Clear the Slide

Tools like Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Canva, Tome and Microsoft Copilot can now turn a few prompts into remarkably polished presentations. And they’re only going to get better.

Which means that as slideware gets better, presenting may become more human, not less.

A beautifully designed slide is scenery, and you need to bring it to life

One of the most useful things I learned in presentation training was to “clear the slide.”

When a new slide appears, you already know what it means. You’ve probably stared at it for hours, but your audience hasn’t. So before diving into the detail, give them one sentence that tells them what they’re looking at:

“What this slide shows is that most of our growth is coming from existing customers.”

Now they have somewhere to stand. Then you can explore the data, tell the story or make the argument.

AI will increasingly take care of layout, imagery, formatting and perhaps even much of the content. Only you can help the people in the room make sense of what's on screen.

TL/DR: The prettier our slides become, the more important it becomes to know what we actually want to say.