Part 3 · Working With AI Tools
Creating Visuals and Presentations with AI
It is late. You present tomorrow, and slide one is still blank. You know your argument inside out. You simply cannot make it look like anything. An hour later you have three ugly slides and a headache.
Why This Matters
Most professionals lose hours to formatting they were never trained to do. AI changes the task: instead of nudging boxes, you write a clear brief and let the tool render it. Telling a tool exactly what you need is Specification Thinking, the difference between a usable draft and noise. In this lesson you will:
- Create a slide deck with Gemini in Google Slides from a written brief
- Create an interactive diagram with Claude
- Create a narrated video overview with NotebookLM
One Brief, Three Tools
The last lesson had you delegate a multi-step task to an agentic tool and review its work before accepting it. This lesson keeps the output in your own hands: the visuals. Three tools, three jobs. Gemini works inside Google Slides to draft a deck and generate images. Claude builds an interactive diagram you can open and adjust, a flow, a decision tree, a chart. NotebookLM turns your own documents into a narrated video overview. Match the tool to the output you need.
All three obey one rule: they render what you specify. A vague request returns generic output: wrong tone, wrong length, a diagram of the wrong thing. The fix is a visual brief, and it has three parts.
- Content: what it must say, the points, the data, the order.
- Audience: who sees it, which sets the tone and the depth.
- Format: the shape and its limits, length, style, layout.
Give it the substance, and do not assume the tool knows your argument. Think audience: a board wants three clean numbers, a class wants a worked example. And set the format's limits: a five-slide deck, a one-screen diagram, a three-minute video.
One caution: AI renders mistakes as confidently as facts. It will invent a statistic or mislabel a chart without blinking. Every number and label that reaches other people is yours to verify: the tool drafts, you decide.
Key Takeaway
The brief is the skill, not the tool. Watch your most polished-looking output most closely: that is where a wrong number hides best.
Check your understanding
Self-check only. Nothing is scored and nothing is recorded; open an answer to compare it with your own.
Mei is preparing a presentation for her company's board of directors on expanding into a new market. She opens Gemini in Google Slides and types: 'Make me a presentation about market expansion.' The generated deck has 15 slides with generic business clip art and bullet points that could apply to any company. What should Mei do to get a more useful result?
- Reduce the slide count to 8 and regenerate, fewer slides means higher quality.
- Write a visual brief: 'Create an 8-slide board presentation on expanding our SaaS platform into the Southeast Asian SME market. Audience: board directors who want to see market size, competitors, projected ROI, and a 12-month timeline. Include data slides for market sizing and a comparison table for top 3 competitors. Keep text minimal, each slide should make one point.'
- Use ChatGPT instead, it produces better presentations than Gemini.
- Generate the deck, then manually edit every slide to add the specific content she needs.
Show the answer
Write a visual brief: 'Create an 8-slide board presentation on expanding our SaaS platform into the Southeast Asian SME market. Audience: board directors who want to see market size, competitors, projected ROI, and a 12-month timeline. Include data slides for market sizing and a comparison table for top 3 competitors. Keep text minimal, each slide should make one point.'
Raj needs to document a 9-step customer support escalation process for his team's handbook. He has tried writing it as a numbered list, but his team finds it confusing because there are three decision points where the process branches. Which AI visual tool and approach would be most effective?
- Use ChatGPT to generate an image of a flowchart, then paste the image into the handbook.
- Use Gemini in Google Slides to create a presentation with one step per slide.
- Use Claude to create an interactive flowchart, specifying the 9 steps and 3 decision points, with clear labels for each branch outcome.
- Use NotebookLM to turn the numbered list into a video overview.
Show the answer
Use Claude to create an interactive flowchart, specifying the 9 steps and 3 decision points, with clear labels for each branch outcome.
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