Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
308: From 2 Days to 20 Minutes: My AI Presentation Workflow That Actually Works
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I share how I cut presentation prep time from two days to just twenty minutes by leveraging AI tools and workflows. What used to feel overwhelming and time-consuming has become streamlined, consistent, and—dare I say—fun.
We explore the common mistakes most people make when creating presentations, why AI is a game-changer, and the exact five-step process I use to create polished, professional decks without losing days of productivity
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The Problem with Presentations
- Why most people waste hours designing slides manually
- How perfectionism and starting from scratch slows everything down
- The pitfalls of relying only on minimal AI features in PowerPoint or Google Slides
The Two Biggest Mistakes with AI
- Not using AI at all, sticking to manual work
- Not giving AI enough content and context (remember—AI is not psychic!)
My Five-Step Presentation Workflow
- Feed AI everything you have: old decks, transcripts, blogs, emails, or even a quick brain dump
- Build and refine the outline: let AI create the structure, then adjust for audience and flow
- Format in Markdown: create a clean hierarchy for importing into tools
- Import to Gamma.app: edit slides, swap visuals, and customize to your style
- Export to PowerPoint or Google Slides: finalize, add extras, and present offline with confidence
Pro Tips for Saving Time
- Use dictation to brain-dump ideas into ChatGPT or Claude on the go
- Always verify AI-sourced information (tools like Perplexity can help)
- Edit primarily in Gamma.app before exporting for the smoothest workflow
- Repurpose your presentations into worksheets, handouts, or future content
Key Takeaways for Marketers
- AI can turn presentation prep from days into minutes
- Providing enough context ensures authentic, tailored slides
- Consistency across decks comes naturally when building on your own existing content
- Efficiency doesn’t mean sacrificing quality—you’ll gain both
Whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or professional who’s tired of wasting days on slide decks, this episode shows how to reclaim your time and still deliver presentations that wow.
Are you ready to stop spending days on presentations and start letting AI do the heavy lifting? Tune in and learn how to transform your workflow today.
Looking to leverage AI? Want better results? Want to think about what you want to leverage?
Check and see how I am using it for FREE on YouTube.
From "Holy cow, it can do that?" to "Wait, how does this work again?" – I've got all your AI curiosities covered. It's the perfect after-podcast snack for your tech-hungry brain.
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Hi, I'm Kendra Korman. If you're a coach, consultant or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science and that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business, with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Korman, and today we're going to talk about how I save hours, hours, on presentations. So presentations used to take me on average, I'd say, about two days. Right, I know my content pretty well. I knew what needed to be in there. It was just really about putting it in there, laying it out, thinking about the flow and making sure that all the colors and the shapes and everything and the images were perfect Takes me closer to 20 minutes on average right now. Isn't that insane, like I just think it's just totally insane. So today I'm actually presenting this topic at Troy Inforum. It's an Inforum affinity group, so if you want information about the Troy affinity group, if you're a local to Metro Detroit or Grand Rapids, inforum is a fantastic organization and has a lot of information, so I'll have their website there.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about the problem most people face. They're still creating presentations the long way, right. They're taking hours out of their day to try and play around with the layout in PowerPoint or Google Slides or whatever they happen to be using, and they're spending days and taking hours out of days instead of just minutes, right, and so looking to get more efficient and effective. Ai can help with that, because you really want to not have to start from scratch every time you have to create a presentation. Now, don't get me wrong. There were presentations that I did when I was the Jeep advertising manager where I was inserting charts from Excel, things like that. This isn't that kind of presentation. This is more informative presentations or educational presentations, things where you're not just updating metrics every month or every week, whatever that happens to be. Those just keep using your old, same old template, but you're not spending two days on those either. Let's be realistic, right? So these are those longer, more creative presentations that I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about the two biggest mistakes I see. Mistake number one is not using AI at all. That's a problem. They're still manually creating every slide, maybe using a little bit of AI in PowerPoint Designer, but that's about all. They're reinventing the wheel every single time they have to create a presentation wheel every single time they have to create a presentation, and it's costing them dates, not minutes.
Speaker 1:Now, mistake number two is not giving AI enough content. I am harping on that left and right right now, and that is because too many people are giving AI not enough content, not enough context, not enough information. Ai is not psychic. Okay, let me repeat that again. Ai is not psychic. It will make stuff up, it will hallucinate and fill in blanks. That may or may not be true, because you didn't give it enough information. It tries to make you happy. That's its goal. It really wants you to be happy, and so it fills in that information, even if you didn't give it to it partially, because you didn't give it to it.
Speaker 1:So, again, I might be talking about something related to AI and small business, and then it starts throwing in like big data and all this other stuff, and I'm like no, I'm talking about small businesses and really trying to leverage saving time, not necessarily big data, right, and without giving it that direction, it's going to throw it into the mix. So you want to make sure that you're giving AI enough content and that you're using it to save you time on your presentations. So let's talk about my five-step presentation workflow that I use for every presentation. It allows me to have custom built presentations for every single one that I do without taking a ton of time. So, step one feed AI everything you have. Do you have old presentations? Do you have a book, like I have my book Mastering AI and Communications, previous presentations, transcripts. Do you have podcast episodes and transcripts of that where you're talking about those topics? Existing slides from related presentations? Do you have any client training transcripts? Do you have any emails you've written about it, flyers, downloadables, one-pagers, anything about the topic that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Give it to AI so that it has a very strong knowledge base. Now, if you don't have any of that, that's okay. Give it a brain dump of information. Pro tip if you don't like to type at all and it's a huge brain dump then get out your phone and dictate it to ChatGPT. Okay, just start chatting with it and give it a brain dump and tell it what you want.
Speaker 1:Step two is to get your outline and give it feedback on your outline. So I'll usually give it the description, the title and the description of the talk or the presentation that I'm doing. It already has all of the information that I gave it and then I'll say please build the outline for this 30 minute presentation or 45 minute presentation or hour presentation or two hour workshop, whatever it happens to be, and it will outline the presentation based on that content and the direction that I gave it. Now I always review because sometimes it's missing a key point or it's still adding in something that I'm like that's not right for this audience. And again, all that like random thoughts that it'll add in to try and make your presentation bigger and better than it's ever needed to be. I'll take a lot of that out. So I'll add some stuff in, take some stuff out, give it feedback based on that or say this doesn't fit the style of presentation I'm doing. Please relay this out.
Speaker 1:Then, once I've done that, I ask it to create a little bit more detail outline. And step three is to have it format that outline in Markdown format. So Markdown is like a hierarchy I almost call it like the H1, h2, h3 headlines and bullet points that computers can read so that they understand the hierarchy of data and information. When it comes to Markdown, I actually will ask ChatGBT to format this outline with the content, with the slide content in a Markdown format so that I can paste it into gammaapp. And step four is to import that into gammaapp and I copy and paste it. I have a link to gammaapp down in the show notes and the video description here, so I import the markdown, I copy and paste it to include it so that that way it's there.
Speaker 1:Gamma does have a like one sentence prompt that you can do and it will build a presentation off of that. I don't recommend that. It's fun to try out, so please feel free, try it out. Ask it to do a presentation on something and you'll be just blown away with how amazing it is. But you know more than any AI system about what you're going to talk about. That's why people are hiring you to do this presentation or invited you to do this presentation, and so I feel like the one line just never gets you to really where you need to be, and it takes a lot of editing to get it to where you want it to be, and I sort of feel it's a little generic, right? A lot of people complain about oh, ai doesn't sound like me, or people are using AI and it doesn't. It's not differentiated and it's all the sameness and things like that. Well, that's from people using like the one line prompt in gammaapp. So again, I would insert the outline so that it knows what to do. Just a vocabulary check.
Speaker 1:Gammaapp calls slides cards. Okay, so if you'd have like 10 slides, it'll be 10 cards, that type of thing. But then I go ahead and I edit everything in Gammaapp so it'll keep my content exactly the same and add images and shapes and a bunch of direction. I can have it like expand on the bullet points or be concise about the bullet points, but whatever method I want to to see what it's doing. You can change out the photos for real photos instead of the AI generated photos. You can change the shapes and the layouts of the slides and make them more visual or less wordy. All of those things and I do almost all of that in gammaapp. I do recommend that you strongly, I strongly, strongly, strongly suggest that you do most of your editing in gammaapp, just simply because once you move it to PowerPoint or Google Slides, it's a little bit harder because there really isn't a slide template, for lack of a better term. It becomes all individual text boxes and image boxes and it just makes it a lot more difficult to edit. So I strongly recommend editing in Gammaapp to make sure that you're happy.
Speaker 1:Step five, which is the final step, is to export it to PowerPoint. That way I have it and I don't need to be beholden to the internet right and the Wi-Fi connection to present. On Gammaapp I have a backup. I usually do a PDF version too. I'll add links in there. Sometimes I'll add another slide that I can't add in gamma. So, for instance, when I do a lot of presentations on AI and intro to presentations on AI, I have Talkadot where people can evaluate my presentation and give me feedback, and then let me know if they have a place that they would like me to speak or anybody that they would like me to speak to, or even if they want to join my email list, right? So I add that slide in in PowerPoint, not inside Gamma. So, again, I do a little bit more editing, but it was 99% of the way complete when I let, when I exported out of Gamma.
Speaker 1:Now I would say the next thing I get is well, I don't have all that content, I'm just going to spend the two days because it'll be easier for me, right? I don't have maybe. I don't have a book, maybe I don't have a white paper, maybe I don't have a freebie, maybe I don't have any real hardcore information. Well, there is a minimum viable content level needed for AI and it still will be faster, more effective and more efficient than doing it yourself from scratch. I would say 99.9% of the time.
Speaker 1:So I want you to think about doing a brain dump. Okay, what are all your thoughts on the topic? Doing a brain dump? Okay, what are all your thoughts on the topic? What are some of the stories that you want to include? Maybe you have an outline and you want to start with that? Ask the AI system. What do you need from me to do this? Well, to do it with what I think and the information that I like. When you do that, I think you'll get a much better result. Now, when you want to save time again, I'm going to push on the dictation to chat, gpt or Claude.
Speaker 1:Get the app for whatever system you're using and dictate to it. Say you know, give it its prompt. You're a presentation creator for an executive at a marketing agency. She's giving a presentation on AI. Before you begin anything, wait until I've given you all of the information related to her thoughts and feelings on this and the description. Just acknowledge receipt of each piece and it will go ahead and it'll acknowledge the different pieces that you give it. And then you say, okay, now I'm ready to work on the outline. Can you help with that?
Speaker 1:Cool thing about that is, if you're logged in, whatever you dictated in the app will be available on your desktop. Dictated in the app will be available on your desktop. So if you are a desktop fan like I am, because I have my nice big two monitors and my nice microphone and everything else, you can go ahead and from the car ride into the office you've dictated your whole thing. You can go into ChatGP to your Clouds web version, copy and paste whatever it is that you found and finish the prompts there and continue the conversation and then put it into Gammaapp and finish your presentation. Super easy, right? It's a lot easier than you think. The technology is not super hard to learn. You do need to play around with it a little bit, I think, when you're learning Gammaapp.
Speaker 1:But outside of that, I think you're pretty lucky with that and as people as humans, I would say, because I think there's very few humans that type a lot faster than they think and can talk. I mean, we can talk. I can talk a ton of words per minute. Right, I can definitely type fairly quickly thanks to my high school guidance counselor who forced me into typing class and he said you will not regret it later on. I hated every minute of that class and I do not regret it later on. I still can type very fast and I'm not a hunter and pecker and I understand where all the keys are. I can still type very fast. I can talk a lot faster than that. Right, I can share my ideas and my thoughts and my strain of consciousness a lot better than typing. Typing takes thought and sometimes I think faster than I type and I will miss things.
Speaker 1:So again, the dictation piece, I think, is a huge game changer for people. It can be a really big impact, have a really big impact on what you're doing and how you're doing it. So how do you structure the content when you're doing the data dump for AI, because you say you don't have these other resources? The data dump for AI because you say you don't have these other resources. So I tell them who their audience is. What's the goal of the presentation?
Speaker 1:And again, here are my thoughts on the idea and what I'd like to talk about, and it's going to organize it all for you in a nice, easy-to-use way. If you want it to help you find a case study or things like that, you can ask it to do that and give you sources. Perplexity is really much better for that, in my opinion, than anything else, but ChatGBT has gotten a lot better again as it's continued to evolve with its models and will give you sources that you can click on and verify, because the first rule of AI is verify everything right. 20 minutes versus two days I mean it just sounds like a no-brainer and for some people they're going to take more than 20 minutes. I get that because you're going to be changing out images and you want a little bit more perfection in your presentations than maybe others do, but there's no reason that you should lose a ton of time on those presentations. It helps give you consistency across your presentations with your consistent thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and you can leverage all your existing content, all the thoughts and experiences that you've had. It will build off of what you give it and there's just so much power there, in my opinion, that it's building off of what you have already shared. So I want you to try this in your next presentation.
Speaker 1:So again, step one is feed AI everything you have. Step two is to get your outline and give it feedback, refine that outline. Step three is have it format it in markdown format. Step four is import it into gammaapp and edit it to 99.9% of the way and then finally export it to PowerPoint is step five, or Google Slides, if that's your jam, and so that that way you don't have to do quite as much. Don't make the mistake of not using AI at all. It'll save you a ton of time with your presentations and it can even create worksheets to go with your presentation later on. As you continue to do that, especially if you give it the brain dump and all the resources, again, make sure you're giving it enough information to work with.
Speaker 1:So this is pretty much what I'm presenting today at Inforum's Troy Affinity Group teaching, showing everybody behind the scenes on how I actually create my presentations and my presentation workflow. So it should be fun. I haven't decided what. Well, by now I will have decided, but as I'm preparing the presentation and recording this in advance, I haven't decided what my one-line sample presentation in Gamma is going to be, but I'm going to have to come up with something exciting and interesting for sure. So stop spending days on your presentations when AI can save you time and cut it down to like 20 minutes and your content's already there. Let AI help organize it and get it to a point where you can present it. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I hope you learned something today. If you did, it would really help me out. If you would rate and subscribe wherever you're listening and watching. Have a great rest of your day.
