Last month I had to put together a 20-slide deck for a partner update. I've built hundreds of presentations in my career, so it's not that I can't do it. It's the blank slide. I sit there staring at the outline, fiddling with the title text, then give up and check email.
That's when I decided to seriously use AI for an entire deck, not just for generating a random hero image like most people do.
My honest attempt
I started with a prompt you can probably guess: "Create a presentation about our partner strategy." The output was what I call an outline of an outline. It had bullets that looked reasonable but said nothing. Everything was too clean, too obvious, and the whole thing felt like a marketing brochure from 2019.
So I tried being more specific. I mentioned our actual partner names, the metrics we care about, the struggles we've had this quarter. That changed things. The structure started to make sense. But the language was still flat. It kept saying things like "drive synergies" and "unlock value," which no real human has ever said in a meeting.
That's the first thing I learned: output quality depends