How to Make a Presentation With AI (From Blank Slide to Rehearsal)

The scariest part of a presentation is rarely the presenting. It is the Sunday evening staring at a blank first slide, wondering how forty minutes of thoughts become twelve tidy rectangles. That blank-slide stage is exactly what AI removes.

Here is the honest division of labor: AI is excellent at the structure, the story order, and the speaker notes. You bring the message, the numbers, and the delivery. This guide walks the whole flow, from brain dump to rehearsal, with copy-paste prompts at each step.

Step 1: dump everything, then ask for a story

Do not ask AI to "make a presentation about X". Give it your raw material and your constraints, and ask for an outline first:

I'm presenting to [audience] for [10] minutes. My goal: by the end, they should [decide / approve / understand X]. Here is everything in my head about this, unsorted: [brain-dump your points, data, worries]. Build me a slide outline: one line per slide stating the single message of that slide, in an order that tells a story. Maximum [10] slides. Flag anything I gave you that should be cut.

The "flag what to cut" line matters. Most bad presentations are good ones buried under three extra topics, and the AI is unsentimental about your darlings.

Step 2: one message per slide, words in the notes

Once the outline feels right, expand it slide by slide, and keep the words off the slides:

For each slide in the outline: give me 1) a short punchy slide title stating the message, 2) at most 3 short supporting points for the slide itself, 3) full speaker notes in a conversational tone, written the way a person talks, not the way a report reads. Slides are visuals, notes are sentences. Do not put paragraphs on slides.

Paste the titles and points into PowerPoint or Google Slides, and the notes into the notes pane. If your company uses an AI slide tool that builds decks directly, this same outline is exactly the input it wants. The design advice in 24Slides' ChatGPT PowerPoint guide pairs well with this step.

Step 3: pressure-test the story

Before you polish anything, make the AI attack it:

Act as the most skeptical person in my audience: [describe them, e.g. a busy finance director]. Read my outline and notes, then give me: the 3 hardest questions they will ask, the weakest slide and why, and the one slide I should cut if I run out of time. Be blunt.

Answering those three questions before the meeting is the difference between presenting and defending. The same trick powers our pre-meeting briefing method, where you generate smart questions before someone else asks them.

Step 4: rehearse with a coach that never gets bored

Read your talk out loud once with voice mode on, or paste your spoken version as text:

Here is my talk as I would say it: [paste or speak]. Time it at a natural speaking pace. Tell me: where I ramble, which transitions are clunky, and which sentence in each section could be cut with nothing lost. Then give me a strong opening line and a strong closing line.

Openings and closings are what audiences remember, and they are precisely what nervous presenters improvise. Have them written, and the middle takes care of itself.

What AI cannot save

A deck with no point. If you cannot finish the sentence "by the end, they should...", no tool can build the slides, because there is nothing to build toward. Decide the destination first; everything above is just the road.

Presentations are one lesson of a bigger skill: turning rough thoughts into clear documents fast. The free course Write Anything Faster: Emails, Reports and Updates trains that muscle in six short lessons, and our office prompt library has the agenda and status-update prompts for the meetings around your talk.