How to Create Customer-Facing PowerPoint Presentations in Minutes

Here’s the scenario: You’re a sales rep on vacation with your family and the customer you’ve been trying to pitch for months tells you he has a couple of hours this afternoon. You did not bring your work computer, luckily your daughter brought hers, but your company’s cybersecurity policy forbids accessing the company shared drive remotely from a non-company computer. You need a pitch deck with some talking points and you need it fast.

Why Gamma?

There are a number of AI slide generators out there, SlidesAI, Canva, GenPPT and Beautiful.ai to name a few. For this article, I chose to use Gamma because it’s perfect for the scenario outlined above. It’s easy to use and can create a quality, customer facing presentation that’s easy to refine in just minutes. Also, your first three presentations can be generated for free.

It All Starts with the Prompt

Like most AI tools, providing a solid prompt is key to success. Like most AI tools, the more information you provide the AI, the better the output will be. When the content is clear and structured, Gamma performs well. If your prompt is vague, Gamma could misinterpret information and produce slides that require significant editing.

Gamma supports a number of different input formats

• Prompt input – Write a quick prompt on the topic that you want Gamma to produce, including as much information as possible.
• Add notes – If you have type-written notes, you can copy/paste that text into the prompt. Notes, bullet points, an outline, one-sheeter, or spec sheet are all acceptable.
• Imported slides or documents – Gamma supports the upload of PowerPoint and Google Slides, or if you have full relevant Word documents or PDF files, you can use those as well.
• Website URL – Include your company website or media kit URL, and Gamma will reference the content on those pages.
• Multi-modal support – You can upload images and logos, and Gamma also supports video input as well, but the video should be hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or similar platforms.

In any case, you should consider Gamma’s first output attempt as a draft and make sure the slides are presenting the picture you want. Below is the prompt I used for this exercise.

Gamma will first create an outline based on your prompt, which you can edit to refine the message of each slide. Reword sentences, add or delete bullets, etc. Then click Generate, and it will create a complete presentation while you watch.

Full Editing Suite Featuring an AI Agent

Once your presentation has been created, it’s time to make adjustments. Gamma’s editing suite features an AI agent that will make bulk presentation changes for you. A prompt is available for more precise instructions, or you can click on a number of pre-built editing features including:

• Improve writing
• Fix spelling and grammar
• Translate
• Make longer/shorter
• Simplify language
• Be more specific

There is also a standard editing toolbar that allows you to import images and other media, create shapes, diagrams, charts, etc. Below are a few sample slides from the sample output. The color scheme does not match my website (but it looks good), and the copy definitely needs an update, but Gamma took the presentation from my original prompt to about 85 percent complete.

Collaboration, sharing and export options

Gamma has both full screen and presenter presentation modes. However, if you’d like your final output in another format, it allows for a number of export options that allow you to take your presentation into PowerPoint, Google Slides, or whatever tool you’re most comfortable using. If you’re on the free plan, your presentation will include watermarks. You can also share a presentation with others via a link that will allow them to edit your presentation, which is great for team collaboration.

Overall assessment

Gamma is a powerful tool that balances speed and quality output. It greatly reduces the time required to create a professional presentation from scratch. It is not as refined as some of the other presentation platforms on the market, but it’s convenient if you need a quality presentation created fast. Overall, I’d say it’s definitely worth taking it for a test drive.