Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty. Amanda's work has been published in National Geographic, The Guardian, Business Insider, Vice, News Corp, Singapore Airlines, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine. Amanda is an Australian living in the cultural center of gravity that is New York City.
Nothing is worse than obsessing over the look of a slide deck, and putting in extra hours to perfect a presentation only to have it never be used or learn that it was overkill. Bypass bothering the designer or working late to whip something up yourself. Artificial intelligence can save you hours of preparing presentations so you can focus on the delivery, not the design.
In this job market, where you want to do everything you can to impress your team without burning out, AI tools could be your best coworker.
While Copilot in Microsoft PowerPoint is one choice, I couldn't see the "Copilot" feature in the ribbon of my PowerPoint dashboard, and for the sake of time to make this as fast as possible, I found a dedicated AI presentation maker, Prezi AI.
I liked that it sounded Aussie (we shorten everything), and the pricing is accessible. There's a free basic version and various tiers that range from $7 to $39 per month. I went with the mid-range, because the lowest 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.
I signed up to Prezi AI Premium and put a reminder in my phone about the free trial end date.
I was prompted to enter information about the presentation, so Prezi AI could suggest content and design ideas. You can also upload a PDF which can be helpful for the 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 that I wanted to present to an agency client. I used this text box to tell Prezi AI what I was looking to achieve.
First Prompt: "I want to professionally and creatively present my initial thinking on a campaign for Zayed National Museum in the UAE. I want to combine my notes with the strategist's notes so I can present my idea by telling a story and taking them on a journey. I prefer a minimalist, elegant design. Do you need me to upload the document?"
I quickly found out that it's not really an AI chat tool, because it generated a mock design without answering my question.
Instead, I saved all the notes into a PDF and re-created the prompt. Prezi AI only uses text content, so don't upload graphics or charts.
I liked how it created a "storyboard" presentation, but some of the imagery was off. For example, it had photos of Steve Jobs and the Bucket List movie with Morgan Freeman -- likely because it features a trip to Egypt, although still very off-brand for a UAE campaign.
I also added these two sentences to the original prompt: "Only use imagery from this website: http://www.zayednationalmuseum.ae/en/. Incorporate all of the text from the PDF and don't add more to it."
Again, it was way off brand, mostly because AI has a hard time understanding cultural sensitivities and nuances. It also even included an image from Pixar movie The Incredibles.
I didn't love the output, as it had a hard time following simple instructions like "only include the copy from the PDF," so I picked the one I preferred the most and edited it -- plugging in critical copy it missed and removing images.
It took me about 30 minutes to make all the tweaks it needed, and while that wasn't ideal, it still would've taken me much longer to put together an initial deck like this. I would've agonized over 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 slide I didn't have to change:
I also liked how the slides move from one to the next, not just swiping to the right but interactively moving like along a map -- you can check it out here.
And the more you use AI programs, the more they learn about your style preferences, making the editing process easier each time. Just always make sure you check the words and images it produces.
