entire process. My strong recommendation is to NOT use AI here. You know the content best, and the substance of your slides has to come from you.

Here’s how I think about making a good deck:

1. Make it clear. Every slide should make one point, stated plainly and directly. Your audience should be able to understand your message without having to think.

2. Lead with the takeaway, not your process. Keep your audience’s attention by answering “why does this matter?” before “how did we get here?”

3. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Work backwards from their motivations and incentives. What would make them care about your takeaways?

4. Use charts to support your findings. Charts are a great way to switch up the format and drive your point home quickly. Keep them simple and well-annotated so they complement your insights, not distract from them.

Step 3: Format your content to be ingestible by the AI

Take the content you wrote in Step 2 and structure it so an AI deck generator can read it cleanly.

A few rules I follow (that you can steal):

• Separate each slide with three dashes ---

• Use angle brackets < > to give the AI specific design direction on a slide

• Give explicit instruction to use the content EXACTLY as is. This is important because we don’t want the AI to edit the content.

• Decide on the style upfront (I have given you options in the prompt below)

Use this prompt:

Use the content below exactly as written. 

Rules:
- Do not rewrite, summarize, or edit it. 
- Each slide is separated by ---. 
- Anything inside < > is a design instruction for you, the AI.

Style: [clean and minimal / bold and colorful / editorial magazine / corporate professional / playful and illustrated]

Content (use as is)

Intro to our new strategy
[your full written content for this slide]
<make this the hero slide, bold and colorful>

---

Key metrics from Q1
[your full written content for this slide]
<use a bar chart, two-column layout>

---

Next steps + ownership
[your full written content for this slide]

Step 4: Put your content into an AI slide generator

My favorite AI slide generators right now:

Gamma: Best for visual-rich presentations. Their auto-generated charts are polished and interactive, and you can actually choose the image generation style.

Gemini (with Canvas): Best if you already work in the Google ecosystem. It comes free with your Google AI subscription, and the output goes straight into Google Slides.

Microsoft Copilot: Best for enterprise users already in Microsoft 365. It builds slides directly in PowerPoint with your org’s branding and pulls context from your Word docs, emails, and other M365 files.

Step 5: Output into Google Slides or Powerpoint, and add your final finishing touches

Open the deck in Google Slides or Powerpoint and do a final pass with fresh eyes.

• Edit anything that looks wrong

• Make sure the storyline flows

• Add speaker notes and animations

And that’s it! Five steps, and you’ve got a polished deck without spending hours wrestling with formatting. Hope this is helpful. If you try this workflow, I’d love to hear how it goes for you.

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There’s too much to learn these days as a Data professional. It feels like every day there’s a new tool or topic that we have to learn.

So what can you do? Build a system that organizes your learning for you.

I know that sounds like a lot. But I set mine up once, and now every new topic I want to learn takes me about 2 minutes to add. Fully researched and prioritized with milestones and resources.

Here’s my workflow using Claude + Airtable:

One time set-up: I create a new Claude project with this system prompt:
“These are my learning goals:

Role I’m working toward: [your answer]

Top skills I use now: [your answer]

Biggest skill gap: [your answer]

When I give you a new topic, assess it against my learning goals and assign it a priority: high, medium, or low. Then break the topic into 3-5 realistic milestones, find official documentation or courses I can learn from, and recommend YouTube tutorials on the topic. When I confirm I want to add it to my tracker, use the Airtable connector to add the topic, priority, milestones, and resources into my learning tracker.”

Every time I have something new to learn

↳ I tell it a topic I want to learn — like “AI agents” or “dbt”

↳ Claude assesses the topic against my goals and assigns it high, medium, or low priority

↳ It breaks the topic into 3-5 milestones and finds official docs + YouTube tutorials

↳ When I confirm, Claude writes everything directly into my Airtable learning tracker

In my Airtable learning tracker, I can filter by priority, sort by topic, and check off milestones as I go.

Oh, plus a bonus! You can set up a weekly Airtable automation that emails you your top 3 priorities every Monday — with milestones and resources already attached.

Get my Claude setup and Airtable template here!