Presenting with AI (2): Slides — One Deck or Two?

Not long ago I helped a company revise its customer presentations. The slides had grown for ten years. Every year someone had added a line, a logo, a product, a chart. Nobody had taken anything away, because nobody had been given the time to look at the deck as a whole and ask what it was for. Now the company has AI tools, and the first idea was to let them loose on exactly these slides: make it shorter, make it prettier, make it on brand. I understand the wish. But the groundwork, two steps back from the tools, had never been done. In many organisations, I suspect, that is where presentations are right now.

If you run a company, this is your problem first. The deck your sales people send to a customer and the deck they present in the room are often the same file. A file that must be understood without a voice has too much text for a room. A file built for the room says too little in an inbox. Since Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT arrived, that one file gets produced faster, in more variants, by more people. Whether your company has one deck or two, and who is responsible for how its slides look, is decided at the top, or by nobody.

(The second of three editions on presenting with AI. Part one was the story: two goals per slide, a through-line in fifteen words, titles that are sentences. This part is the slides. The companion deck, the case for investing in human skills and AI together, made for a management board, gets its design here.)

One deck or two?

What I see most often: a team builds one deck for two jobs: to be sent, and to be presented. A deck that has to work without anyone speaking needs the whole argument on the slide, usually as text. In the room, that same deck competes with the speaker. Richard Mayer, the UC Santa Barbara learning psychologist from the last edition, found in sixteen out of sixteen comparisons that showing the spoken words as text on screen makes people understand less. The audience reads, or it listens. Not both.

Everyone knows the fix: a second, thinner deck for the room. Almost nobody makes it. It costs time, and managers rarely like to see time spent on slides twice. So presenters take the sending deck into the meeting and do not dare to change it. That, more than fonts or colours, is why company decks look alike to me. Not because they share a template, but because nobody adapts them to the room they are in.

This is where the tools earn their licence. The second deck no longer costs an afternoon. Take the sending deck and ask the tool: keep every title, move everything below the title into the speaker notes, leave one number or one picture per slide. Then read the result as carefully as a colleague's draft. One rule follows: the full deck goes out after the meeting, not before. People who have already read the argument do not need to hear it.

Who owns the slides in your company?

The second deck only works if there is a first one worth keeping. I remember my years at IBM: there were so many templates, from business divisions, units and countries, that you never quite knew which one to build on. A small company has the opposite problem. No template at all, and everyone in sales builds their own deck. No shared pool of slides that have been tested on customers. Nobody feels responsible. Sales says marketing owns it; marketing needs sales to learn what works in front of a customer. Meanwhile the slides grow, like the ten-year deck at the start.

My position for companies is simple: the company decides what corporate design it expects. That decision belongs to the top, and the AI tools now enforce it, if it exists. Copilot in PowerPoint has Brand Kits with a setting called "Strict brand adherence": Copilot then uses only your approved template layouts, and people who build presentations from the template cannot override it. Only the Brand Kit owner or a brand manager can. Claude Design, still in beta on this point, applies an organisation-wide design system to every new deck. If nobody decided on the design, the tools lock in nothing, and every deck comes out a little different, only faster.

Before anyone buys licences: one owner for the shared slide pool, one meeting a quarter where sales and marketing look together at what customers responded to, and one design decision from the top. Size matters. A thirty-person company probably needs a shared folder, not a brand manager. A company the size of IBM needs the brand manager, and the courage to retire templates.

If you sign budgets and every deck in your company has started to look the same, one thing is enough. Forward this edition to whoever runs people development for you, with one line: "I want us to work on this over months, not in an event. Find me something like it." What to look for: a programme that starts with the leadership team, runs over months rather than days, and treats human skills and AI as one subject. If you run people development and just received that line, or still have budget for this year: that is the work I do, since 2010 with organisations from start-ups to adidas and Fraunhofer (references). Thirty minutes, and you'll leave with a clear next step whether or not you work with me: book a call.

What the tools did to my deck

The companion deck from the last edition got its design this week. I used Claude Design with the design system I had built from my website and earlier presentations: colours, fonts, layouts, a few rules. My first prompt: take the next step and improve the deck visually, using the Digital Leader Program template. The second: "I want to emotionalize every slide with an image that supports the message." The third, when the first pictures came back: don't they all look a bit old? The images came from Adobe Express, with one of Google's Gemini image models behind it, the one Google nicknamed Nano Banana. Below, two of the results: the cover with the through-line, and the first slide, where one number carries the argument.

Two things I noticed. First, the tool did the easy step well because the hard step was done: the titles were sentences, each slide had one fact and one feeling, the ending was written. Give the same tools a ten-year sales deck and they make it prettier, not better. Second, the pictures. The first set looked like stock photos from 2012; the second looks like this year. Every photo carries the label "AI-generated image", and the people in them do not exist.

A note on the tools, as of October 2026. Copilot builds a deck from a prompt, a Word file or a PDF, and Microsoft states that prompts and responses are not used to train its models. Gemini in Google Slides generates and edits images and whole slides, from the Business Standard plan upwards. ChatGPT's images now carry a digital label and an invisible watermark that say where they came from. Claude has an add-in for PowerPoint that reads your slide master, and a warning in its own documentation: not recommended for final client deliverables without human review. Gamma and Canva build decks from text; if your data has to stay in Europe, ask before buying: Canva lets you choose EU residency on its enterprise plan, Gamma processes data in the US. Whichever you choose, the finding from the creativity edition applies to slides too: ideas from the same tool grow more alike. Used well, it is a mirror for convention.

Pictures, and the law

My second prompt asked for an image on every slide. Richard Mayer's research on what to leave out says no. A 2025 meta-analysis of 181 studies from his own research programme, by Jennifer Cromley and Runzhi Chen at the University of Illinois, found that removing decorative detail had the largest effect of all his design rules. A picture that does not carry the message takes attention from the one that does. So the second half of my prompt was the important half: an image that supports the message, or no image.

Then the law, and this is not legal advice. Since 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act requires anyone using AI to label deepfakes: AI images that make real people, places or events appear authentic. A clearly drawn illustration is not a deepfake. A photo-real colleague who never existed can be one: the EU Commission's guidance from July says it is enough that the person could exist. So every photo in my deck carries a label. Copyright runs the other way. The US Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that prompts alone do not give enough human control for protection, and German law requires a personal intellectual creation. A pure AI image has no copyright owner, so you cannot stop a competitor from reusing it on copyright grounds. And in Germany, once the accounts are company accounts with logs, the works council is probably at the table: a Hamburg labour court ruled in January 2024 that private ChatGPT accounts needed no co-determination, and several employment law firms read that as: company accounts may. None of this stops you using AI pictures. It asks for three habits: label them, do not build your brand on them, and bring the works council in before the roll-out, not after.

Your turn

If you sign budgets. Ask for the two decks: the one that gets sent, and the one that gets presented. If they are the same file, the next presentation to you will probably be read aloud. Then send this edition to whoever runs people development, with the line from the middle of this page.

If you lead a team. Take the next deck your team sends to a customer. Keep the titles, move the rest into the notes, present that version. Send the full one afterwards.

If you develop people. Before buying design licences for everyone, find out who owns the slide pool in sales. Then put sales and marketing in one room for an afternoon with the ten most-used slides. If you need the mandate, forward this upward; the opening is written for the person who signs.

Your 1% this week, whoever you are. Open the deck you use most, read only the titles, and delete one slide nobody has questioned in years.

Next time: the stage. Face, hands, voice, and what AI feedback tools can and cannot hear. Until then: in your company, is the deck that gets sent the same deck that gets presented? Tell me in the comments. I read every reply.

If you want to bring these themes into your organisation, you can also explore the Leadership Essentials workshop series for teams.