Why AI Can’t Build a Great Slide Deck for You

Let’s imagine someone asks their preferred generative AI tool to “create a professional slide deck” on a specific topic. In seconds, it spits out ten slides, complete with headings, bulleted lists, and maybe even a stock photo of two people high-fiving in an office.

Technically, that is a slide deck.

But it’s not your slide deck.

The AI tool doesn’t understand your goals. It doesn’t know what matters to your audience. It doesn’t know the message you need to communicate or what’s at stake if the message isn’t framed appropriately. 

To be clear, AI can be a useful partner in the slide deck creation process. I use it. But AI shouldn’t be a substitute for your judgment or the insights you bring to your message. 

So before we get swept away by the promise of creating a slide deck with one click, it’s worth understanding what a strong deck requires and why AI can’t do all of it for you.

AI knows what’s common. Not what’s effective.

Ask an AI tool for slide advice and you’ll get familiar tips: keep it simple, use visuals, avoid too much text. These suggestions aren’t wrong, but they reflect conventional wisdom, not evidence-based best practice.*

What’s missing are insights from cognitive psychology, visual design, and rhetorical theory. You also miss the kind of nuance that comes from real experience. That includes experimenting with different approaches, learning from feedback, and seeing firsthand what resonates with your audience.

AI doesn’t know your purpose or your audience.

Every great deck is designed to do something specific. Maybe you’re explaining a complex strategy. Or gaining buy-in for a bold recommendation. Or helping your team make a tough decision.

That purpose should shape every decision you make when preparing your slide deck.

The same is true for your audience. You know what they care about. You understand their blind spots and feelings on the topic. You know what context they’re missing and what politics might be in play.

AI doesn’t know any of that unless you do first.

AI won’t structure your message effectively.

AI tends to fall back on surface-level patterns. Ask it to structure a deck and you’ll usually get something like problem-solution, past-present-future, or intro-body-conclusion. These formats are common, but they aren’t always right for your message.

That’s because most AI tools are built to continue a pattern. If you give them a topic, they’ll pull from the kinds of outlines they’ve seen used most often. They don’t ask what your audience needs to hear first, what questions they’re likely to have, or where your strongest point belongs.

And once the structure is in place, the AI doesn’t take a step back to ask whether your story holds together. It doesn’t rearrange slides or rethink the flow. That kind of thinking still requires a human perspective.

AI doesn’t get information density.

Some slides need just a few words and a single visual. Others need more in-depth explanation to support complex ideas. The right density depends on the purpose of the deck and how your audience will engage with it.

Most AI tools oversimplify and often stop short of adding the depth your audience may need. They don’t have the judgment to know when to provide more details for a careful reader or when to scale back for a live presentation.

AI won’t give you your message.

AI tools often produce generic, surface-level points instead of specific, concrete points you want to convey. 

Headlines are especially challenging. Writing a strong one requires a clear understanding of your content, your audience, and your goal. AI might suggest a few options, but it can’t reliably identify which one communicates your message most effectively or why.

The same issue comes up with visuals. While the tools are improving, they still struggle to choose images or diagrams that reinforce your message, especially when the goal is to explain something complex rather than just decorate a slide.

AI layout tools are helpful—for simple slides.

If you’re working with low-density content, large text, and a simple layout, AI can be a useful assistant. But when a slide includes multiple points, detailed text, or a mix of visuals and data, layout decisions are much more difficult.

AI tools don’t understand how to organize that kind of complexity. They can’t guide the viewer’s eye through a dense slide or group related ideas in a way that makes them easier to process. They optimize for beauty, not clarity.

AI can polish, but only if you know what good looks like.

One of the most useful ways to apply AI is for fine-tuning your writing. It can clean up grammar, suggest clearer phrasing, and smooth out clunky paragraphs.

But AI can also make weak ideas sound more refined without actually improving them. If you’re not sure what you’re aiming for, it’s easy to accept a polished version that lacks clarity and substance.

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AI is a helpful tool, but only in the hands of someone who knows how to use it wisely.

And when it comes to creating a slide deck that conveys the message you need, you still have  to do the thinking. AI can accelerate your work, but it can’t replace your judgment.

That’s what Build Better Slide Decks is all about: helping you make smarter decisions about what to say, how to say it, and how to show it.

Because the most powerful tool in your communication toolkit is still … you.

*When you ask a generative-AI tool to build a slide deck, what it’s doing is drawing on the large corpus it was trained on and generating something that is statistically typical of what it has seen.

Build Better Slide Decks is available on Amazon. You can learn more at slidedeckbook.com.