A practical guide to using AI

Artificial intelligence should be regarded as part of a collection of tools for the modern business. In the same way that Office 365 or Google Workspace as a suite of products. At my company, unfold:ai, we are typically adding AI to both, along with other tools.

How to use AI to design a presentation

In this next part of my masterclass, we’re going to focus on a “generative AI” tool, or chatbot – which can take a series of prompts – to help design a presentation for a made-up office cleaning company. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ve come up with a company that uses all-natural cleaning products, has excellent customer service and can also provide general office environment improvements such as plants and fruit deliveries. They are visiting a potential client, Zwortle Partners Ltd.

We are going to use a prompt technique of providing the AI with the role, or personality, that we wish it to use. This will help to guide the AI on the style and type of response we would like. As part of the first prompt, we will also provide some general business guidance. Were this a real company you could include product and company information to help inform the AI.

In this example, we are going to use the generative AI tool from OpenAI called ChatGPT.

Prompt 1: Providing the outline

As an experienced salesperson, I want you to create the outline for a presentation for our company “BeGreen-BeGleam-BeClean”.

About our company: As a company we use all-natural cleaning products and the latest in cleaning tools, such as HEPA compliance cleaning machines. We can enhance any working environment with the provision of plants, which we take care of, staff kitchen cleaning, and the provision of good quality organic supplies, such as coffee (fair trade) and daily fruits and office snacks. We also take away anything that’s not used and recycle it or distribute to the local food bank.

I want you to create an outline personalised presentation to “Zwortle Partners Ltd”, who are a firm of lawyers, explaining why we would be a great new supplier.

Here are some of the results. It created a 9-slide outline for a presentation.

This would already be a useful outline that we could copy and paste into PowerPoint to produce a draft presentation.

A better next step could be to provide some additional information to support the AI’s reasoning, for example, specific information about the benefits to staff productivity when they have a great place to work.

Prompt 2: Adding in some refinement

You could simply add to the initial prompt with a prompt like this:

That’s good, but can you work into the presentation that a clean healthy environment increases staff wellbeing, happiness and productivity. One of the key values of “Zwortle Partners” is “local sustainability” so mention that we use low food mile products whenever possible.

This provided a revision of the outline in our example, working some additional points into slide 3.

Now we are going to ask ChatGPT to write the copy for each slide. We will provide some new persona guidance on how we want the presentation to resonate with our client.

Prompt 3: Producing the content

I want you to use the above outline to write the content for each slide in detail.

Keep each slide succinct and engaging. Assume that the reader is a professional businessperson.

The tone should be warm, resonating, caring and demonstrate how our company would be a good match for the customer’s needs.

Write the presentation, not the presenter’s script.

We now have a good draft presentation which we could copy and paste into PowerPoint.

Once in PowerPoint, we can then apply a template and style guide.

We have successfully used AI to help generate the outline and the presentation, and quickly get to a personalised presentation.

If we had more company information, we could have supplied that to the AI as part of the prompts, generating better quality output. But hopefully you can see how quickly and easily AI can be adopted into everyday tasks in any business.