The best AI presentation tools (according to designers)

AI presentation tools have made it easier than ever to create slide decks. You can quickly generate visuals, get speaker notes written, and summarize content in no time. For quick internal decks or first drafts, this is genuinely useful. 

But when presentations need to persuade, build a narrative, and leave a lasting impression? That’s where the limitations start to show. The output is often just okay. Not memorable, not tailored, and unlikely to stand out for its creativity, forward thinking, or empathetic, nuanced ideas. 

There is absolutely a space for AI in the presentation process, and, in this article, I’ll go over some of the best AI presentation tools and what they do well. 

I’ll also be answering a more interesting question: “Why are professional designers still in business when AI can generate complete presentations from one prompt?” I’ve asked some of my fellow designers for their input on this matter, and their answers, which are grounded in daily practice, are revealing. 

 

 

Available AI Presentation tools

Before we look at the more complex topic of whether you should be using AI presentation tools instead of real, professional designers, let’s look at what’s on the market. Because, whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay, and we may as well use it to support us (“support” being the keyword).

It’s worth noting that not all AI presentation tools are built the same. They generally fall into a few categories: full-deck generators, integrations with tools you may already use, image generation tools, content and writing assistants, and general design assistants. Each of the tools listed falls into one of these categories. 

 

Full deck generators:

Gamma: 

Gamma is one of the most popular tools for AI slide design at the moment. It can do a lot, including handling content structure, layout, and image selection.

Best for: Quick first drafts, internal slide decks, ideation.

Where it falls short: Many people report results that are derivative and unoriginal. 

Pricing: There is a free tier available, with paid plans starting at $9 per user per month. 

 

Beautiful.ai 

Beautiful.ai’s main feature is that it adapts layouts as you add content. This means your slides will stay intact, even where text runs long (which would usually break templates). 

Where this tool reportedly falls short is that it can lack flexibility when it comes to highly customized content. 

Best for: Decks where consistency and structure are most important.

Where it falls short: Reportedly, it can lack flexibility when it comes to highly customized content.

 

Integrations:

CoPilot (with Microsoft PowerPoint)

Everyone already uses PowerPoint; with CoPilot, you’ve got PowerPoint AI. From a well-written prompt, you can get a full presentation deck, with images and graphics, along with speaker notes. 

Best for: Teams/individuals already using the Microsoft ecosystem. 

Where it falls short: You have to pay extra for CoPilot, on top of your Microsoft subscription.

Pricing: 

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business (Up to 300 users): Starts at $18/user/month (billed annually). Standard pricing is $21/user/month annually, or $25.20/user/month for a flexible monthly commitment. 
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise (300+ users): $30/user/month (billed annually). 
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Personal: Available for individuals at $20/user/month via a Copilot Pro subscription.

 

Gemini (With Google Slides) 

Similar to the Microsoft Office and CoPilot relationship, Gemini brings the AI to a tool many people are already using. Together, these tools can help you create and share slides with not much fuss. 

Best for: Simple collaborative decks and teams already using Google Slides.

Where it falls short: Creating complex presentations using these tools is questionable as they are not purpose-built for AI presentation design. 

Pricing: Gemini for Google Slides is priced as an add-on to your Google Workspace account, starting at roughly $20 to $30 per user, per month

 

Image generators:

Magnific

This tool is for image generation only. It can produce on-theme visuals in a fraction of the time you would spend searching stock libraries. This feeds into an efficient slide creation process, but it does not create the slides for you. 

Best for: People who need stylistically consistent images quickly.

Where it falls short: Not able to handle text. It makes small or stylized text unreadable. 

Pricing: Paid plans start at $7.50 per month.

 

Napkin AI

Napkin can take text and data and turn them into visuals that you can add to slides. For presentations that come with a lot of data, this tool can really solve the problem of making information digestible. 

Best for: Data that needs to be presented visually.

Where it falls short: Napkin is not able to generate a full slide deck.

Pricing: There is a free tier available, but all visuals you generate will have Napkin branding on them. Paid plans start at $9 per person per month. 

 

General and writing assistants:

Claude 

Claude is another very popular tool, despite not being built for the purpose of presentation design. It can help with summarising content, structuring content better, writing speaker notes, and sense-checking your arguments. 

It is not an AI presentation design tool per se, but it is a great thinking partner for creating slides. 

Best for: Rewriting slides, organising content, and drafting speaker notes. Microsoft users can also get Claude as an add-on in PowerPoint, making this a good tool for them.

Where it falls short: Only handles basic charts; no complex business visualizations.

Pricing: There is a free tier, and paid plans start at $17 per month. 

 

ChatGPT 

Impossible to leave out, ChatGPT is great for drafting content, summarising ideas, and generating images.

Best for: Drafting content, editing content, general presentation design support 

Where it falls short: Because it is not built for presentation design, it has no real understanding of presentation structure. 

Pricing: There is a free tier available, and the paid plans start at $20 per month.

 

Design Assistants:

Canva 

While this one is more of a design platform than an AI presentation design tool, it is still worth mentioning. The platform comes with a broad library of templates and visuals, which you can make use of along with its AI Features to create just the type of presentation you need.

Best for: People who want a decent design without having the technical skills. 

Where it falls short: So many people use Canva; your presentation might end up looking generic. 

Pricing: There is a free tier; however, your access to AI tools will be limited. Paid plans start at $12.99 per month. 

Pricing: Plans start at $12 a month.

 

For an even more extensive list of AI tools, and further detail of some of the tools mentioned above, check out this video. 

 

What AI Presentation tools do well

Now that you’ve got a rough lay of the land, let’s talk about the areas in which AI presentation tools shine. 

As much as AI can’t do everything, evidenced by the fact that AI companies themselves are still hiring designers and other subject matter experts, it can do some things really well. For instance, presentation AI has taken a lot of the repetitive, tedious tasks out of designers’ hands, giving them time to focus on what really matters. 

Here’s what it helps with:

1. Creating first drafts, fast. A study found that most presenters spend more than 40% of their time on formatting presentations. With AI, you can mitigate this time wastage. You don’t have to create something from nothing. AI can do it, and it can do it quickly. You can work on refining, reworking, restructuring, and adding a human touch after the first draft is in front of you.
2. Generating images. This is perhaps the area where working designers have embraced  AI most wholeheartedly. Sarah Rand of Power Your Point explains: “Freepik, now Magnific, is the key to me generating images in the same style, colour and tone and nailing the theme and personas of people within a couple of hours — whereas it used to take days to find the right image on Pexels.
3. Summarizing and editing content. A once tedious and time-consuming task, making content more digestible is something AI can do easily. As Rand notes: “AI is useful to help cut down content (text-heavy slides)”. 
4. Sparking ideas. AI is a great tool to help get the creative juices flowing. It can come up with a mass of ideas, of which you can pick and choose your favorites and mold them to your preference. Anannya Mukherjee (PhD) of Auryx Presentations says: “I have used ChatGPT to ideate data visualisation and played around with Gamma as a more powerful version of basically SmartArt. It is significantly useful in the ideation stage, as its imperfections jog ideas — making me think about why what it is producing is unsatisfactory, what is actually missing from the output, and how that changes the presentation’s message.” 

AI is more of an assistant and thinking partner than a replacement for experts as a whole. It helps create more efficiency, but it should not take over (yet at least). 

 

Using AI for the rest of the presentation process

On the note of efficiency, AI, of course, can be used for more than just creating actual slides. It can be used in various other stages of the presentation process, too. 

It can help  to: 

• Do initial research or structure content for a presentation. In many cases, you will have to fact-check if you haven’t fed the AI the source material, but it is a good place to start. 
• Transcribe or generate captions. This may not be useful for live presentations, but for any recorded footage, it can come in handy. 
• Practice your speech. There are tools like Speeko, which allow you to rehearse the talking part of your presentation. These tools can flag filler words, pacing issues, and clarity problems, helping you to present the best version of your ideas. 

 

How design experts use AI presentation design tools 

Up until now, this article has been theoretical. It has discussed which tools you could use. But what are the real designers using? I asked them, and their answers show that there is no one single AI presentation platform, or one single tool that helps you do an entire job. 

Experienced designers build a stack of tools to use for different parts of the slide creation process. Here are some of the expert stacks: 

Jesse Virgil’s stack: 

• Claude cowork – for content on slides 
• Glean – for content research
• ChatGPT – for image generation 
• Gemini – also for images

Sarah Rand’s stack: 

• Magnific (previously Freepic) – for image generation 
• ChatGPT – for transcribing screenshots

Rand specified that, for transcription, manual proofing is necessary.

Anannya Mukherjee’s stack:

• ChatGPT – for data visualisation ideation 
• Gamma – for exploring layout possibilities 

Mukherjee uses AI tools as idea generators, not final output tools.

As you can tell, the pros are using AI selectively, for specific tasks where it can save them time. What they are not doing is using AI as a tool to create a final product.

 

How design experts really feel about AI Presentation tools

So, we know that AI is everywhere, we know that professionals are using it, and we know it can help create much more efficient workflows. 

Why, then, are professional designers still in business? The answer is in the weaknesses of AI presentation tools. 

 

Homogenous outputs 

The most common criticism experts have about AI is not that it creates mediocre slides, but that it creates slides that all look the same. 

“I am seeing a lot of AI-generated slides from Claude and Perplexity. It looks all the same,” says Sarah Rand. “Everything ends up in 3 boxes or a table. It doesn’t question whether there is another way to showcase the information. If you’re creating an important presentation that needs to generate revenue, I wouldn’t risk it looking generic.”

Amy De Wolfe of Presentation Design Pro has similar thoughts: “Everything it gives you is very homogeneous. It can apply different colors, but it doesn’t understand how to really translate a brand consistently, if at all. It just reuses the same few layouts it likes for everything.” If you want to see this weakness in practice, take a look at this LinkedIn post comparing a designer-made deck to a Claude-made deck.

If every output is similar, nothing will be memorable, meaning nothing will catch the attention of your audience. This is anything but an ideal outcome for any business presentation. Real designers bring diversity and creativity that AI cannot (yet) rival. 

 

 

Building a narrative 

Anannya Mukherjee (PhD) identifies the next weakness of AI in terms of presentation design: “AI is unable to think of a presentation as a cohesive project, which is where it falls the most flat for me. It can think of related ideas to put in different slides, but it isn’t able to actually articulate why those ideas are related, and crucially, what the significance of their relationship is. Therefore, there’s no build-up or pacing or proper narrative thread in the storytelling, and when you edit it to find that thread, you end up having to change a lot of the output to make it work.” 

This is echoed by the team at Meraki Theory, a presentation design agency, who describes the narrative problem in practice, “The first thing I fix (when a client comes to me with an AI-generated first draft) is usually the story arc. AI can generate a lot of content quickly, but it often treats every point as equally important. Presentations need hierarchy, pacing, and a clear emotional or strategic throughline.” They add that this reveals something fundamental about AI’s blind spot,  that presentations are not documents, but guided experiences where the slide is only one part of communication. 

The problem here is that AI cannot factor in context, nor can it thread various thoughts together to create an original point of view. A pack of slides is more than each individual page. It’s a collection of thoughts that come together to make a strong, cohesive argument that is meant for a specific group of people in a specific setting. 

As Nancy Duarte argues in the MIT Sloan Management Review, strategic message design, creative judgement, and empathy are the three “communicators’ advantages” that AI cannot replicate. Strategic message design requires originality. Creative judgment requires taste. And empathy is the ability to sense the unspoken and adapt to it. These are not things that AI has or can do. 

Amy De Wolfe takes an even more fundamental position: “If a client comes to me with an AI presentation, I take it at the same design value as if the client sent me a rough draft they built themselves. There may be some visual organisation of the thoughts that works well and can be pulled over, but I am unlikely to keep anything from the content file — I am going to be looking at the whole flow of the deck, the audience, the goals, their brand, and coming up with a design that will make their message land strongly.” 

 

Using templates

Something that almost all the presentation design experts mentioned is that they do not trust AI to work with existing brand templates. 

“AI cannot understand templates. I have tried to get Claude to use a template correctly. It was unsuccessful,” says Sarah Rand.

This is not a minor problem. A template is more than font choice, color palette, and logo placement. It brings your message across with tone, spacing, logic, visual language, and a sense of hierarchy. 

Being able to work with templates properly (and create templates, for that matter) is another element that puts real-life presentation designers ahead of AI presentation tools. 

 

Presentation AI is Evolving

Jesse Virgil offers a balanced perspective regarding AI presentation tools: “The output varies in how polished it is, but it rarely fully misses — it usually still gives me something I can work with. It saves time even when it is not perfect.”

That is a perfect representation of where we are with presentation AI, and why expert designers are still needed. For internal presentations, first drafts, editing, and image sourcing, AI is really helpful. But, when it comes to client-facing work, critical investor presentations, and anything that needs a narrative that is meant to persuade, AI is a starting point at best. 

The tools, however, are improving, and the “skills gap” will continue to narrow. But for now, the gap in strategic thinking, narrative judgment, and empathy is wide, and those are the things that ensure a presentation lands.