How to make presentations with AI

What AI is good for here

Officers present all the time: briefings for senior officers, progress reviews, training sessions, meetings with partners. An AI assistant can help you get from a blank screen to a clear structure quickly. It is most useful for:

• Outlining slides. Suggesting a logical order and a heading for each slide.
• Simplifying messages. Cutting long paragraphs into a few short points that an audience can follow.
• Preparing speaker notes. Drafting what you might say for each slide and likely questions from the audience.

You decide the message. AI helps you say it more clearly.

Before you start

Do not paste classified material, unpublished figures or citizens' personal details into a public chatbot. Use only tools your department has approved for official material. See data leakage. If your presentation is based on a confidential document, write your own short summary without sensitive details and work from that.

Step by step

1. Start with the purpose. Tell the tool who the audience is, how long you have and the one thing they should remember. For example: "Ten minutes for the Secretary on progress of the record digitisation project. Main message: on track but needs two more scanners."
2. Ask for an outline. Request a slide-by-slide plan with headings and three or four points each. Keep it short: fewer slides usually work better.
3. Shape it yourself. Reorder, cut and add. Make sure the structure matches what you actually want to say.
4. Simplify the wording. Paste your own text and ask for shorter bullets or plainer language. See the plain language rewrite prompt.
5. Draft speaker notes. Ask for notes for each slide in a natural speaking style. Read them aloud and change anything that does not sound like you.
6. Prepare for questions. Ask: "What are five difficult questions a senior officer might ask about this? What would a good answer cover?" Then prepare the answers from your own facts.

Check every figure

AI can produce numbers that look right but are wrong or made up. It can also misstate a date, a policy or the name of a scheme. See hallucination.

• Take every figure from the original source, not from the AI draft.
• Check that percentages and totals add up.
• Make sure charts show the real data with clear labels.
• Remove any claim you cannot trace to a source you trust.

If a slide says it, you are presenting it as fact. A wrong figure in front of senior officers costs more than the time AI saved.

Images: never present AI pictures as real

Image generation tools can make convincing pictures of people, buildings and events. Follow these rules:

• Never show an AI image as a real photograph of a site, an event, a beneficiary or an official.
• Do not create images of real people. This can mislead and can look like a deepfake.
• Label any illustration made with AI, for example "Illustration created with AI".
• Prefer real photos from your own office, with permission from anyone shown.

Simple icons and diagrams are usually clearer than pictures anyway. See content provenance.

What to check before you present

• Does each slide support your main message?
• Is every figure taken from and checked against the source?
• Are AI illustrations labelled and free of real people?
• Do the speaker notes sound like you?
• Is there anything confidential that should not be on screen?

For help turning points into what to say, see the talking points prompt.