5 prompts for consulting-grade PowerPoint slides

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Management consultants are renowned for handling high-stakes corporate challenges. They’re also renowned for their slide decks.

Building consulting-grade slides is learnable, and anyone, consultant or not, can benefit from bringing sharper, more impactful slides to a business meeting.

Consultants have a range of frameworks they apply to assess what the slide is claiming, whether the evidence supports it, and whether a reader understands the key takeaways without help.

AI writing tools can give any professional the ability to create slides that would survive management review in a top consultancy. With thinkcell's custom prompts, fully integrated into PowerPoint, you can save your preferred frameworks to develop a consistent style and punch up any presentation with a click.

How to create a custom prompt in thinkcell

Open the thinkcell Assist side panel via the thinkcell tab. thinkcell Assist comes include

1. Click on “Edit Text,” then on the gear button to go prompt configuration.
2. At the bottom, you’ll find your custom prompts. Click the plus button to add a new custom prompt.
3. Enter a name for the button and clearly write or paste in your custom prompt.

Remember, a framework you apply only when you remember it won’t become a habitual way of thinking. Save these custom prompts and they’ll be available alongside thinkcell Assist’s standard Rewrite and Shorten buttons, helping you apply them consistently as part of your presentation workflow.

Here are five custom prompts you can use to punch up your slide decks like a management consultant.

1. Apply the Pyramid Principle

Restructure the selected text using the Pyramid Principle. Lead with the single governing conclusion. Support it with no more than three arguments at the same level of abstraction. Place supporting detail beneath each argument. Keep all original facts and do not add new ones.

The temptation while you’re assembling a slide deck is to present all your facts and findings first, leading your audience along until you end with your big conclusion.

The Pyramid Principle flips this convention, forcing you to present the conclusion first and then go into greater detail with your facts, findings, and knowledge bombs.

The advantage of using the Pyramid Principle is your audience knows the most important message from your presentation right away, and you’re less likely to lose the thread of the story as you get deeper into your presentation.

2. Make it MECE

Restructure to conform to the MECE principle (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive). Ensure that all points are mutually exclusive (no overlaps) and are collectively exhaustive (covering all relevant aspects of the topic). Make sure that topics that belong together are in one point and not in several places or appearing more than once, and make sure that headlines and the content below them fit each other.

This prompt checks your content against the MECE framework: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive.

Consultants use MECE to identify any overlap between points and gaps in an argument’s logic. By ensuring no two points overlap and nothing important is left out, you have an objective way of testing whether a slide’s structure holds up.

Running this prompt cleans up your slide’s logic before anyone else sees it. And that’s the point. Structural problems are easy to fix when you’re building your deck, but much harder to deal with if someone calls you out while you’re presenting.

3. Refine for board-level audience

Make this text fit for the target audience of board-level executives. Change any wording but keep the content and importance of points exactly the same.

When a board-level executive is presented with a slide, they’re usually scanning for a “so-what?” This prompt will put the “so what?” upfront, so the slide respects their time and gets your point across quickly.

Unless you’re presenting detailed slides to a specialist audience, getting straight to the point is a valuable quality of any presentation for any audience.

4. Write positively

Rewrite the following text in a more positive and constructive tone, while preserving its original meaning and intent. Ensure the writing is polished, professional, and suitable for an executive audience. Use clear, concise, and confident language with the quality expected in board-level communications.

Imagine your team has identified several important risks that senior leadership needs to address. You’ll want to engage your audience with the solution, rather than fixate on the problem.

This prompt helps you strike the right tone, turning critical messages into constructive, forward-looking communication that keeps the facts clear.

5. Shorten 50%

Make the text 50% shorter without losing the original meaning

Brevity is the soul of consulting. How else can you get a cost-benefit analysis on a major acquisition into just a few slides?

You could ask to “make it concise” but putting the precise number in the prompt ensures the model doesn’t have any wiggle room. This is a great prompt to run after you’ve run any of the previous custom prompts and are concerned that your texts may have become too long-winded.

Consulting-grade AI prompts for consulting-grade slides

thinkcell Assist already includes several pre-loaded buttons that will punch up your decks in line with professional best practices, including action titles, parallel phrasing, and turning text into bullet points. Adding your own expert custom prompts will give you the complete toolkit for getting your slides from good to great.

As a final note, top consultants use AI but top consultants don’t rely on AI blindly. Remember to check the output and make sure you understand and verify the changes your custom prompts make. It’s on you to work with AI effectively to produce a clear, accurate, impactful deck. That's a deck you can own and a deck you can present with the confidence of a top consultant.