How to Make a Presentation With AI (The Whole Deck)
Fourteen slides. Slide 3 has 62 words on it and a stock photo of a handshake. Slide 9 repeats slide 4 with a different font. Somewhere around slide 11 there's a table nobody can read from the back of the room.
That's the deck most people bring to a meeting, and the problem isn't that the slides are ugly. It's that nobody decided what the deck was for before the slides started existing. If you want to make a presentation with AI and end up with something you'd actually stand in front of, the order of operations matters: decide the spine first, generate the whole deck in one go, then edit. Not the other way round.
I'm going to build one here — a six-slide pitch from a small office-cleaning company to a facilities manager — and show you the rules that keep six slides looking like one deck instead of six unrelated posters.
Why deck length is a design problem, not a content problem
Every slide you add costs you something. It costs the audience attention, and it costs you consistency — because the more slides you have, the more chances there are for one of them to use a different heading size, a different blue, a different alignment.
The fix is a rule I stole from writing: one job per slide. If you can't say what a slide's single job is in four words ("name the problem", "show the price"), it doesn't have one, and it's either two slides or zero.
Run your current deck through that and you'll usually cut half of it. The 14-slide version above? Six slides had a job. The other eight were either restating a job already done or holding text the presenter was going to say out loud anyway.
The six slides that do the work
Here's the spine. It's not the only one, but it works for anything where you're asking someone to say yes — a service pitch, an internal proposal, a budget request.
| # | Job | The cleaning-company version |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Who you are + one promise | "Meridian Cleaning — offices that look opened, not closed" |
| 2 | Their problem, in their words | "Your morning crew arrives before the cleaners finish" |
| 3 | What changes | "Every floor done and signed off by 6am" |
| 4 | How it works, in three steps | Walkthrough → fixed weekly schedule → photo sign-off |
| 5 | Proof | One named client, one line about how long they've stayed |
| 6 | The ask | "Two-week trial starting the 24th. Yes or no by Friday." |
Notice slide 2. Most decks open with slide 3 — the outcome — because that's the exciting bit. But an outcome only lands if the audience has just heard their own problem described accurately. Say their problem back to them, in their language, before you sell anything.
And slide 6 is an ask, not a "thank you". A thank-you slide is the most common wasted slide in existence. The last thing on screen while they're deciding should be the thing you want them to decide.
Three rules that keep six slides looking like one deck
Design consistency across pages is a completely different skill from designing one page well. A single slide can be beautiful on its own and still make the deck look amateur.
Lock two fonts and three colors before slide 1. One display font for headings, one plain one for body — if you're not sure which pair, the combos in font pairing for non-designers are safe starting points. Three colors: a dark background, a light text color, one accent. The accent is for exactly one thing per slide. Not two.
Give the heading an anchor position. Pick one spot — top-left, 80px in, same size on every slide — and never move it. This is the rule that does the most work and gets broken the most, usually because one heading was longer and someone nudged it down "just for that slide". When headings sit still between slides, the deck feels designed. When they jump, it feels stapled together.
Cap titles at six words. Six words fits on one line at a big size, which means the anchor rule never gets broken to make room. It also forces the title to be a claim ("Done and signed off by 6am") rather than a label ("Service Details").
Building the deck in Ridvay Studio
You don't have to make six slides one at a time. Describe the whole deck once and get a multi-page design back — one page per slide, all sharing a look.
Build a 6-slide pitch deck for Meridian Office Cleaning proposing a monthly contract to a facilities manager. Dark navy background, white text, one blue accent, bold sans-serif headings, one idea per slide. Slides: title and promise, their problem, what changes, three-step process, one client proof point, the ask with a deadline.
What comes back isn't a flat picture of a deck. It's an editable design — every heading, body line, shape and image is its own layer on its own page, so you're changing a deck rather than regenerating one and hoping the next roll is better.
Then edit, in this order:
- Fix the anchor first. Click the heading on slide 1, note its position and size, and match every other slide's heading to it. Do this before touching the words — it's the change that makes the biggest visual difference and it takes about a minute.
- Rewrite the titles to six words. Any title that wraps to two lines is too long; cut it until it fits on one. If cutting loses meaning, the meaning belongs in what you say, not on the slide.
- Spend the accent color once per slide. Scan each page for blue. If it's on the heading and a badge and an icon, pull it off everything except the one thing you want them to look at.
- Apply your brand kit. If you've set up a brand kit with your logo, palette and fonts, apply it across the pages so your colors replace the generated ones everywhere at once.
Generate this deck in Studio and edit it →
If your deck runs longer than six slides, generate it in two passes and keep the first page as your style anchor — remix it, replace the copy, and the type and color decisions carry over instead of drifting.
The zoom-out test
Before you present, look at the deck as thumbnails — the page strip in the editor, or your slide software's grid view. Don't read it. Just look at the shapes.
Three things show up instantly at that size and are almost invisible at full size:
- Headings that move. They'll flicker up and down as your eye crosses the row. That's your anchor rule broken.
- A slide that's darker or lighter than its neighbours. Usually a photo that ate the whole background. Either commit to full-bleed photos on every slide or none.
- A slide that's a solid block of grey. That's text density. Nobody will read it, so cut it to a headline and say the rest.
This test takes fifteen seconds and it catches more than a careful read-through does, because at thumbnail size you're seeing what the audience sees in their first half-second on each slide — pattern, not words.
What to do with everything you cut
The objection to a six-slide deck is always the same: "but they need the detail." They do — just not on screen while you're talking. Put it in a leave-behind. A one-pager sell sheet handles the specs, the pricing tiers and the terms far better than slides 7 through 14 ever did, and it survives being forwarded to the person who wasn't in the room.
The deck earns the yes. The one-pager survives the follow-up. Trying to make one document do both is how you end up with 62 words on slide 3.
If you want the individual slides to hold up on their own as well, how to design a pitch deck slide that lands goes deeper on the layout inside a single frame — hierarchy, contrast, and the three-second read.
Start with the six-slide spine, generate the whole thing at once, then spend your time editing instead of building. Describe your deck and get six editable slides →