How to create a PowerPoint presentation with thinkcell AI Suite

A serious presentation workflow isn’t just writing “build me a slide” in the AI chat. In this article, we’ll walk you through how you can use thinkcell AI Suite in an iterative process to efficiently move from your first idea to a polished presentation ready for the boardroom.

Before you start: Define your presentation's purpose

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) applies as much to AI-generated presentations as anything else. AI can help you find data and organize your thoughts, but you should already know why you’re building the presentation, who it’s for, and what your desired outcome is.

Take the time, either on your own or with the help of thinkcell’s integrated AI chat, to think about the slide you want to build. This will help you to clarify open questions for yourself. You don’t need to outline every single slide immediately, but you might discover that you’re missing key information in your brief that would help you point the AI in the right direction.

Write your first prompt for your AI PowerPoint presentation

The concept of prompt engineering flared up around 2023 and quickly flared down again as AI models improved, meaning that today, AI can interpret normal, human-written requests much more effectively.

As a result, you don’t need to write a six-page essay to get started. Just describe the slide or presentation you’d like thinkcell to build. There’s no rigid structure you need to follow for your first prompt, but here are a few things you might want to include to give thinkcell’s AI useful context:

• Attach a relevant file, like a PDF or Excel workbook, if there is data or background information you would like to form part of your presentation.
• Specify the target audience for your presentation, as internal knowledge sharing and client-facing pitches have very different requirements.
• Name any particular websites you would like to look up, or simply describe the topic and ask thinkcell to conduct some web research.
• Reference any thinkcell Library templates you would like to use when building your slide layouts.
• State how many slides you would like to build, so that thinkcell can prepare a narrative outline of the desired length.

Before executing, thinkcell’s AI is designed to check if it has everything it needs. You might be asked to clarify key points or fill important gaps where information is missing.

Shape your presentation’s storyboard

Once you’ve provided the context, thinkcell will put together a storyboard, assuming you’ve asked for more than one slide. If you only want to build one slide, you’ll go straight to approving the outline.

For the storyboard, thinkcell generates a text-rich slide with a clear, slide-by-slide breakdown of your presentation’s narrative. The storyboard includes the specific purpose of each slide and a short content summary, helping you understand the key points of your presentation and how the story flows from one slide to the next.

The storyboard is based on the context you’ve given, but this is also your opportunity to inject your own ideas and specifications. Maybe you want to open up slide 1 with a data visualization. Maybe you want to add a slide that includes more details from your own organization’s strategy to complement what the AI found in its web search.

Take the time here to enhance the storyboard with the details that matter to you. Your input will ultimately be what helps your presentation stand out from the presentation someone at the next desk could have built.

Approve the slide outlines

The next step after storyboarding is approving a detailed content outline for every slide. Here you can go one step deeper than in the storyboard, with each slide outline including the following:

• Category: Captures the main communicative purpose of the slide, such as “action” or “evidence.”
• Narrative note: Describes the role of the slide in the presentation’s story arc.
• Main content: Gives a detailed breakdown of the on-slide content, which points are to be covered and which arguments are to be made.
• Visualization: Describes the slide layout, including details of any thinkcell charts to be included.
• Sources: Lists the sources of data or information to be referenced in slide footnotes.

While it’s tempting to simply ask thinkcell to build the slides, you’ll see the best results if you review the outline and make changes. In the example above, you might want to add your own interpretation of hiring options based on your expert assessment or your team's internal strategy, rather than go with the AI’s best assumptions.

As with the storyboard, adding your expertise to the outline will help guide thinkcell AI Suite in building a presentation that better matches what you want to communicate.

Verify facts and data in your AI-generated presentation

Business slides that make fact-based claims will often include data. thinkcell’s AI is diligent about indicating which data sources it is using. There will be clear labels when a chart contains dummy data and thinkcell will let you know which aspects of the data might need your closer attention.

You’ve got the sources. You’ve got thinkcell charts with precise values in the datasheets. That’s all you need to do a quick double-check and verify the data you’re showing lines up with what the sources say.

As well as looking at individual charts, thinkcell AI Suite reads the presentation as a whole, and will help you keep your data story consistent from chart to chart and from slide to slide.

Add annotations and make the slide your own

You’ve guided the AI so far and come a long way in a short time. But it’s likely you have specific insights you want to add and recommendations you want to highlight. Certainly, you’ll want to replace any dummy data with real data and annotate your charts to emphasize the key takeaways.

Besides the charts, you can also review texts, action titles and other on-slide elements, and make any adjustments you like. Everything generated by thinkcell’s AI is fully editable, so you can jump in and make fixes yourself, or make edits via the AI chat.

Use AI comments for final fixes

Finally, while you can make edits directly on the slide, you can also work with AI comments. You can go through the presentation, adding thinkcell AI comment boxes to any slide where you see the need for a fix.

thinkcell AI comments let you review the whole presentation without getting slowed down making edits on every slide as you go. Click through the deck, add the comments, and thinkcell’s AI can execute the requested changes.

AI comments are particularly useful for collaborative workflows, as a reviewer can add their thoughts and edit requests. With thinkcell AI Suite, the person fixing the presentation just has to check the comments and ask the AI to make the changes.

Build slides you can own with thinkcell AI Suite

thinkcell AI Suite’s workflow is designed to produce high-quality slides efficiently, while keeping you in control from first prompt to final presentation. thinkcell’s AI respects your vision, ensures transparency of data sources, and combines the speed of AI slide generation with the flexibility to make edits and add refinement for polished outputs you can own.