Like many, I dread spending hours perfecting presentation slides. There's hardly any worse feeling than pouring over every little detail hours before a major deadline. Do the fonts look professional enough? Are the text boxes aligned? Does everything look visually cohesive, or like a last-minute scramble? And likely the worst of all: staring at a blank slide, unsure where to even start.
Fortunately, Adobe understands that, and just announced a new Generate Presentation feature coming to Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat. We got an exclusive first look at the tool, and frankly, it might just be time to say goodbye to PowerPoint as we know it.
Adobe launches Generate Presentation and you can try it today
Today, Adobe announced its latest AI-powered tool, Generate Presentation, which is available in preview starting today in Adobe Express and Acrobat.
The feature is designed to solve a major issue everyone who's ever built a presentation knows all too well: staring at a blank slide and spending hours figuring out where to even begin. Now, here's a question you likely have at this point: there are already plenty of AI tools that claim to generate presentations -- what makes Adobe's approach different?
While it's true that there are a bunch of AI presentation generators out there now, practically each one I've tried either churns out generic, uninspired slides or requires just as much tweaking as doing it yourself. Most generators ask you to give it a prompt, and they instantly get to work. If hundreds of people were to generate a presentation on the same topic using the same prompt, you'd likely end up with hundreds of very similar, cookie-cutter slides that still need heavy editing to feel professional or engaging.
With Adobe's Generate Presentation feature, the best part is that you're in control from start to finish. As with all AI features, you begin with a prompt detailing the type of presentation you'd like to create. However, you can also include documents like PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, TXT, and XLS to provide additional context and allow the feature to tailor the slides to your specific content. The feature draws primarily from the documents you upload, but it's also capable of drawing from its training data.
There's also a Customize button you can hit to pick the Length and Audience. The former gives you four options: Short (1-10 slides), Medium (10-20 slides), Long (20+), and even the option to generate a set number of slides based on your needs.
The Audience setting gives you preset options that adapt intelligently based on the content you provide. For example, if you upload lecture slides, options like Teachers, Students, or Administrators appear.
If you provide business documents, you might see choices like Executives or Senior Management. You also have the option to type in a custom audience. I uploaded an article I wrote about Google's Little Language Lessons Google Labs experiment, and added the following prompt:
Create a professional, academically appropriate presentation for my final term based entirely on the content of the document I have uploaded.
The Audience options included selections like Language Learners, Educators, AI Researchers, Students, and more.
Since this is a presentation for college, I picked Students and Educators. Then, you'll be asked to pick from a bunch of professionally designed templates (completely customizable).
You can customize every detail of your presentation
Here's my favorite part: instead of just getting to work, the AI feature will first display a tentative outline based on your source files. You can remove, rearrange, modify, or add sections to the outline before any slides are generated. This gives you a clear roadmap and ensures the presentation flows exactly how you want.
Once you're happy with how the outline looks, hit Generate and Adobe will begin working its magic. Once generated, you can then refine individual slides, swap layouts, adjust text, add images or videos, and even regenerate specific slides without starting over.
You can use all of Express's and Acrobat's features you're already familiar with, giving you full creative control while still saving hours of manual work. Once you're satisfied, you can download the presentation as a PDF or PPT, or present it directly.
What I like most about Adobe's AI-generated slides is how natural and polished they look. For comparison, NotebookLM launched Slide Decks a few days ago. While it can turn prompts into slides, the results feel obviously AI-generated.
You also can't customize layouts or modify slides beyond regenerating them, and removing the watermark requires a $200 Google AI Ultra plan subscription. Adobe's approach, by contrast, produces slides that are presentation-ready from the start, while still letting you adjust layouts, text, and visuals freely.
While I'm all for creativity, and I'm not the biggest fan of outsourcing tasks to AI, having a tool like Adobe's Generate Presentation handle the tedious formatting and structuring frees me up to focus on crafting the content and narrative that truly matter. So, I already know this is quickly going to become my go-to tools. You can try out Generate Presentation starting today by hitting this link!
