How to Use AI to Create Slides and Visuals for Your Presentations
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Use AI to strip your slides back, not to bulk them out. The best use of a tool like Chat GPT in slide design is as an editor that cuts, clarifies and sequences, so the deck reinforces your message instead of replacing you. I have been using AI on my own presentations and with the speakers I have worked with since 2022, and the single biggest shift it made was not prettier slides. It was fewer of them. Get that right and the slides go back to being what they were always meant to be: the support act, while you stay the headliner.
That framing matters before you type a single prompt. Slides are meant to support your message, not carry it. Most presenters use them as a crutch, filling each one with text so they never have to remember what comes next. The audience ends up reading the screen instead of listening to you, and you end up narrating bullet points instead of speaking with conviction. AI will happily make that problem worse if you let it, generating slide after slide of tidy filler. Point it in the right direction and it does the opposite.
Why most presentation slides fail the audience
A slide covered in text forces the audience to choose between reading and listening, and nobody can do both at once. When they read, they stop listening. When they listen, they miss the screen. Either way your message gets watered down. This is death by PowerPoint, and it is a clarity problem, not a design one.
The issue is almost never a lack of design skill. It is a lack of clarity about what each slide is for. People dump content onto slides because they have not decided on their core message, or on which supporting points genuinely need a visual. So they hedge, and they put everything up there just in case.
Before you open a design tool or ask AI for a single slide idea, answer one question: what does this slide help my audience understand that my words alone cannot? If you cannot answer it, the slide should not exist. Hold that question in your head for the rest of this article, because every prompt below is really just a sharper way of asking it.
How AI helps you reduce slides to what matters
Here is the counterintuitive part. The most valuable thing AI does in slide design is subtract. Most people reach for it to generate more, and that is backwards.
Paste your full deck outline in and ask it plainly: "Which of these slides are essential for the audience to understand my core message, and which are here only because I feel safer having the information on screen?" That one prompt forces a ruthless edit. When I have done this with my own decks, and with speakers preparing for rooms that really mattered, the finding is always the same. Roughly half the slides exist to reassure the presenter, not to serve the audience. AI is very good at spotting the difference because it has no ego invested in the slide you spent forty minutes building.
While you trim, apply two rules that keep slides honest:
One message per slide. If a slide is making two points, it is two slides, or one of the points does not belong.
A maximum of nine words on it. This is my nine word rule, and it is deliberately strict. If a slide needs a paragraph it is not a slide, it is a document, so hand it out rather than projecting it.
Ask AI to take a wordy slide and cut it to a single message under nine words, or to one image or one number that carries the point. Clear beats clever every time. Less on the slide almost always means more authority in the room, because you are guiding the audience rather than reading to them.
How to use AI to turn complex data into clear visuals
If your presentation involves numbers, trends or comparisons, AI can help you find the clearest way to show them. The classic mistake with a data slide is showing everything. A chart with twelve data points and three axes tells the audience nothing except that you own a lot of data.
Ask AI to name the single most important insight in your figures and to suggest the simplest way to show it. Usually the answer is one number, one trend line or one comparison, not a table. Then ask for the headline that sits above the chart: "What is the point of this chart in nine words or fewer?" That forces you to decide what the data means before you show it, which is the whole difference between informing a room and confusing it.
There is a delivery habit that pairs with this. When you get to a key figure, state the number and stop talking. Let it land. A single stat, clearly shown, with a beat of silence after it, will outperform a busy dashboard you talk over every single time. AI can build you the clean version. Only you can give it the pause.
Why AI should plan your slide sequence, not just design individual slides
Most people ask AI to help with one slide at a time. The bigger prize is sequencing, because the order in which you reveal information shapes how the audience follows you and what they remember.
Ask AI to review your full structure and suggest the best moments for a visual, because not every section needs one. Some land harder with nothing on screen, so the room focuses entirely on you. A slide that is blank, or nearly so, is not a gap in your deck. It is a spotlight on the speaker.
A strong sequence tends to have a rhythm: an image or a key stat to open a section, a clean or blank slide while you explain, and a simple takeaway visual to close it. Getting AI to map that rhythm across the whole presentation beats designing slides in isolation. It is one slice of the wider AI workflow for public speaking that ties your preparation together, and it works best once you already know the shape of your message.
If you want a structure to hand the AI before it sequences anything, give it the bones of a nano speech: an open that hooks, a body that makes one clear point and backs it up, and a close that asks for something. Slides then attach to that spine rather than becoming the spine. The deck serves the structure, not the other way around.
How to use AI to write speaker notes that support delivery
Speaker notes should not be a full script. They should be trigger words that keep you on track without tempting you to read.
This matters more than it sounds, and I learned it the hard way. Early in my speaking life I leaned entirely on a scripted presentation. I forgot a single line, the whole thing was pinned to that script, and I could not recover. A notes page crammed with full sentences invites exactly that failure, because the moment you rely on the words being there, one missing word takes the floor out from under you.
Paste a section into AI and ask: "Reduce this to five bullet points that would remind me of the key ideas without giving me full sentences to read." The result is a set of prompts that support recall without creating dependence. It works because it forces you to understand the material well enough that a few words trigger the whole explanation. If you cannot deliver a section from a trigger of five words, you do not know it well enough yet, and that is useful information to have before the room does.
How AI helps you match visuals to your brand and audience
Different audiences respond to different visual styles, because it is not about you, it is about them. A deck for a creative agency should look nothing like one for a financial services conference.
Ask AI to think it through with you: "I am presenting to [audience] at [event type]. What visual style would feel credible here, and should I lean on photography, illustration, minimal text, data visualisation, or a mix?" That gives you a starting frame before you open a design tool, so you are not defaulting to whatever template loads first.
AI can also help you describe the images you need. Rather than trawling stock libraries for an hour, describe the concept and ask for specific image ideas that reinforce your message rather than decorate the slide. The rule of thumb that keeps it clean: an image and a couple of words that spark curiosity beats a wall of text, every time.
What AI slide tools cannot do for you
AI can suggest content, sequence and visual concepts. It cannot make you a confident presenter. A beautiful deck delivered by someone reading from their notes is still a poor presentation.
The proof shows up the moment the slides disappear. A speaker I worked with had his slides fail in the middle of an important presentation. He rambled, lost his place and spiralled, convinced it had ended his career. He had, in that very room, closed the deal. He was his own worst critic, as most of us are, and the lesson was simple: the presentation was never the slides, it was him.
You should be able to survive a dead projector. That only happens when the message and the structure live in your head, not on the screen. So get the message right, get the structure right, rehearse until you can deliver without the slides, and only then design visuals that lift what you are already doing well. Slides are the last layer, not the first. Build them in that order and AI becomes a genuine asset. Build them in the wrong order and you have just automated your way to a prettier crutch.
Frequently asked questions about AI and presentation slides
Should I use AI to design my slides directly?
AI is better at planning slide content and sequence than at producing finished designs that sit right with your brand. Use it to decide what each slide should contain and in what order, then build the actual visuals in a tool like Canva or PowerPoint. Think of it as your editor and art director in the planning stage, not your production line. The judgement calls about taste and brand fit still need a human eye at the end.
How many slides should a presentation have?
There is no universal rule, but a useful guide is no more than one slide for every two minutes of speaking, so roughly 10 for a presentation of 20 minutes. The number matters less than the test behind it: every slide should earn its place. If you cannot say in one sentence why a slide exists, it probably should not. Counting slides is a proxy for the real discipline, which is cutting.
Can AI help me create slides for technical presentations?
Yes, and this is where it adds the most value, because technical content is where overload creeps in fastest. Ask AI which details are genuinely essential for your specific audience and which can be simplified, cut or moved to a handout. Then have it turn the complex parts into single sentence summaries someone outside the field could follow. The skill in a technical talk is not showing that you understand the detail, it is deciding how little of it the audience truly needs.
How do I stop AI from just making my deck longer?
Give it a subtractive brief, not an additive one. Instead of "make me slides on X", tell it your total slide budget and your time limit, and ask it to fit the message inside those constraints. Prompts like "cut this to five slides" or "what can I remove without losing the core message?" pull it in the right direction. Left to its defaults, AI will pad, so the constraint has to come from you.
What is the biggest mistake people make with presentation slides?
Using them as a script. When your slides contain everything you plan to say, you become a narrator rather than a speaker, and the audience reads ahead of you and stops listening. The strongest presenters use slides sparingly, let their words carry the message, and reserve visuals for the moments that genuinely benefit from one. AI makes this mistake easier to fall into and, used well, easier to fix.
TL;DR: Using AI for slides and visuals
Decide your core message first. AI cannot design a deck around a point you have not made yourself.
Use AI to cut, not to add. Ask it which slides exist for the audience and which exist for your comfort, then delete the second group.
Hold every slide to one message and no more than nine words. If it needs a paragraph, it is a document, so hand it out.
Turn data into one insight, not a spreadsheet. Ask AI for the single most important number, trend or comparison, plus a headline of nine words or fewer.
Sequence the whole deck, not one slide at a time. Some sections land harder with nothing on screen.
Keep speaker notes to short triggers of five words or fewer. If you cannot deliver a section from a trigger, you do not know it yet.
Slides are the last layer of preparation, not the first. Get the message and the reps right before you design a thing.
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