Last month a client handed me a 40-page research PDF on a Tuesday and asked for a 10-slide investor update by Thursday morning. Five years ago that would have meant an afternoon of dragging text boxes around. This time the whole job took about 35 minutes, and most of that was spent rewriting sentences rather than building slides. What follows is the exact process I used, step by step, including the parts where Decktopus AI gets in your way and you have to take the wheel.
Step 1: Write the brief the way you’d brief a junior designer
The main reason AI presentation tools produce bland decks is the prompt. Typing “make a presentation about marketing” and then complaining about generic output is like handing a designer a napkin that says “something about marketing”.
A usable brief has five parts: audience, occasion, the action you want at the end, tone, and slide count.
- Weak: “presentation about our new product”
- Workable: “10-slide product launch deck for existing retail customers, warm and practical tone, ends with a request to book a demo”
That second version gives Decktopus AI decisions it can actually make. It knows to skip technical architecture, it knows the reader already buys from you, and it knows the last slide needs a call to action rather than a polite thank-you.
What happens after you generate
The tool builds an outline first, then slide titles, then body copy underneath each one. Editing works at every stage, and it’s much cheaper to fix the outline than to fix twenty finished slides. Spend your first two minutes up here.
Step 2: Fix the outline before you touch a single slide
First drafts usually land somewhere between eight and twelve slides and are rarely right. On my investor update, the generated outline ran: Market Overview, The Problem, Our Solution, Product Features, Benefits, Pricing, Case Study, Roadmap, Team, The Ask.
I deleted Team outright (the board already knew the founder), merged Features into Benefits because the deck was saying the same thing twice in different fonts, and moved Pricing so it sat immediately before The Ask. Ten slides became eight, and the argument got sharper.
A simple filter for this stage: every slide should either advance the argument or answer an objection the audience is already holding. If it does neither, cut it. You will not miss it.
Step 3: Answer the question fields with numbers, not adjectives
Before it writes, Decktopus asks for details about your topic. Treat those boxes as an interview rather than a form. Vague input produces vague slides, every time.
- Instead of “improve onboarding”, write “cut onboarding from 14 days to 3”
- Instead of “strong growth”, write “revenue up 42% year on year”
- Instead of “many customers”, write “1,200 stores across 6 countries”
Concrete figures also survive the next round of editing, because there’s nothing to soften. “Significant traction” slides back into mush the moment you rewrite it. “1,200 stores” doesn’t.
Step 4: Swap the stock photos for real ones
Suggested imagery is fine as a placeholder while you’re still deciding what each slide is for. It stops being fine the moment you’re presenting. A deck of nine stock photos of people shaking hands in glass offices reads as filler, and audiences notice even when they can’t say why.
My working rule is two or three stock images at most. Everything else becomes a product shot, a screenshot, or empty space. Negative space almost always beats a decorative photo that means nothing.
Keep the aspect ratios consistent when you swap things in, too. A deck that mixes wide banners, tall portraits and square crops looks like it was assembled by three different people on three different days.
Step 5: Turn the speaker notes into a script, then cut them in half
Auto-generated speaker notes are a solid first pass. Read them out loud. Anything you stumble over gets rewritten. Anything that simply narrates what’s already on the slide gets deleted, because the notes should carry the argument, not repeat the bullet points.
If you’d rather record a narrated walkthrough than present live, those notes make a natural voiceover script. Editing the recording afterwards is a separate problem, and it’s one Descript solves by treating the video like a text document, so you delete a fluffed sentence by deleting the words on screen.
Step 6: Share the link, then pick an export format on purpose
Sharing a live link with view analytics is one of the genuinely useful features here. Send the deck to one colleague for a sanity check before you export anything, because once a PDF is in someone’s inbox you’re not fixing a typo quietly.
When it’s time to send it out, the format matters more than people think:
- PDF when the layout must not shift and nobody needs to edit it
- PPTX when a client or teammate will edit it themselves, and you accept some formatting drift
- Live link when you want to see who opened it and which slides they lingered on
Worth knowing before you commit: the free tier’s export rules are tighter than most people assume, so it pays to understand what the free plan actually includes before you invest an hour building a 30-slide deck on it.
A worked example: an 8-slide client onboarding deck
Here’s a structure I now build in about 20 minutes and reuse constantly. It’s deliberately unglamorous.
- Slide 1: “Welcome aboard” with their logo and today’s date
- Slide 2: “What happens next” with three dated milestones
- Slide 3: “Who you’ll work with” with four headshots and one-line roles
- Slide 4: “Your setup checklist” listing the five things they need to do this week
- Slide 5: “Where your data lives” answering the security question they’re too polite to ask
- Slide 6: “Support in three tiers” covering self-serve, email, and a direct line
- Slide 7: “30/60/90 day plan” with one row per checkpoint
- Slide 8: “Questions” with a calendar link instead of a generic sign-off
None of that is clever, and that’s the point. Onboarding decks are logistics, and Decktopus handles logistics well. The generation takes seconds; the value is in the order you put the slides in.
Where you should stop automating and build by hand
Some slides resist generation entirely. Financial tables break apart because columns don’t survive the layout engine. Org charts come out as lists pretending to be diagrams. Legal or compliance wording needs a human who knows the exact phrasing, and decks that must match a brand template down to the pixel will fight you the whole way.
Length matters too. Past roughly 25 slides, the generated outline gets shallow and you end up spending more time correcting than writing. If your deck is mostly data, build the tables yourself and let the tool handle the narrative slides around them.
Save the deck as a template and the next one takes ten minutes
The real payoff arrives on the second deck, not the first. Once a structure works, duplicate it, swap the copy, and leave the bones alone. The first build takes half an hour. The fifth takes eight minutes, because you’re no longer deciding what the slides should be, only what they should say.
That’s the whole shift: start from a structure you trust instead of an empty canvas. It’s the same reason I stopped building presentations from a blank slide altogether. The blank slide was never where the thinking happened. It was just where the time went.