AI, ChatGPT, and the Presentation Workflow Nobody's Optimised Yet
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
Introduction: Still Building Slides Like It's 2004?
Over a billion people use PowerPoint. Thirty million presentations are given every day. And a Harvard study found that people in corporate environments spend more than 25% of their working time on presentations — preparing them, attending them, following up on them.
That's roughly 10 hours a week. And for most people, a significant chunk of that is wasted. Robin Dohmen has spent over a decade helping startups, scale-ups, and corporate teams present better. His message at Present to Succeed is simple: the tools to fix this already exist. Most people just aren't using them.
Start With the Framework
Before any tool, any template, or any slide, Robin's approach begins with a proven three-part structure: Story, Design, Deliver. Get those in the right order and everything else follows. Skip straight to the slides — as most people do — and you're building on sand.
How AI Transforms the Story Stage
This is where ChatGPT earns its place. Robin uses it to brainstorm topics, generate presentation names, structure outlines, write first-draft scripts, and adapt tone of voice for different audiences. The same 20-minute talk can be reshaped for a board of directors or a junior marketing team in minutes, not hours.
The caveat: AI writes generically until it knows you. Feed it your voice, your style, your examples — and it gets significantly better.
A useful benchmark: 120 to 150 words per minute is a comfortable speaking pace. A 20-minute presentation is roughly 2,500 words. That's a lot to write from scratch. It doesn't have to be.
Design: Where AI Gets Genuinely Exciting
Tools like Midjourney and DALL-E can produce striking, realistic visuals that would have taken a professional illustrator days — in minutes. Robin's favourite example: tech CEOs reimagined as Coachella headliners, generated entirely by AI. Mark Zuckerberg as "Lil Zuck." Jeff Bezos as "DJ Bezos." Absurd, yes — but proof of what's possible when you stop searching stock libraries and start prompting instead.
Beyond visuals, Robin highlights a handful of tools worth knowing: Pitch.com for tracking when clients actually open your deck, Tome for AI-generated presentations from a single prompt, and his own platform Pitchy for end-to-end scripting, design, and delivery training.
For fonts and images, the classics still hold: Google Fonts, Flat Icon, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay — all free, all useful.
Delivery: The Part People Skip
The best script and the sharpest slides still fall flat without delivery. Robin keeps it to three essentials: match your visual scale to the room (a big stage needs big, bold slides), adapt your tone to your audience, and — crucially — prepare your Q&A in advance. He generates likely questions with ChatGPT before every session. It's not cheating. It's preparation.
Final Thought: Time Is the Only Asset You Can't Buy More Of
That's Robin's through-line for the whole session. AI won't make you a better presenter on its own. But used well — at the story stage, the design stage, and the delivery stage — it can hand back hours every week that you'd otherwise spend staring at a blank slide. The tools are free or cheap. The only real question is whether you're using them.
Join the Conversation
Which AI tool has made the biggest difference to how you build presentations — and is there one you think is underrated? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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