How to Use ChatGPT for Presentations (Without Letting It Write the Whole Thing)

A note before we start: this is my personal experience. I’ve referred to some research, but please don’t take it as gospel. Use it as a reference point.

It’s late afternoon. Your boss or a client says, “Can you put together an outline for that proposal by tomorrow morning?”

So you open a blank slide. You type a title, delete it, type another one. You start hunting for icons. Suddenly it’s midnight. And when you finally finish, the response is: “So what’s the conclusion?”

If you’ve been there, you know the feeling. And here’s what took me a while to realize: the slowest part of making a presentation isn’t the design or the formatting. It’s deciding what to say, and in what order. That’s where my brain froze.

Like a lot of people, I tried the obvious fix: “Make me a deck on this topic” in ChatGPT. What came back was generic, textbook-style filler. I ended up retyping everything myself.

After repeating that a few times, I changed how I use ChatGPT. I stopped asking it for a finished product. Instead, I use it as a sounding board that produces only the skeleton. Since then, the time I used to lose at the very start of a deck has basically disappeared.

Here’s the process.

Why handing the whole job to ChatGPT backfires

When you type “Make a proposal deck about X,” ChatGPT gives you a plausible-looking table of contents. But it’s rarely usable as is. The reason is simple: the AI doesn’t know what’s in your head, namely who you’re persuading, what they need to be convinced of, and what you want them to do afterward.

Here’s where the usual approach goes wrong:

• Missing purpose and context. You haven’t said who the deck is for or what you want the reader to do next.

• Asking for everything at once. Structure, body text and design in a single prompt leads to vague output.

• No real facts. Without your numbers and constraints, the AI can only give textbook answers.

The fix is to separate the work into three stages:

1. Clarify the premise (a back-and-forth with the AI)

2. Fix the slide outline (titles and key points)

3. Write the content for each slide

I only let ChatGPT handle stages 1 and 2.

Step 0: Let the AI ask you the questions

Instead of “give me an outline,” I start with this:

I want to create an internal proposal deck on the following topic.
To draw out the information you need from me, first ask me
5 questions in bullet points.

With that one line, ChatGPT comes back with the kind of questions that matter: Who’s the audience? What are the decision-maker’s concerns? What’s the budget and timeline? These are things I’d have skipped over on my own. I answer in short bullet points, and within a few minutes the core premise of the deck is in place.

A lesson I learned about “AI voice”

This approach also came from a small failure. I once had AI write a thank-you message and showed it to someone. Their response: “This sounds like AI wrote it. If it’s not in your own words, the feeling doesn’t come through.”

That stuck with me. Now, when I write prompts, I put my own opinion in first. And because I work in question-and-answer form, I can see right away where the AI’s understanding and mine diverge. If the AI just writes alone, you get its one-sided take, and it’s hard to tell where it went off track.

The 3-step workflow (Slides, but in plain text)

Once the premise is set, I still don’t open PowerPoint or Google Slides. Everything stays in text.