I've been making slide decks for over a decade. Quarterly reviews, investor updates, internal kickoffs — I know the drill. Last month I decided to hand part of the job over to AI. This is what that actually looked like.
What the AI got right
A teammate asked for a pitch deck about a new feature we're beta testing. The kind of thing that needs to be done by Friday. Instead of opening PowerPoint and staring at a blank template, I tried a few AI presentation tools. I typed in a rough brief: "Quarterly update for the board, focus on retention metrics and roadmap." The tools did something genuinely useful right away. They produced a skeleton of ten slides with a sensible order and reasonable headings. That alone saved me twenty minutes.
I also gave the tool our internal deck structure with example headlines. The output quality jumped significantly. Asking for three versions of the same slide works too — one of them is usually close enough to what I needed. The trick is to treat the AI like a junior intern who's read everything but never spoken to a customer. You can't just assign "make the deck." You need to brief it like you would a person.
Where it falls apart
The closer I looked, the more I felt like I was reading a report written by a committee that never attended a meeting. The bullet points were grammatically fine but said nothing. "We are leveraging data to optimize outcomes." Nobody talks like that, and nobody wants to read it on a screen. I had to rewrite nearly every slide's content. Not just the tone — the actual meaning. One tool confidently stated that churn decreased by 15 percent. That is far from the truth. Hallucinated numbers are terrifying in a quarterly review.
Here's something I didn't expect. Reviewing AI-generated slides takes more focus, not less. You have to check every fact, read every bullet for meaning, and repair the rhythm that a human writer would naturally have. At the end, I wasn't sure if I'd saved time. The design templates looked better than my usual defaults, so formatting was a win. But the thinking work stayed mine.
How I use it now
While building Huanjian, we've talked to a lot of people who make slides for a living. Almost all of them say the same thing: the AI is good at getting started, bad at finishing. The gap between a decent outline and a real presentation is exactly where the hard work lives.
I still use AI for presentations. I just use it the way I'd use a search engine or a mood board — not as an author. Last week I made a deck in two hours that would have taken four. That's a good ratio. I'm still figuring out where to draw the line between my own judgment and what the machine spits out. I suspect that line is the actual skill.