Executives present constantly. We present to customers and prospects. We present to investors and Boards. We present to entire companies and to individual teams. We use presentations to convey our vision, strategy, observations, plans, and analyses. Presentations are omnipresent in the modern working world.

Creating presentations has drastically changed over the last three decades. Presentations began with flip charts and overhead projectors. When I began my career, we worked with graphic designers to create presentations from thoughtful outlines that carefully built a point-of-view supported by visual data. Even when Harvard Graphics was launched and adopted by many firms, the software was complex enough to use that it was still necessary to plan your presentation before you built it. Today, we have a plethora of digital tools that help us create visually appealing presentations that can captivate the audience. Still, we need the discipline of thinking through the story in advance.

Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides are two of the most popular presentation tools. Most presentations are worse. But why?

Story before Slides

One of the most significant issues with PowerPoint and Google Slides is that it is so easy to build a presentation that most presenters or marketers start making their presentations on the slide platform. Slides become dense with text - "frankenslides", and the number of slides grows exponentially. Sometimes, the final product can still look polished and not make a memorable point. Nancy Duarte of Duarte has been working with companies and leaders since 1988 to focus on the storytelling before the slides. She's a clear voice drowned by a cacophony of easy-to-create slideware.

Another area for improvement with these tools are design options. Sure, they come with a decent selection of templates, but they can become overused and dull afterward. Customizing them can be a hassle, and the result may differ from what you envisioned. Presenters attempt to create a visually appealing presentation using themes but often need to make changes to make their message clear and concise to the viewer. Prezi and Canva further make the presentation more attractive but cannot compensate for the lack of deep thought up front on the purpose of the presentation and how to achieve that purpose in the fewest words and slides. Jeff Bezos requirement that presenters draft a six page memo provided to attendees in advance of a significant decision discussion is another effort enforcing clarity of thought and succinctness of analysis.

AI to the Rescue?

Enter Beautiful.ai. This relatively new presentation tool launched in 2018. Beautiful.ai is a cloud-based software that uses AI algorithms to design beautiful presentations seconds after the creator provides the outline and data. I've been using it for the last year. Beautiful.ai enforces design standards that make it impossible for creators to create "frankenslides" full of dense text and no apparent point.  Frankenslides apparently congregate to make the entire presentation hard to decipher.

With Beautiful.ai, creators input content as the prompt, and the software can automatically generate a visually appealing presentation. Alternatively, the creator can create individual slides as needed. The tool has many templates, design options, and the option to upload a custom template of your choice. Like Google Slides and Powerpoint365, Beautiful.ai is designed for cloud collaboration, enabling teams to collaborate on the presentation.

So, will Beautiful.ai be the remedy to the issues with PowerPoint and Google Slides? Perhaps. Powerpoint and Google Slides are also excellent when creators use messaging discipline. A presentation must tell a story with an emotional component, memorable data, and a compelling close. I define notable data supporting the story as data nuggets, meaning someone who views the presentation will repeat it to someone else to convey the message. One to three data points are the maximum someone remembers, so creators have to pick them carefully.

Canva and Gamma.app also generate high quality design based on a clear story.

AI-powered presentation design can be faster and more unique than death by digital slides. To leverage AI for presentations, creators must be clear about the prompt, a new term for having a well-thought-out outline.

This article was previously published on LinkedIn on January 4, 2024