How to make a presentation with AI: a seven-step workflow that holds up at work

These seven steps work with every tool. The first four decide how good the draft is; the build itself is the short part.

A brief that names six things leaves the tool little to guess: audience, goal, slide count, structure, data and style.

As of October 2026 the tools differ less in whether they can draft a deck than in where they work, what they start from and what you can do with the file. The table summarizes what each vendor's own help pages describe.

Choose by situation rather than by ranking:

• Your company has Microsoft 365 Copilot and a Brand kit: start in Copilot, which works inside PowerPoint.
• You already work in ChatGPT or Claude: use their slides features or add-ins, so the deck stays next to your notes and files.
• You present from the browser: Gamma keeps decks in its own format and exports PowerPoint, PDF and PNG. Read the export notes before you rely on the .pptx.
• Your team lives in Google Workspace: Slides with Gemini keeps the deck where your colleagues already work.
• You start from long documents or a spreadsheet and want to approve a plan first: Slaide asks up to four questions, shows the page plan and builds page by page.

Slaide is the tool behind this site. The guide ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot for PowerPoint compares the three assistants in more detail.

Sources, as of October 2026: OpenAI on Slides in ChatGPT and ChatGPT for PowerPoint; Anthropic on Claude for PowerPoint and creating files in Claude; Microsoft on creating a presentation with Copilot and Brand kits; Gamma on exporting; Google on generating a presentation with Gemini.

Give the tool your template at the start when it can read one, and apply the template afterward when it cannot. Here is what each vendor's own pages say.

• Copilot learns your look from Brand kits. Sample slides in the template matter most; with too few of them, Microsoft says, Copilot falls back to the slide master, which may give less optimal output.
• Claude's PowerPoint add-in reads your slide master, layouts, fonts and colors. Anthropic advises starting with your template applied.
• ChatGPT can work from a reference deck or a template made with Template Creator. OpenAI notes that generated slides may not match your preferred style exactly.
• Gamma imports colors, fonts and a logo from a .pptx file as a theme, but its PowerPoint export has no slide master.
• Slaide keeps your colors, fonts and logo on a Brand page and can open your .pptx. New slides follow the design it reads from the file: theme fonts and colors, each slide's layout and the footers. To restyle a finished deck, ask for it, for example "Restyle the whole presentation in our brand".

To bring a finished deck onto your company template, apply your template to it in PowerPoint. For the full picture, see AI presentations in your company template.

Decide the number yourself. If you leave it out, the tool chooses, and it does not know your time slot. Count the minutes you have and the messages you must land, and give each message one slide; the guide on how many slides to use turns that into a number.

Treat the first version as the work of a fast junior colleague: structured and plausible, not yet checked. Six checks catch most problems.

• Numbers. Compare every figure with its source, including totals and percentages. A tool can misread a table or round differently from you.
• Titles. Read only the titles, top to bottom. They should tell the story.
• Claims. Every statement about a market, a competitor or a customer needs a source you can name. Delete the rest.
• Charts. Check axis, unit and period. A chart that looks right can plot the wrong column.
• Names and dates. People, companies, products and deadlines.
• The file. Open the exported file in the program your audience uses and check fonts, line breaks and speaker notes.

A deck that passes these checks reads like this: six slides, and every title is a conclusion. The deck is an example with invented companies.

Check before you upload, not after. Read your company's AI policy, find out where the tool processes your data and under which terms, and remove names or figures the deck does not need.

For Slaide, documents and uploads are stored with Supabase in the EU, while AI requests go through OpenRouter to language-model providers in the USA. Use of your content for training is excluded by contract. For sensitive material, first check whether processing in the USA is permitted for you.

Here is a budget request written so that it works in any of the tools above. Replace the brackets with your own facts and attach the spreadsheet.

The button on the prompt box opens the brief in the editor behind this site. With a clear brief like this, the AI can skip its questions; where something is open, it asks up to four, then shows the page plan, one card per page, with a "What I assumed" list. You edit the plan or approve it, and the AI builds page by page with a render check on every page. The plan comes first; a finished deck usually takes a few minutes. The AI PowerPoint generator page describes the full flow.