Earlier this week I had to put together a pitch for a new feature in our product. Normally I'd spend a couple hours wrestling with slides, but I figured I'd let the AI tools do the heavy lifting. I've been testing a bunch of them — some that ship as standalone apps, others that plug into Google Slides or PowerPoint. After a few weeks of this, here's what I actually found useful.
Content generation is the easy part
Every tool can now take a topic and spit out a deck. The problem isn't making slides — it's making good slides. The ones that don't look like they were generated by a robot that only read Wikipedia. I've fed the same one-liner ("Q3 sales strategy for mid-market fintech") into five different tools. Four of them gave me a structure that felt like a template from 2019: "Market Trends, Our Solution, Competitive Landscape, Next Steps".
Only one tool asked me who the audience was, what tone I wanted, and whether I had existing data to reference. That's the kind of friction I don't mind. Because if I'm going to spend 15 minutes tweaking the AI's output, I'd rather it started from a place that understands context, not just keywords.
My teammate told me last week he used an AI tool to generate a pitch for a client. He said the deck looked beautiful but the content was all fluff — generic statements like "we leverage synergies to drive growth." He had to rewrite every slide. That's not saving time, that's just moving the work from formatting to editing.
Design that actually helps, not just looks pretty
I'm not a designer. I know the basic rules — don't use too many fonts, keep contrast high, leave white space. But AI presentation tools try to be full-on designers now. They'll pick a color palette, apply animations, even suggest image placement. Some of it works. I've seen decks where the AI automatically matched icons to the message, and I thought "that's better than what I'd do."
But there's a trap. Many tools apply the same layout to every slide: title top left, bullet points on the left, image on the right. It's clean, but after five slides it feels like I'm reading a report, not a presentation. The best tools I've tried let me override the layout per slide without fighting the AI. I've learned that if I can't quickly drag a text box or change a font size, I'm going to get frustrated and abandon the tool.
While building Huanjian (huanjianai.tech) we found that the hardest part isn't generating slides — it's letting people keep their own judgment. We spent a lot of time on a feature that lets you "lock" a slide's design while regenerating content. Because sometimes you just want to keep that one perfect layout and fix the words.
The workflow gap: where the real time goes
Honestly I'm still figuring this out. The tools that generate a full deck in 30 seconds are impressive demos, but the last mile is a killer. You still need to copy-paste data from spreadsheets, embed charts that update live, add speaker notes, adjust for your company's brand guidelines. None of the AI tools handle that well.
I tried one that claimed to "integrate with your data sources." It connected to Google Sheets but then displayed numbers as static text. If I updated the sheet, I had to regenerate the whole slide. That's not integration, that's a one-time import. For someone who presents weekly numbers, that's a dealbreaker.
Another tool let me upload a PDF of my existing materials and it extracted slides. It worked for about 70% of the content. The rest were mangled tables and weird text wrapping. I ended up spending more time fixing those than if I'd started from scratch. So my take is: if the tool can't handle your actual workflow (real data, real updates, real revisions), it's a toy, not a tool.
I still use AI presentation tools, but not the way I thought I would. I use them for brainstorming slide structures, for generating visual metaphors I wouldn't think of, and for cleaning up messy outlines. I don't use them for the final output. Maybe next year someone will crack the integration problem. Until then, I'll keep one hand on the mouse and one foot in the old way of doing things.