Crafting impactful presentations earlier was tedious work, requiring strategic and research skills, design finesse, and a knack for building narratives. Then came the trickery of delivery.
Presenters worked on all the aspects to create slide decks that could resonate with people and drive the message home. Even with all the boxes ticked, it still didn’t guarantee that the audience would receive the presentation in the same way intended.
Artificial intelligence circumvented all this and transformed the way presentations were created. Now, it’s as simple as putting in a prompt with a rough outline and receiving a polished professional deck within minutes.
AI-powered tools, such as Presentations.AI, SketchBubble AI, Gamma, etc., assist in everything – from concept generation to design and even delivery, enhancing output in less time.
This article details how AI converts a rough outline into a full-fledged deck, the tools and mechanics behind it, and the future of presentation creation.
Let’s explore!
Steps from Outline to Decks
1. The Starting Point – An Outline
An outline is the beginning of a presentation. It’s a rough sketch of the key points you wish to cover. The outline might have a title, bullet points, or a vague idea of the narrative.
AI enters the scene when it receives this outline as input. It then analyzes the text to understand the sections’ flow, theme, and relationship. It then expands and enhances the idea by identifying the main topics, subtopics, supporting information, etc., visualizing and structuring the information into a complete presentation.
AI tools accomplish this by receiving text inputs, integrating with writing tools, or structured prompts.
Once you put in a prompt with an outline, AI scans through the text, understanding the structure, intent, context, and flow, and starts generating the content.
Note – Select the outline you want transformed into a deck. You can paste it from a document, web page, email, or type it.
2. Expand the Bullet Points into a Narrative
The transformation process begins with expanding the bullet points into complete content. AI starts with headlines and subheadings, incorporates speaker notes, suggests supporting information, data, examples, and visuals, and eventually structures all the information for enhanced clarity, receptivity, and impact.
For instance, if your outline is ‘Advantages of AI in Presentation-Making,’ AI can generate content like –
Slide title – Transforming Presentations with AI
Bullet points –
- Quick slide generation
- Assistance in designing and delivery
Speaker note – AI doesn’t replace presenters; rather, it enhances their efficacy by completing repetitive work quickly, leaving them space to focus on more vital work.
How is AI able to do all this?
Large language models (LLMs) make this happen. Trained on an endless number of datasets across industries and domains, they power AI to understand the context and flow of an outline and generate coherent and relevant work.
Note – Select things like the number of slides you wish to generate, the language and tone for the presentation, the target audience you need the content for, presentation templates that match your style, etc.
3. Work on Designing and Layout
After generating content, the next step is to work on design and layout. This stage bridges the gap between words and visuals.
Apart from automating the work, the AI tools also use design principles like contrast, hierarchy, proximity, etc., emphasizing relevant content and enhancing clarity and audience engagement.
With the help of machine learning and design principles, AI tools can accomplish tasks like –
- Information visualization by generating charts, graphs, lists, etc., from raw content. These tools choose the layouts that best match the content type.
- Selecting the right typeface, color schemes, and visual hierarchies.
- Working on consistency in terms of themes and brand guidelines with tools automatically applying the branding to the presentation.
- Suggesting and generating attractive and relevant visuals like icons, custom illustrations, infographics, images, icons, GIFs, etc., that complements the content. AI also matches the keywords with the respective visuals, which are pulled from integrated libraries and built in real time.
- Ensuring visual coherence and proper optimization of the negative space.
4. Maintaining the Flow and Consistency
Your slide deck needs to be consistent and coherent or the entire purpose is lost, irrespective of the quality of the content. AI tools also provide story score or feedback to improve your narrative. The concept runs similar to grammar tools that work on enhancing readability of the content.
AI consistently analyzes the overall flow to ensure it’s logical and makes sense. It scans for things like –
- The sequence is logical and coherent.
- Relevancy and appropriateness of transitions.
- If there are any gaps in storytelling.
- Redundant slides or information.
- If slides are to be rearranged for a better flow and impact.
- Better ideas for titles or summaries that explain the content more aptly.
5. Collaboration and Feedback
A lot of these platforms are collaborative. They let multiple people co-create documents using real-time prompts. AI-powered tools are dynamic, as they allow users to tweak the content and design until the message feels right.
Users become curators rather than creators. The prompts you can put to get desired content are like –
- Make the content more concise or persuasive
- Add a quote that underlines the point
- Data visualization with a table
- Add more data to reinforce the point
- Change the tone to more conversational and informal
Note – Review your presentation in a slideshow, a complete draft with content, templates, animations, and transitions. Make changes to the draft as you deem fit. You can expand it by adding more slides or keep it intact with text changes, images, design, or layout changes.
Once completed, share the file with the world as a link (to be viewed and edited by anyone or a selected few people) or export the file as a PDF or a fully editable PPT.
What Else does AI do to Make Your Content more Appealing?
- AI tools can help you with branding and content customization. They can automatically apply brand guidelines using brand-specific color themes, typefaces, and logos. They can also maintain a predefined tone of voice. They offer customized templates (for different audience types) with consistent formatting.
- AI tools can help with more than just deck creation. Other features are AI avatars that can deliver in video format, real-time feedback on delivery (tone, pace, clarity), text-to-speech narration, etc.
Pros of AI
- The enhancements make presentations more scalable and accessible.
- The presentation creation process has become significantly quicker.
- There is less cognitive load for non-designers, enabling anyone to build professional decks with less effort.
- Better quality of output with more consistency.
Cons of AI
- The content could be generic or templated.
- Less utilization of personal skills leads to redundancy and reliance on tool capabilities.
- Limited domain-specific depth, resulting in more superficial content without human input.
- Ethical issues concerning authenticity and ownership.
The Future of Presentations
AI isn’t there to replace human intelligence; rather, it amplifies it. While presenters need to infuse their presentations with strategic storytelling, empathy, and good communication, AI can be seen as a powerful assistance that’s doing the heavy lifting.
Irrespective of who you are – marketer, educator, or startup – working with AI in presentation design is not a luxury anymore; it’s becoming essential.
Summing It Up
Bid farewell to the precious hours spent doing repetitive work in presentation creation.
AI helps presenters streamline the process and enhance their efficiency by focusing on other crucial tasks like delivery.
With the power to create any outline into a stunning deck within minutes, AI has revolutionized how presenters were made, simplifying the work while enhancing the presentational output.
These tools handle everything from conception, designing, to visuals and flow, doing much of the heavy work for presenters.
As AI continues to evolve, it’s not just speeding up the process of presentation creation but also raising the bar for quality and accessibility.
