Have my presentations changed forever? Will I now burn TPUs instead of braincells?

Yes! They finally may have...

Like most people in tech, I’ve tried to use AI for most things I do for a while now. For some reason, they’ve failed spectacularly for me for presentations.

Some of it is the tools - everyone I’ve tried gives me results I’m unhappy with. Some of it is me - I have a very particular presentation style and I find it’s hard for me to use AI tools to generate slides I could present to (I like big visuals and don’t like everything I want to say on the slides vs. just some of the largest take-aways).

And then like many people, I find I need to get the visual and text just right if I’m building it and that takes a while.

But all of that may have changed forever. NotebookLM’s relatively new slide generation feature not only creates great slides, it changed my workflow completely.

I’ve always maintained that I’d get the best results for anything if I write it all down first and then build the slides I’d use to talk through it. But somehow translating that into practice proved quite hard since I’d worry the slides would take so long and the act of building the slides would change what I had to say.

But NotebookLMs quality of slides was so good, and the generation of slides so easy that for a talk I gave I asked it to generate 5-6 different options and I was happy with most of them. The overall quality and ease was so good, I focussed on editing and tweaking the doc I was writing and simply had it regenerate the slides when I had a new idea to add.

I even used two different sets of slides for the talk that I wanted to give twice. Need proof? Check out the infographic I generated here. :-) And try this yourself!