AI is terrible at PowerPoint
This is a fact I often forget when I’m under a deadline to prepare meeting agenda slides.
Undoubtedly, I give poor Claude a terrible prompt for something simple, and the result fails miserably or “cannot be saved on your desktop” for unknown settings reasons.
My colleagues have lamented similar situations from their desks, and so has my husband at the dinner table.
It turns out this is due to LLMs being trained on immense amounts of HTML and almost zero XML (which is a PowerPoint file).
I’m not a fan of PowerPoint to begin with, but, as Mike Taylor writing for Every Inc. says with great pith, “Data doesn’t drive decisions, narrative does, and love it or hate it, a slide deck presented on a glowing screen is the closest thing we have to our ancestors gathering around a campfire to tell stories.”
Most of the PowerPoints I make are for internal meetings — to tell a story and facilitate decisions. In truth, I usually use Canva slides because I’m quicker there. (Side note, Claude, bless them (it?), is even worse in Canva than PowerPoint.)
The other PowerPoints I work on are for prospects to download from our website, or for my colleagues to use when presenting our technology to their leads.
I find myself peeved but determined, here:
- .pptx is not going anywhere for the foreseeable
- My workflows are changing as I incorporate AI into everything I do
- I need to tell stories and facilitate decisions. Most people don’t care how I do that as long as I do.
The most effortless way forward seems to be the following: I’ll use HTML presentations for internal meetings and, I’ll trial a pre-built Claude skill for the places where .pptx can’t be avoided (yet).
Nityesh Agarwal I’m gonna give your “hands-on-deck” skill a red hot go.
I’m going in with realistic expectations, aware that I’ll probably spend twice as much time cleaning up (by hand…by pixel?) whatever I’ve built with the skill. But, I’d rather test a good solution than keep assuming AI “just can’t do PowerPoint.”
So, two experiments. Neither of which is really that life-changing or mic-droppish. But, for me, an earnest attempt to cyclically adapt how I work so that Claude can do their best work too. Or vice versa.