ARTICLE PREVIEW

AI Tools For Presentations

Author: Nicolas, March 2023

If we think about using AI for a process, the best method I have experienced so far is to chunk the process into sub-processes.

Table of Contents

After having prepared more than 200 decks of slides in my career, here are the 6 steps I identified for a financial presentation:

Gather & Analyze Financial Data
Define your message
Create an Outline
Develop Content for Each Slide
Design Presentation Theme
Incorporate Visual Aids

Let’s dream for a minute:

If we would like to automate 100% of a financial presentation, the dream would be to connect our financial data to a tool.

And then just tell it the period and the topic on which we would like our presentation to be created.

Now back to reality, I didn’t find the solution that performs all these steps at once.

But in this review, I will tell you which solution comes the closest to it and what are other alternatives depending on where you want to save time or add value compared to your existing processes.

Another important point in deciding which tool is the most helpful is the Export.

In Finance we need our slides to be either in PowerPoint or for some companies in Google Slides.

You will see that some of the tools using AI to generate presentations don’t have an export towards PowerPoint or Google Slide. Which is for me a show-stopper.

Best Approach

What is the best approach based on my review?

Here is my research approach:

I researched which tools exist online: more than 30 tools are claiming to use AI to make presentations.

Then, I reviewed all of them and selected 13 which indeed used AI.

All others were either not serious or didn’t have AI as their core functionality to generate the presentations.

Our conclusion: you have today 2 ways to use AI for Financial Presentations (see below 1 and 2).

1. Use A Generative AI Tool to Produce Your Content

Analyse data, define your message with the SCQA approach and then create the outline and content of each slide.

Pros: You are fast at producing your outline and the content of each slide. The quality and the wording is also better than what you could do in the same time.

Cons: You have to move the content to PowerPoint or Google Slides and format it yourself. You don’t get any help on the design, which could be highly time-consuming.

2. Use A Presentation-Focused Generative AI Tool

To create the outline, the slides, the theme, and visual aids.

Pros: consistency of theme, canvas created, and creative slides proposed to you.

Cons: The quality of content is poor compared to ChatGPT. You still need PowerPoint for some visual aids as there are not as many solutions as SmartArt.

Your data is not dynamically connected to your Excel files or Google files.

Moreover, it can be that your company has already a theme for your presentations, which makes the theme of these tools not an advantage for you.

3. My Approach: The Hybrid Approach

After having reviewed more than 15 tools, none of them can be as fast and powerful as PowerPoint and Google Slides when you try to redesign.

It also lacks functionalities and flexibility.

Therefore the time you save at the beginning, you will loose it once somebody ask you to tweak something in the presentation or when you try to add visual aids or graphs that don’t fit the tool you are using.

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