I’ve changed my mind about AI presentation generators

Good enough!

My husband Josh recently taught our three-year-old the concept of changing one’s mind. It’s given her a sense of relief (and/or power). Just because you say something once doesn’t mean it has to be your choice forever. It’s a good lesson for adults too.

You’re allowed to change your mind. I did this last week.

I’ve changed my mind about AI presentation generators.

Tomorrow, I’m teaching a virtual masterclass for a large group of international media leaders. And since it was scheduled a couple months in advance of course I put this off until last minute. I had a thorough outline but nobody wants to attend a masterclass presented in a word document.

The truth is, I like building presentations. I find it to be a somewhat mindless and soothing part of the job. Unfortunately it’s not a great use of my time. I had vaguely learned about AI presentation generators but dismissed them because (1) I love making them and (2) I thought they’d look too generic.

Then I realized it doesn’t really matter. At least in this case, it’s more important that the takeaways are easy to understand. Clean is the goal, not wowing the audience with a certain design je ne sais quoi.

I uploaded my outline to the Gamma App. Then answered a few prompts about the intended audience, how brief I wanted each slide, selected a design template (there weren’t too many to choose from), and chose the # of slides.

Example Inputs

Gamma is free if it’s generating 10 slides or less. Afterwards you can add more slides manually for free or you can ask AI to generate another slide using credits.

Boop. Boop. Boop.

Impressed is an understatement. It was not perfect but it was able to take my outline, follow the flow and pull out key points, write stronger headlines, and create visualizations. The slides were clean and, yes, VERY generic. But it was a great jumping off point. Maybe 60-70% of the way there. Plenty room left to leave my unique stink.

Onto Editing:

All text and images were editable. The images were AI generated and look like it. You can either ask AI to generate a new image or you could upload your own. I think the right images can add more personality to a presentation so that’s where I’d spend the majority of my editing time. Using credits, you can also ask the AI to re-write any text or re-design the slide layout.

Edit Text Options

I could see this being more useful if you’re able to import brand guidelines or a pre-existing design template. Also, imagine how much better the presentations would be if the AI gets to know your presentation style over time.

Here are the drawbacks so far:

• From what I can tell so far, you aren’t able to export it into Google Slides so all editing is done via Gamma’s platform. You can invite people to collab on a presentation with you though. And present in full screen mode.

• I’m having a hard time figuring out how to add elements that aren’t already incorporated into a slide template. For example, I can’t for the life of me add a logo to each slide. I’ve had to learn PowerPoint and then Keynote and then Google Slides so I just need to gets some reps in. But it’s not entirely intuitive right away.

• Not a lot of design templates to choose from. I wonder if it will be like Canva or Squarespace where you can kind of tell that something was designed there. But then again, most Google Slides look the same too. And that’s where I’m doing most of my building currently (from scratch every time 😭 ).

So, yeah. I’ve changed my mind. This tool rocks and it saved me boatloads of time. That’s something I can get behind. Play around with it and let me know what you think.

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FYI - This was not a sponsored post. Going to try Beautiful.AI next and do a comparison.