Make a simple presentation with AI, then edit it yourself

A presentation tool will happily give you twelve slides when you needed six, and a chart when you needed a sentence. The speed is real. The judgement is still yours. This is a way to make a simple deck for a work review: outline first, slides second, your edits third. Free tools only. The example below is one I wrote so you can see the shape. It is not a client’s deck.

Start from the decision, not from a theme

Write one line at the top of a note: what should be true when the meeting ends. “They approve the three slides for Monday.” “They know the budget is still open.” “They pick one of two options.” If you do not know the decision, you do not have a deck. You have a pile of updates, and a pile of updates should be the one-page report, not slides.

Then list the slides you are allowed to have. For a short review I use five. A title with the decision. What is done. What is next. What is open, with owners. The ask, in one line. You can live with eight. You rarely need fifteen. Every extra slide is a place for the tool to invent a point.

Get the outline from the chat, not the design

Open ChatGPT or Gemini. Give it the decision, the slide list, and the notes. Ask for speaker notes in one sentence per slide, and a headline that is a claim, not a label. “Budget” is a label. “Budget is not confirmed, so the deck waits on Riya” is a claim. Claims are what a room can react to.

Read the outline before you touch a design tool. If a headline is not true, fix it in the chat. Designing a wrong slide is how an hour disappears. Also delete any slide the tool added “for flow.” Flow is not a deliverable.

Move the outline into a slide tool

For a fast first version, Gamma can turn an outline into slides. Canva and Google Slides are the other free paths in our AI Practitioner classes, and they are better once you are editing. Use whichever you already have open. Paste the outline. Ask for simple layouts. Tell it: no stock photos of handshakes, no icons on every line, large type, one idea per slide.

If Gamma gives you a polished theme that does not match your company, do not fight the theme for an hour. Export or copy the words into Google Slides or Canva and use the template your team already trusts. The words were the point of the AI step. The font is not.

Edit like a person who has to present it

Stand up and say each headline out loud. If you run out of breath, the headline is two headlines. If you would not say it to your manager, it does not stay. Then look at every number. A generated chart is guilty until it matches a cell. If you cannot point at the cell, replace the chart with the sentence “number not confirmed.”

• One idea on each slide. Move the second idea.
• Headline is a claim you can say in one breath.
• No number without a source you can open.
• No logo, photo of a person, or client name you do not have the right to use.
• Speaker notes are for you, not a second essay on the slide.

Charts are where these tools bluff. If the notes said the labels were missing, the slide should not show a clean chart with labels the tool invented. A plain table you typed is more honest than a beautiful chart that is wrong. You can add the chart after the labels exist.

Images, if you need one

Most internal decks need no generated image. If you want one, for a cover or a simple diagram, generate it in the tool you already use and then look at the text inside the image. AI images still misspell words. If the image contains a word, it is probably wrong. Prefer a diagram you build in the slide tool: three boxes and an arrow. It will look plain. It will also be correct.

Do not drop in a photo of a real customer, a colleague, or a celebrity. Do not paste a competitor’s logo to “make it concrete.” If you need a picture of the product, use the real photo from your drive.

A five-slide pass you can repeat

Give yourself a short clock so the tool does not become the project. Ten minutes for the decision and the outline in chat. Ten minutes to drop it into slides. Fifteen minutes to edit headlines, kill extra slides, and check numbers. Five minutes to present it to an empty room or to your phone camera. If you stumble, the slide is the problem.

Save the outline prompt next to your status-report prompt. Next time, the notes change and the five-slide shape stays. That is the reusable part. A new theme every week is not a skill.

What to refuse from the first draft

Refuse a slide called “Our vision” unless someone asked for vision. Refuse percentages that were not in the notes. Refuse next steps that assign work to people who were not in the meeting.

Refuse to present a deck you have not clicked through once. Generated slides sometimes hide the point in a caption under a picture, in type too small for a laptop share. If you cannot read it on your phone, they cannot read it in the room.

From one deck to a habit

The mistake is to treat the tool as the designer of the meeting. It is a fast junior who has not met your client. You bring the decision, the notes, and the veto. After a few decks you will know your own bans: no more than six slides, no chart without a source, headlines as sentences. Write those bans into the prompt. The tool gets more useful when your rules get more specific.

On Saturday we make one file live, usually the one-page report, and we look at how the same habit carries to a deck. You can try the five-slide pass above on the next internal review. Make the outline, edit the words, and only then care about how it looks.