Choosing the best AI presentation tool

AI makes it easier than ever to create presentations. However, human judgement is still needed to build effective presentations that enhance decision-making. That’s especially true for high-stakes, data-driven presentations required in consulting, finance, strategy, and other professional roles.

When AI presentation tools are used effectively in organizations, they save time, streamline workflows, and elevate every aspect of the presentation. When the wrong tool is used, they waste time, and you end up with presentations that don’t meet your company’s standards. This article explains how to evaluate the key features and capabilities when choosing an AI presentation tool.

What are AI presentation tools?

AI presentation tools are software applications that help create, edit, and improve presentations. While some AI presentation tools focus on generating presentations from scratch through prompts, others are integrated into PowerPoint and other presentation software to support existing workflows.

Why should organizations use AI presentation tools?

AI presentation tools can save time by building slides, improving content, and automating repetitive tasks. Professionals use AI tools to produce presentations with less manual effort than traditional workflows require.

In larger organizations, business presentations often involve multiple stakeholders, large Excel workbooks and tight deadlines, making it harder to turn analysis into clear communication. AI presentation tools help with these challenges.

The most effective AI presentation tools for business communication support the entire presentation workflow, helping you move from the underlying data to a boardroom-ready presentation.

Key features of AI presentation tools

Considering the wide range of AI presentation tools serving different purposes, here are some must-have capabilities to look for.

Using AI presentation tools to analyze data

Most slides don’t start in PowerPoint. For quantitative slides, the process often begins with digging through the underlying data in Excel and discovering the key insights that will eventually make it into your presentation.

The best AI presentation tools include Excel features that help you with this critical first step. When integrated into Excel as well as PowerPoint, AI tools can analyze datasets, create new tables, and supplement your data with additional verified information.

How think-cell Assist helps: You’ve been waiting all week for key data to finish the monthly reporting for a new sales region. When the Excel file finally arrives, it’s a massive, unstructured data dump rather than anything you can present.

Using the AI-powered chat capabilities of think-cell Assist in the Excel side pane, you can quickly identify the data you need. At your request, think-cell Assist creates a new, clean worksheet with a table showing revenue grouped by subregion and adds rows calculating the margin.

Because all think-cell Assist outputs are formula-based, you can trace each calculation back to the source data and verify you have the numbers you need.

Generating charts with AI

Important insights locked away in a complex Excel datasheet provide little value. An effective PowerPoint presentation with well-designed charts turns your analysis into something easily understandable and communicates insights that help persuade or inform stakeholders.

A key feature of some AI presentation tools is automatically generating charts from Excel data. In high-stakes business presentations that require 100% accuracy and multiple revision rounds, any AI-generated chart must be editable in PowerPoint and stay connected to the underlying data.

AI presentation tools that generate static images of charts that resemble the data aren’t suitable for business presentations, because they can’t guarantee complete accuracy or be edited with precision. The only option is to repeat the prompting process to generate another iteration of what is required.

AI presentation tools can not only generate charts but also suggest the best-fitting chart types based on the underlying data. With these suggestions, you can decide which visualization best communicates the message you want to convey.

How think-cell Assist helps: You completed the analysis for regional sales performance in Excel. The numbers are fully verified, and you have an idea of the story you want to tell when you present to the team.

With think-cell Assist, you can automatically generate a fully editable think-cell chart directly from Excel and add it to your PowerPoint slide with a click. Once added, you can apply the final touches, such as adjusting colors, formatting series labels, and adding annotations. If you need to change the data in Excel, the chart updates as well.

Pressure-testing recommendations with AI presentation tools

Critical thinking is essential when building presentations that require strong storytelling and absolute accuracy. In these instances, AI should support your critical thinking and not replace it. A key feature of an AI presentation tool is an integrated chat that can read and analyze your presentations all within PowerPoint. Then, AI can act as the devil’s advocate to strengthen your presentation by pointing out:

• Hidden assumptions
• Alternative explanations
• Missing evidence
• Potential objections and counterarguments
• Other potential weaknesses

Final recommendations remain a human responsibility, but an integrated AI tool can serve as a sparring partner that improves the final presentation.

How think-cell helps: You’re preparing strategic recommendations to present to the leadership team. After finishing your draft, you need a final opinion to ensure that the recommendations are backed up by the supporting slides.

With think-cell Assist, you can use the integrated chat to ask questions about specific slides and challenge your work from the leadership team’s perspective. By asking for missing assumptions and possible objections, you can refine the narrative before presenting. Your recommendations, based on your expertise and judgement, remain the same, but how you communicate them in the presentation improves.

Creating better slide content with AI

The best AI presentation tools can help improve slide content based on what you already have. In a global survey of business professionals, 44% reported using AI for reviewing and refining content, making this the top use case.

Some ways AI can help with text-based tasks:

• Generating action titles based on the slide’s content
• Creating executive summaries based on the slides of your choice
• Editing and rewriting text for length, clarity, and impact
• Improving consistency with parallel phrasing
• Translating text

Of course, AI-generated content should always be reviewed. But AI can save a lot of time and effort working with the slide content you already have.

How think-cell Assist helps: With the clock ticking on a presentation deadline, you need to put on the finishing touches before sharing with the regional offices. With think-cell Assist, you’re a click away from creating a summary slide based on your presentation content. It’s one more click to add an action title. And your presentation is complete.

think-cell Assist offers translation into 70+ different languages, all while preserving formatting, so you can easily ensure each regional office gets a polished presentation while beating deadlines.

Improving presentation workflows with integration

Many AI tools interrupt existing workflows. Copying and pasting between Excel, PowerPoint, and an AI application isn’t an efficient process. Switching between programs slows professionals down and increases the risk of errors and formatting inconsistencies.

The best AI presentation tools are fully integrated into PowerPoint. With everything in one window and the outputs fully editable, everything you need is in one place, and you can work more efficiently.

How think-cell Assist helps: You’re working on a data-heavy Excel sheet that will serve as the basis for an external presentation. think-cell Assist is integrated at every step. You can use think-cell Assist to analyze your Excel data and then generate a polished chart for the presentation.

With the chart in place, think-cell Assist can generate action titles, summaries, and more. And putting the finishing touches on each slide is especially easy with on-object buttons. If some text is too long and breaks the layout, you can just select it and click a button to shorten it or turn it into bullet points.

Costs, compliance and security for AI presentation tools

The core features and capabilities of your tool of choice are important, but so is data security, cost, and ease of deployment.

Keeping data secure

One of the biggest discussions around AI is data security. Is the data input safe? Is the infrastructure legally compliant and following privacy standards?

How think-cell Assist helps: If you’re working with any data, whether sensitive or not, you can be assured that think-cell Assist is built with enterprise-grade security that meets GDPR-compliant privacy standards. Your data is protected and never used to train AI models.

Having Flexibility with LLMs

Most AI presentation tools are built on underlying large language models (LLMs) provided by companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI. Each model is continuously developed and improving, but being locked into just one model can be a downside if other models prove to give better results or be more efficient.

How think-cell Assist helps: When you’re using think-cell Assist, this tool switches between AI models automatically. Every improvement in AI is an improvement in think-cell Assist, while also optimizing for resources.

Pricing that’s transparent

Depending on the tool and usage. AI software can sometimes cost much more than expected. That’s especially the case with consumption-based pricing. When AI is too expensive, the value of using it declines.

How think-cell Assist helps: You can buy an annual license for think-cell Assist with clear, transparent pricing. Find out more about purchase options.

Deploying software easily

AI presentation tools should be easy to deploy, maintain, and integrate with existing workflows. Tools that aren’t compatible with other software or prove difficult to deploy to the rest of the organization won’t be useful.

How think-cell Assist helps: If you’re already a think-cell user, deploying think-cell Assist follows the standard think-cell deployment process. Furthermore, presentations containing elements created using think-cell Assist features remain fully compatible and editable for all users.

5 common mistakes when using AI presentation tools

Despite the power and convenience of AI presentation tools, mistakes can undermine the effectiveness of your presentation. We'll run through five common mistakes people make when using AI and explain how you can avoid them to keep your presentations professional.

1. Letting AI choose the message

As helpful and authoritative as AI presentation tools can seem, there’s a risk in letting AI choose the overall message of your presentation. Regardless of how detailed and well thought out your prompts are, your human expertise offers a better understanding of what’s needed to make an impact with the audience.

How think-cell Assist helps: think-cell Assist builds on your human expertise rather than replacing it. You can build more effective slides while being able to modify any outputs, whether it’s charts, texts, or more.

2. Using generic prompts

Prompt engineering is the process of using text inputs to guide AI software in creating better outputs. A generic input without much detail results in a sparse output. While such a result might be good enough for some tasks, it’s rarely sufficient for important presentations.

How think-cell Assist helps: Use the chat function for both simple tasks and detailed prompts. By explaining your goals or asking think-cell Assist to take on a specific role in your prompt, you’ll get better results. You can also get very specific, such as requesting headlines to be in sentence case instead of title case.

3. Relying on questionable data

AI tools are often completely confident in the answers they provide. However, they aren’t always 100% correct. Hallucinated and incorrect information can be a major problem, as bad information is often mixed with facts. Sifting through every data point or source is essential but time-consuming.

How think-cell Assist helps: think-cell Assist pulls information from trusted sources, such as your Excel data, financial information, and statistics from Statista. With this verified information, you can easily build charts to add to your slides and maintain your credibility

4. Not reviewing outputs

AI makes it easy to generate vast amounts of content that would have otherwise required manual effort. Considering the speed and ease offered by AI presentation tools, it’s becoming increasingly common for high-profile mistakes to make their way into reports, legal filings, and other professional documents.

How think-cell Assist helps: Instead of upending your slide workflows, think-cell Assist is seamlessly integrated into your existing slide workflow and review process. For example, when using think-cell Assist within Excel to transform data, the transformed data is created in a new datasheet. Any changes are clearly explained within the chat function. This helps you review and verify data.

5. Using too much text

The most effective presentations aren’t walls of text. Instead, they’re clear, concise, and easy to follow. Some AI presentation tools tend to generate overly wordy slides, which doesn't make for great communication.

How think-cell Assist helps: Use think-cell Assist to rewrite or shorten text, and then organize its structure with bullet points or parallel phrasing. All of this can be done in one click without leaving PowerPoint.

Building better presentations with AI

AI works best when used thoughtfully by an expert who understands the craft of storytelling, slide composition, and presentation flow. In the end, humans are responsible for judgement, business context, and final approval. But the best AI presentation tools help support the complete workflow leading up to that final version.

The fallacy of speed

The best AI presentation tools aren’t the ones that create the most slides in the shortest amount of time.

Fast AI slide generation without the requisite quality often means more time editing, revising, and regenerating. While time is saved up front, it’s lost to the hours it takes to fix the generated content. Speed without quality delivers little value.

Rather, the most useful tools help professionals move from data to decisions – all while staying in control of the presentation.

AI presentation tool evaluation checklist

To help you evaluate the best AI presentation tool for your organization’s needs, use this checklist.

AI presentation tools FAQ

Here we answer some of the most frequently asked questions about AI presentation tools.