Build decks with AI like a co-founder: 12 steps

I’ve lost count of how many nights I’ve watched someone (fine, me too) shuffle the same three slides around at 11pm, convinced the story was hiding somewhere between the bullet points. Rewriting a title five times. Nudging a text box two pixels to the left. Doing everything except the actual thinking.

So when I came across this post from a founder who runs an AI startup, it hit a nerve. The author describes hitting that exact wall: rewriting the same slides at 1am, sure the story just wasn’t there yet. Then they stopped treating AI like a toy and started treating it like a co-founder for decks. What follows is close to the exact workflow their team now runs on every deck they ship, internal or investor facing. I think it’s one of the cleanest process breakdowns I’ve seen on this topic.

The real problem isn’t the slides

The original poster makes a point I keep coming back to. They’d built more decks than they could count: board decks, investor decks, all-hands decks. And most of that time went into formatting, not thinking. That’s the trap. You feel busy because you’re moving things around, but the story never gets any sharper.

The founders getting this right now, according to this creator, aren’t writing slides line by line anymore. They’re directing an AI that already knows the structure that works. That’s a mindset shift before it’s a tooling shift, and it’s why the steps below start with definition and research rather than with opening PowerPoint.

The 12-step workflow, start to finish

Every step here comes straight from the post’s author. I’ve added a short note on why each one matters so you can follow the logic instead of just copying a checklist.

1. Define the presentation first. Topic, audience, goal, tone, length, style. Skip this and the AI guesses, and it guesses generic. Five minutes here saves an hour of rewrites later.
2. Ask AI to research before you write a single word. Key facts, stats, and case studies come first. You want raw material on the table before you decide what the story is.
3. Build the story around hook, context, evidence, action. Not just slides stacked in a row. This four-part arc gives the deck a shape people can follow even without you narrating it.
4. Generate a full outline before touching a single slide. An outline is cheap to change. A half-designed deck is expensive to change. Fix the order while it’s still plain text.
5. Use Copilot or Gemini inside the tools you already have. The expert points out that these already live inside PowerPoint and Google Slides. No new tool to learn, no exporting and reformatting.
6. Turn old docs, reports, and notes into a deck. Instead of starting from a blank page, feed the AI what you already wrote. The blank title slide was never the problem. The empty input was.
7. Kill generic titles like “Market Analysis.” Write the actual takeaway instead. If someone reads only your slide titles, they should still get the whole argument.
8. Cut every slide down to one headline and three supporting points. Nothing more. This is a hard constraint, and hard constraints are what make AI output usable instead of bloated.
9. Let AI suggest the visual, chart, or diagram. Not just the words on the slide. Ask “what’s the best way to show this?” and you’ll often get a better idea than the bullet list you had in mind.
10. Ask AI to draft your speaker notes. The slide stays clean, and the talking points live off screen. That’s how you stop reading your deck out loud to the room.
11. Have it summarise the whole deck back to you. And flag which claims need stronger evidence. If the summary sounds weak, the deck is weak. This is your built-in editor.
12. Never let it invent a stat, quote, or source. Verify everything before it goes live. This is the one step the author frames as non-negotiable, and I fully agree. One fabricated number in front of investors undoes the other eleven steps.

The deck stops being the bottleneck. The story gets to be the whole point again, which is what it was always meant to be.

How I’d run this tomorrow

A few practical notes from my side, built on the framework this industry pro laid out.

• Write the definition as a prompt you reuse. Something like: “You’re helping me build a 10-slide investor deck for seed-stage fintech VCs. Goal: get a second meeting. Tone: confident, not hype. Style: one headline, three points per slide.” Save it. Paste it every time.
• Do steps 1 to 4 in a chat window, not in your slide tool. Outline and story work is text work. Only move into Copilot or Gemini inside Slides once the outline is locked.
• Treat step 11 as a review meeting. Paste the finished outline back in and ask “summarise this deck in five sentences and list every claim that needs a source.” Read the answer the way a sceptical board member would.
• Keep a verification list. Every stat the AI touches goes on it. Nothing leaves the list until you’ve seen the original source with your own eyes.

Why this matters beyond pitch decks

What I like most about this workflow is that nothing in it is specific to investors. Board updates, all-hands, a sales deck, a conference talk. Same twelve steps. The creator’s team uses it for internal decks too, and that’s the tell that it’s a real process rather than a one-off trick.

It also fits a broader shift I keep seeing: the people getting the most out of AI aren’t asking it to “make a deck.” They’re giving it structure, constraints, and source material, then letting it do the heavy lifting inside the tools they already pay for. Direction over generation.

The post’s author closed with a question worth sitting with: what’s actually slowing your decks down right now, the writing or the design? If you’re honest, the answer tells you which of the twelve steps you’ve been skipping.

Go read the full LinkedIn post for the complete breakdown, and send it to a founder who’s rebuilding the same slide for the third time tonight!