Generative AI has been on the rise in presentation creation. It has significantly streamlined the process with assistance in content planning, conceptualization, designing and layout, and even interactive elements.
What was previously a presenter’s prerogative has been made easy with the advent of this technology.
But is it entirely this hunky dory as shown?
Well, no. With all its fantastic potential, AI in presentations also has some serious drawbacks, which makes it imperative to use the tool strategically and not as a replacement for human creativity and expertise.
This article shares insights on the opportunities and challenges AI offers to the presenters and some tips on how to get the best out of this tech in presentation design.
Advantages of AI Presentation Tools
1. Speedy and Efficient
One of the most daunting tasks of a presentation is wading through thousands of images and templates to find the right one. Even more frustrating is not being able to find what you want even then.
AI tools can simplify this work for you and make you more efficient in presentation design with simple text prompts. You can use the tools to quickly generate and design slides and content, saving time and energy. It will allow you to refine your delivery and other presentation aspects instead of spending hours on formatting.
2. Generate Content for Your Slides
Another intimidating aspect of presentation creation is spending time with a blank screen, where you have no idea how to start.
Several AI-powered presentation maker tools will help you get started, relieving you from the trouble of designing from scratch. You can give prompts to generate content for you. It can brainstorm ideas, suggest key points, share an outline, draft content, and structure slides quickly based on your requirements.
AI tools are especially good and beneficial for presentations that are information-loaded or require a lot of data analysis.
3. Designing and Layout
Can you imagine creating presentations without any pre-designed templates as a base? How extremely tedious would it be to work on everything from scratch?
AI tools have made this aspect of presentation design extremely easy and professional by offering a multitude of features, such as pre-designed templates, suggesting layouts and alignment that will best suit your design, formatting slides automatically, and choosing color schemes.
You can even put prompts for graphics that match your presentation’s theme. AI lets you create placeholder images that you can design later, giving you enormous design options.
4. Audience Engagement
AI tools assist audience interaction and engagement by offering options like polls and quizzes. These interactive elements are necessary to transform your presentation from a one-way lecture to an active discussion.
Audience engagement is critical for a presentation’s success, and AI tools have simplified and quickened that process.
5. Editing and Refinement
After spending weeks in concept creation, designing, and delivery, you have to start the process of editing and refining your slides (let’s say on feedback) just days before your presentation.
It will not be so great, right? AI tools are a blessing that lets you spend time practicing and refining your delivery.
AI-enhanced presentation maker tools offer real-time assistance. They can edit and refine the script, summarize information, improve clarity, suggest better alternate wordings, correct grammatical issues and design layouts.
These tools will do your work by polishing your content to its most refined form, giving you time to zero in on other crucial aspects before the presentation.
6. Speech and Voice Overs
You can use AI tools to add narration to your presentation. Numerous options in style, accent, tone, etc., make the content more dynamic, engaging, and understandable.
These AI-generated voice overs significantly enhance presentations by adding clear and professional narration to the slides, saving time and effort by eliminating the requirement for manual recording.
Also, the text-to-speech technology enables quick script modifications without re-recording.
7. Data Visualization
AI simplifies the tedious task of converting raw data into easy-to-understand information. The prompt and the visualization tools can convert content into professional and visually appealing charts, graphs, infographics, etc., making it digestible, informative, and visually appealing.
The AI tools can identify patterns, generate interactive dashboards, and efficiently let presenters share data-driven insights. They can also assist in laborious tasks like sorting data and suggesting and selecting the most apt visualization styles.
8. Continuous and Consistent Work
AI tools don’t get tired. Give as many prompts as you want for however long, and they will keep delivering results until you don’t get what you want.
That’s not the case with fellow presenters, who might also have other commitments or interests and get tired.
What AI Tools Don’t Do Well
(i). Originality and Creativity
AI tools use existing information and data as their sources of information. Therefore, it’s challenging for these technological tools to share creative or original ideas.
It lacks human intuition and is weak at crafting compelling and emotional narratives and stories.
(ii). Context and Other Nuances
AI is technology, so it lacks the nuances of being human. That means it will not be aware of the audience’s cultural preferences, context, language, expectations, etc. It can lead to potentially awkward or inaccurate content.
What can be considered by a presenter can’t be done by a technological tool. It can misread your presentation’s context, yielding generic and irrelevant content.
(iii). Personalization
AI-generated presentations may be fast when it comes to factors like data or design. However, they can severely lack the personal touch a presenter or human can render to the work.
It will fail to reflect the presenter’s voice, style, and identity in the work and might lack the necessary bond a human can build.
There’s overreliance on automation, which makes the work look repetitive and generic.
Also, it doesn’t know your audience. In presentations, learning the specifics of your audience (who they are, their interests, inclinations, expectations, cultural background, etc) is imperative for a successful presentation. AI will mostly give you a generic strategy that doesn’t create as much connection as possible.
It won’t be able to think about the people in the room, gauge your relationship with them, and convey meaningfully the information you can from personal interactions.
(iv). Accuracy and Ethical Issues
Just because a machine, bot, AI, or software performs a task doesn’t mean it will be 100% accurate. Humans can make mistakes, and machines can, too. So, reviewing or verifying the AI-generated content is crucial to ensure there is no inaccurate, misinformation, or biased content.
(v). Lost in Translation
An AI generator works on two premises. One is the algorithms built into the program, i.e., how much intelligence the programmers structured it to have. Second, it prompts a user to generate results.
It will only fetch results from a pre-built structure based on specific keywords, which couldn’t always match what was sought. Even if the prompts are well put, they still don’t guarantee the desired result as to how it was imagined in the mind.
(vi). Research
AI tools might not be able to conduct a thorough and detailed study on the topic as much as a human can. Presenters should rely on their skills, knowledge, and expertise to add to the presentation.
(vii). Adaptation and Live Interactions
A good presenter’s sign is his ability to assess the audience and adapt and improvise immediately to meet their needs.
The presenter needs to gauge the audience’s reaction consistently and think on their feet to keep the presentation on track. However, that can’t work with AI-generated presentations, which can’t be adapted to spontaneous questions or people’s responses in real-time.
(viii). Copyright Issues
One of the significant concerns of AI-generated work is crediting the work, i.e., who owns the product, which can lead to potentially unforeseen issues.
Since technology is still developing, we have yet to see where it leads.
(ix). Program Glitches
You have your hands on a long list of advantages that AI offers, but it’s a fairly new and developing technology, which means that not all kinks have been worked out of the programs yet.
There are a few issues which presenters have to grapple with when creating AI presentations –
- AI-generated images don’t come with attractive backgrounds. The foregrounds may be aesthetically pleasing, but the backdrops are not the same.
- AI can’t understand the importance of slide elements, so it lacks an understanding of crucial design elements like hierarchy.
- When logos are uploaded as picture files, AI can’t distinguish them from other pictures, leading to weird layouts with cropped logos.
Tips to Use AI in the Best Possible Way
- AI as the Starting Point – AI is not a replacement for human expertise. Try to use it as a tool that streamlines the process. The presenter should have control over the final product only.
- Define an Outline and Structure with AI – Use AI as a systematic silhouette provider for your presentations. Let it brainstorm ideas, identify key points, and deliver an outline. Then, you can fill in the rest of the presentation – the details – with your creativity and expertise.
- Fact-Checking – Let AI craft your presentation. You must review it later to ensure all the information is accurate, relevant, appropriate, and tailored to the audience.
- AI with Human Creativity – To get the best of both worlds, add your voice, style, imagination, expertise, stories, real-life examples, and uniqueness to an AI-generated presentation. It will add your personal touch to the work, making interaction and connection with the audience easy.
- Customer-centric – Your presentation should be centered around the audience (with a clear context), with the AI only enhancing and not dictating the message.
- Voice overs – Even though AI voices are improving, they lack the spontaneity, nuances, and emotions offered by a human talking, making it crucial to combine the AI narration with human oversight.
- Use AI for Creative Visualization – AI can sometimes share inaccurate information, so human intervention is needed. AI-generated visuals can be combined with human interpretation for more insightful presentations.
- Remember to Practice Delivery – AI can generate the slides for you, but you need to practice delivery for the presentation to be effective.
Final Verdict
AI is a potent tool for creating presentations, but it has strengths and limitations. While you can’t entirely rely on AI for everything, you can’t ignore its benefits.
The trick is – balancing AI and human capabilities.
Let AI do the grunt work and the presenter be the guiding force that dictates what needs to be done.
Finding the perfect balance is needed to create powerful, concise, relevant slide decks that ultimately have the maximum impact possible.
