Transcription
Okay, real talk. None of the slides you're about to see were made by a designer. I am not a designer by trade, but I made these without Illustrator, without Canva, without lots of late-night YouTube rabbit holes to teach me how to do this in editing software that I'm not that great in. These are all made with ChatGPT40, and they are really, really good.
I'm excited because we have hit a point in our AI journey where you can build a presentation that feels like it came from a high-end consulting firm just by knowing what to ask. So, in this video, I'll show you exactly how I'm making presentations with the same quality as the biggest consulting firm in the world. And I'm doing it all just using AI. We're not using templates. We're not using editing software. We're just giving ChatGPT some prompts and seeing how far it can take us.
But before we get started, let's talk about what makes a presentation actually feel polished. So, how do we know that it's not overdesigned, but it's really clear? Because this is a really big part of what the big consulting firms get right in making their presentations. You need a framework. And the first thing that you want to do is start with the story, not the slides. So you don't want to map out the slides and think about the visual part until you understand your narrative. One method that you can use to do this is called SCQA, and that is situation, complication, question, and answer. And that will help you to frame the context and lead your audience straight to the solution.
The next thing that you want to do is lead with the takeaway. If you only get to the point of your presentation when you are 10, 12, 15, 20 slides in, you have waited way too long. So make your conclusion clear up front, and then you'll use the slides to back that up.
Next, you want to make sure that you keep your ideas organized so that you don't repeat yourself and you don't leave anything out. There's a good pneumonic that the consulting firms use, and it's called MECE, and that stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, and that means that you want to have no overlap, but you also don't want to leave anything out. And that can make your thinking easier to follow so people don't get tripped up on things that they're kind of uncertain if those are the same thing or if maybe there's something missing.
You want to make sure that you only have one idea per slide. And make sure that that title is a full sentence headline so that it tells the story, even if someone's only skimming it; not just sales data, but the point of Q4 revenue grew 12% driven by product X. And use charts really sparingly, only when you need them to really say something. Because a good chart doesn't just show numbers, it makes the insight obvious. And when you do use a chart, make sure that you're using a call-out, you're changing the color, you're pointing to whatever the takeaway is, and make sure that that is really visual.
Next, you want to make sure that you keep it clean. So, stick to simple fonts; three, at the most; use consistent spacing and minimal color. The goal isn't to impress with your design skills. It's to be understood. So, the easier it is to follow, the more likely people are to trust what you're saying. And that's the whole point, right?
Let's head over to ChatGPT and start to see what we can do to make amazing presentations. Let's start with our first prompt in ChatGPT. And what we really want to get from this one is just a good understanding of what ChatGPT40 can do. There are all sorts of new image generation capabilities that came with 40, and they are pretty incredible. So let's say that you are proposing a product that you want to start working on, and you want to give an idea of what it might look like in a rough prototype, but then a final product as well. If you tried to do that in Photoshop, that could take a very, very long time. But ChatGPT can do this. So let's look at my prompt and see what kind of results we get once we generate that image.
So I started with a prompt that says: generate a horizontal image that shows a product transformation. On the left, a rough handmade prototype and on the right, a polished final version of the product. Include subtle labels that say before and after. Keep it clean and slide-ready. Now the more information that you give GPT, the better your results are going to be. And it likes you to be a little bit conversational. So when you give it full sentences and you explain what you want, you're going to get better results. So it looks like it's coming up with a mouse. Now, you could get it to generate sort of any product that you want, but you can see that it has kind of that rough like you made it out of cardboard, but then you actually designed it. I mean, this is absolutely ready to be used in a presentation. It looks like it was made out of clay or something. I'm not really sure, but you could absolutely use this in a presentation right away.
So, another use case that you might want to test out is you might have an idea in your head that you have sketched out on paper. So whether that's a diagram to kind of explain something or a point that you want to make, but you are not the designer who is going to draw that or you don't want to spend all the time trying to lay that out in Illustrator or just make it look really good. You can do this right in Canva. So I'm going to show you how I took a picture. I drew something out, sketched it on paper, took a picture with my phone, and now we're just going to upload it into ChatGPT with a prompt to make a slide that's ready to add to our presentation. So, we have my prompt that has my photo, and I'm just going to add my photo here. And it is just a really, really simple sketch. You can see that there. This very simple little sketch that I did of product to customer to support to insights and back to product. Now, it is working on the diagram, and I want it to be slide-ready. So, I wanted to give it those prompts to tell it to keep it really clean and to make it really professional. Look at that. But we have a very much nicer-looking diagram than I made by myself. And you could add things to it as well. But this is really easy to just now drop into your slides because it's ready to show your story. Used a simple font, made really nice arrows. It's all ready to go.
Now, we're going to take it up a notch because I know that we have all been there when we are staring at a bullet point slide and we just can't think about how to make it more interesting, but we know it's not great. We're going to give ChatGPT a bullet point slide and we're going to ask it to make it a lot better looking. Now, this prompt is a little bit more complex so that we can get really great results. So, we're going to be super specific in our prompt by saying the aspect ratio that we want: 16 by 9, professional slide, the name on the slide, and then I'm uploading the generic benefits bullet points. I want to use a modern minimalist horizontal layout with five equally spaced benefit cards across the slide. You can be this specific or you could give it a little more leeway, but this just ensures that I'm going to get a really great result. I'm telling it to use a monochrome icon. So, it's going to pick one for each bullet point, a bold benefit title, so it's using the titles that I gave from the bullets. And then it's going to actually write up some copy for the subtitle. I want all the cards to have equal emphasis. I want a grid layout. I want it to be neutral. And I want it to be really simple. And I'm also going to tell it that I want it to resemble the slides from the consulting firms that we talked about. So, McKinsey, BCG, really business class, and we don't want anything cartoony. We don't want anything goofy. We want it to just be really, really on point. All right, look at that slide. This looks great. Super professional. The icons look great. They actually are relevant to our topic. I mean, we got a clock for saving time, reduction in cost, the team, user experience. This looks really good, and it's just a prompt instead of needing to go through and develop all of this stuff in design software.
So, we started with a few examples where we had something to work from, whether that was an idea of something we wanted to create and we knew how we wanted to represent it or specific slides that we knew kind of what we needed to get out of them. But what if you have an idea and you're not sure how you best want to represent that using ChatGPT or using a slide? We can use ChatGPT to tell us how to best represent something. So, let's try with an idea. We're gonna say that we are trying to represent a value ladder and we know we kind of want it to be a stair step, but we're not really sure what the best way to represent it is. And we're going to give it some design parameters to keep it looking like a great consulting deck. We're going to say we have three levels of value. We want to communicate visually, and we're going to tell ChatGPT I don't know how to best show it. These are the things I know I want: is that it's a value ladder and it's a stair step or tiered. I know what things I want in it: the starter toolkit, the guided program, the strategic partnership, and then I know some of the design choices that I want because I want it to be consistent with the other things that we've created and that it's consistent with the consulting-quality decks that we're talking about. So, let's see what it can do. Here is our slide. And look at this. This is great. It actually comes up with some bullet points underneath it. So, it gives you the subtitles of custom strategy, execution, ongoing optimization. So, it has ideas of even how to communicate the idea that you gave it, not only the visual, but also some of the sub-bullets and some of the subheads that you might want to use. So, even if you have no idea how you want to communicate something, you can do that using AI.
Now that I have all of these great images, I need to put them into an actual deck. And that's where Piktochart comes in. It makes it really easy for me to bring those in and create a structured, lovely presentation in no time. I'm going to head into Piktochart, and I'm looking in the presentations. I can either use a blank template or I can start with something else. I'm going to look for a data presentation because I think it'll be simple and clean like what we were looking for. So, this business minimalist template looks really good for what we were looking at. So, I can start here, and I can start bringing in the images and things that we created. So, let's say that we want to start with our product. We're going to swap out this image for our image. So, we're going to go into our uploads and bring in that image of the product that we were talking about creating. And let's say we're going to change this to say the idea. And I am going to go ahead and center that text. And I'm going to change that font to something a little more impactful. And I'm going to make it quite a bit larger. And within Piktochart, I can line up things using all of the grids, which makes it really simple and fast to create. Now, I can continue to add in my images. So, let's say I want to add another page. So, I'm going to duplicate that slide, and we're going to swap out our customer journey. Then, we can add a blank page if we need to. So, we can add in our benefits and then our last page to add that value ladder. All right. So, at this point, my presentation could be complete, and I would just need to simply download that. And what's great is I can download that in multiple formats. So, I could download that as pictures or I can download it as a PDF or a PowerPoint. So, my preferred presentation software is PowerPoint. So, I'm going to go ahead and download that as a PowerPoint, and it will be all ready to go. So, ChatGPT helped me to create all of these great images and Piktochart made them look really good and ready to present to my audience.
Now, using tools like ChatGPT40 or Piktochart to create your presentations is great, but at the end of the day, your presentation itself is only half the battle. The other 50% is how you carry yourself in the way that you present the information. So, click here to go watch the next video where we show off five different techniques that you can implement into your next presentation to absolutely kill it and finally get the confidence and the engagement that you deserve. Don't leave your next presentation to chance when you could be one video away from mastering the skills that separate amateur speakers from presentation masters. I'll see you over there if you want your next presentation to be your best one.