For years, making slides was the most annoying part of my job. Not the thinking — the making. I'd have the content in my head, but opening PowerPoint and staring at a blank deck felt like waiting for a printer to warm up. Something about that empty grid just shut me down.
I remember one deck last year, a product review for our investors. I spent three hours just on the first ten pages: choosing layouts, moving boxes, adjusting fonts. By the time I got to the actual message, I was too tired to care if the words were good. And then I'd restart anyway because the design felt off.
That's the part AI changed for me. Not the final polish — the starting.
Starting before the blank page
What worked for me was using AI to get the messy version out first. I type in my rough idea — not a prompt like "make a beautiful presentation", but something broken: "we need 12 slides, audience is our team, main point is we should focus on onboarding rather than new features. one slide about what our competitors do." Half sentences, mixed thoughts, no order.
The output isn't great on its own. Honestly, most of it is mediocre. It misses context and makes weird suggestions. But it's a starting point. I can react to something instead of inventing from nothing. It's the difference between being asked "what do you want to say?" and being handed a rough draft you can tear apart.
That's how I use it now. I feed in my notes, the worst bullet points with unfinished thoughts, and the AI arranges them into a structure that would've taken me an hour to build. I delete half of it and rewrite the rest. The blank-screen paralysis is gone, and that alone saves me a solid hour every time.
While building Huanjian, we found that this is the moment most people struggle with — not the design, not the content, but the jump from nothing to something. So I've been thinking a lot about how AI can help with that first step, and how much of it we should automate without making the deck feel generic.
Where I still do things by hand
Slide design, for one. AI-generated layouts can look clean, but they're also very safe. Everything becomes a neat grid of rectangles with a title on top. Sometimes