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Hi, and welcome back to Try AI for Growth. I’m your host, Sara Vicente Barreto, and here I share short, real-life stories of how I’ve been using AI to make my work more focused, efficient, and sometimes surprisingly joyful.
Today I want to talk about something I had been hearing about for a while, but was still in my queue with great curiosity.
Claude for PowerPoint. Now, if you’ve listened to previous episodes, you already know I have a slight addiction to Claude for Excel. At this point, it has genuinely changed how I analyse information and think through strategy work. In fact, if I don’t have Claude for Excel working on something for me in the background, I get a bit nervous.
So naturally, I was curious about Claude’s PowerPoint capabilities. Was this going to be about formatting faster, getting better-looking slides? Or was there a content element to it?
The First Experiment
I finally gave Claude for PowerPoint a go. The only surprising thing since I did it, is that I am not using it for hours a day. But I am in the Claude for Excel period of my life, and even for me, there are only so many windows I can have open at one time (and I am hitting usage limits daily).
But back to Claude for PowerPoint. I was preparing a company pitch, and I did not think it was working. I started with something small, converting slides full of content and “noise” into a clean comparison. In a conversational tone, I explained what I was trying to create — a slide which showed a side-by-side comparison differently, with only the key highlights, before we went through the 2 projects we were pitching. I did not ask it to summarise, I did not give guidance on what the highlights would be, I just said: give me a side-by-side comparison of these 2 projects for a company pitch.
And honestly? I was impressed.
It created a clean structure, reorganised the information visually, highlighted the important comparisons, and simplified what had previously felt cluttered. It was still our content. Still our thinking. But suddenly it was clearer. Oh, and completely on brand.
That was the moment I got curious. I looked at my teammate and we smiled. We were onto something.
The Next Challenge
Next, I asked it something much more conceptual. We’ve been thinking about how to introduce a stronger partnership framing across all our pitches — whether for fundraising, volunteering, or corporate empowerment work. I described the type of positioning we wanted — a bit confusing, a bit vague. I was really not sure this was going to work, but I felt willing to give it a try.
Can you give me 2 alternatives?
With surprisingly few clarifications, Claude came back with a framing slide that was… genuinely good. Not just text. Not just design. The combination.
It suggested the messaging, visual hierarchy, icons, layouts, colour directions that were already aligned with our branding, and language that actually sounded close to us. Not perfect, obviously. But close enough that instead of starting from scratch, we were suddenly refining.
Immediate Impact
When you are pitching your business to clients or investors, the hardest part of strategic presentation work is not execution. It is tone and framing. But you spend too long on getting slides right, drafting boxes, finding icons, and preparing charts. And not long enough on messaging and framework. You look at old decks, you know you want to create something, but you kind of just have to get something out.
With the ability to speak your thoughts before you even have to worry about design or colours, aligning things on a page or how many columns to use, this is a completely game changer.
At this stage, I could already feel the dangerous little tingling of AI addiction kicking in. So I decided to push further.
Re-Thinking Everything
I uploaded one of our intro slides that is probably over five years old at this point. Quite a few of these slides we feel kind of work, but would benefit from a new approach. It just feels dated, and we often don’t even know what we want to say when we get to it. Partly, because it does not even reflect how we think about the organisation at this point.
So I tasked Claude with showing me alternatives for that slide, explaining what the core message was, but open to anything else. I opened a can of worms. As we iterated, I started identifying more slides I wanted to change.
Luckily, we hit our usage limit for the session. In a way, it was a relief.
We decided to use the new slides created, but leave the reworking of our structural slides for another day. At the end of the day, our goal was to speed up the pitch and send it across as efficiently as possible.
Collaboration Enhancement
Somehow, what started as “let’s see if Claude for PowerPoint can do slides” had turned into a full redevelopment of our pitch deck. I did all of this alongside our fundraising manager. It was the first time for both of us, and we worked through the prompts together in real time. We looked at the possibilities together and saw what we liked (and did not like) together. That part matters.
For two reasons. First, because the only way you can bring teams along is by involving them in the process. Throwing some training at them is not going to solve the issue. But also, because with AI, value is not only in the output — it’s also in the conversations it creates.
We found ourselves debating positioning, simplifying ideas, clarifying audiences, and reacting to visual possibilities much faster than we normally would. AI accelerated the iteration process, but it also accelerated strategic thinking. And importantly, it helped remove some of the fear around redesigning established materials.
A New Analyst in Town
Now, before we all declare the death of designers and consultants, let me be clear. This is not a design tool. And it’s not really a content tool either. At least not in the way people think.
For me, the best way to describe it is this: it’s a partner analyst.
“I have said it before, and I will say it again. There is a new analyst in town, and its name is Claude.”
It helps structure thinking. Explore alternatives. Pressure-test communication. Suggest angles you may not have considered. It gives you momentum when you’re stuck. But you still need judgment. Taste. Context. Strategy. And honestly, the better your thinking, the better the results become.
Lessons Learned
- Context, context, context. The quality of the output improved massively because we were already inside the presentation, where our tone and branding were present. We also explained the meeting, the audience, and what we were trying to get at with our new slides — our strategic intention.
- Stay open to experimentation. Some of the strongest suggestions were not things we would have designed ourselves initially. But seeing alternatives helped us rethink how we communicate ideas. We liked some, we ditched others. Which leads me to my next point.
- Stay iterative. The magic was never in the first answer. It came from refining, reacting, adjusting, and building on the outputs together.
As a bonus — and not different from my Lovable experiment in the last episode — use it collaboratively. You can challenge together, refine prompts, learn and discuss. Just with another partner in the room. That combination of human discussion plus AI acceleration is where I think the real value sits.
And one final lesson. Tokens run out. So you still need to be doing some of it yourself if you are under time pressure.
Thanks for listening to Try AI for Growth. If you’ve been experimenting with AI for presentations, strategy, or communication work, I’d love to hear what surprised you most. And if you’ve been avoiding refreshing old materials because the process feels too overwhelming, maybe this is your sign to try.
Be sure to subscribe and share this with someone spending way too much time on PowerPoint. Until next time, keep experimenting and keep having fun.
Photo by Markus Winkler – Pexels Photo