Nothing is worse than obsessing over the appearance of a document, only to never open it again. You put extra hours into perfecting a presentation, only to find out it won’t be used or was redundant. Oh.
Skip the hassle of a designer or working late to create something yourself. Artificial intelligence can save you hours of presentation preparation so you can focus on delivery, not design.
In this job market, you want to do everything you can to impress your team without burning the midnight oil or getting burned out. AI tools are your best colleague.
While Copilot in Microsoft PowerPoint is an option, I couldn’t see the Copilot feature in my PowerPoint panel bar, and for the sake of time to do this as quickly as possible, I found a dedicated presentation creator of HE, Prezi. HE.
I liked that it looked Aussie (we cut everything), and the price is affordable. There is a free basic version and different tiers ranging from $7 to $39 per month. I went with the mid-range because the lower tier didn’t come with infographic capabilities. It’s $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.
Prezi AI promises to create “your best presentation in minutes.” Let’s see about that.
Getting up
I signed up for Prezi AI Premium and set a reminder on my phone for the end date of the free trial.
I was prompted to enter information about the presentation so Prezi AI could suggest content and design ideas. You can also upload a PDF that might be useful for AI or skip this step for now and choose a template.
For the sake of this example, I pulled out some initial brainstorming work I did for a creative campaign I wanted to present to an agency client. I used this text box to tell Prezi AI what I was trying to achieve.
First request: “I want to professionally and creatively present my initial idea for a campaign for the Zayed National Museum in the United Arab Emirates. I want to combine my notes with the strategist’s notes so that I can present my idea by telling a story and taking them on a trip. prefer a minimalistic and elegant design Do you need me to upload the document?”
I quickly realized that it’s not really an AI conversational tool because it generated a mock model without answering my question.
Instead, I saved all the notes to a PDF and recreated the request. Prezi AI only uses text content, so don’t upload graphics or charts.
Processing and finalizing the presentation
I liked the way it created a “story” presentation, but some of the images were off. For example, there were photos of Steve Jobs and the movie Bucket List with Morgan Freeman — likely because it features a trip to Egypt, though still very off-brand for a campaign in the United Arab Emirates.
An image of Steve Jobs was an odd choice for the AI tool.
I also added these two sentences to the original request: “Use only images from this website: http://www.zayednationalmuseum.ae/en/. Incorporate all text from the PDF and do not add more to it.”
Again, it was way off the mark, mostly because AI has a hard time understanding cultural sensitivities and nuances. It even included an image from Pixar’s The Incredibles.
I didn’t like the result, as it was hard to follow simple instructions like “include only copy from PDF”, so I picked the one I liked best and edited it — linking the critical copy I missed and removing images.
How long did it take to make an AI PowerPoint presentation?
It took me about 30 minutes to make all the necessary changes, and while that wasn’t ideal, it would still take me a lot longer to create a starter deck like this. I would have suffered for the design.
It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s better than wasting precious time trying to do it from scratch.
Here’s an example of the slide that I didn’t have to change:
I also liked how the slides move from one to the other, not just by swiping to the right, but by moving interactively like across a map — you can check it out here.
And the more you use the AI programs, the more they learn about your style preferences, making the editing process easier every time. Just always be sure to check the words and images it produces.