When Will AI Make Our Salesdecks For Us?

Spoiler alert: not now, not so soon, maybe never?

The latest ᴀɪ marvel is the breakthrough with super-ʜᴅ animated/ᴄɢɪ yet real looking video production.

The initial clips are quite the thing to behold.

So the world of ᴀɪ continues to move at pace.

I've come across such products specifically asking you for a prompt to whip up a slidedeck in a flutter of mere seconds.

I've tried them out.

I've found them to be pretty much useless.

No matter how you refine the prompt. Several times, even.

The issues I've had are mainly threefold.

It falls down because of a level of detail required that is unique to you and your audience/prospect it cannot attain. It can never know the nuances, granularity and individuality of what they want, what you want to get across, and where this is unique to your proposition.

It falls down because most, nearly all, presentations are rubbish. If you don't believe this, trawl through Slideshare. And your bot doesn't know which from the millions it's got 'trained' on might be decent. It is not aware of true best-practice. So you get regurgitated nonsense of bulleted text, stock 21st century clipart imagery and embarrassing Excel-wizard-style charts.

It falls down because it is not your voice.

That latter one being most fatal.

After all, can you imagine say, when every prospective vendor uses their preferred ᴀɪbot to produce their deck?

With each and all, no end of iterations can improve things. And such editing ends up taking longer than originally producing yourself would have taken.

So, if you want to keep your career on track, it's too early to adopt such a new automated member into your salesteam.

Having said which, I have had success away from the focused apps. ChatGPT for instance has helped me when I've asked it for content specific to a single slide. On occasion, this has been for text. Succinct prose I struggled to quite nail myself. More often though, asking for short, sharp, snappy text which it failed miserably to provide. Yet its gibberish sparked greater ideas of my own.

Which also brings in the inevitable question of our age; Slidedecks are dead, Discuss...

A fair bit of my time for a while now has rather been spent helping to create a single slide that encapsulates the key issue in place of a full deck.

Typically with levels of progressive disclosure. Sometimes as part of say, three slides max. Deployed for short periods intermittently throughout say a 45min call.

And if auditable, shareable collateral is required, then the old infodocs approach can switch in (not a presentation, but summaries by slidedeck).

Follows these themes today and you'll both save time and make more deals.