A clip from our spring 2025 GenAI workshop for mission-driven teams, with AlignIQ founder Dan Garmat. Recorded May 2025; AI slide generation has improved a lot since, so treat the tool assessment as dated.
Dan shows how personal preferences give an assistant like Claude context about his work, then runs an unscripted web search on whether AI can make good slides.
Key takeaways
- Personalization: tell the assistant your job, who you work with, your brand guidelines, vision and mission, so its answers fit your work.
- A live question (can these tools make slides?) gets a coherent research summary in seconds, the kind of report you might ask an intern for.
- Read it like an intern’s report: useful and digestible, but you don’t know it’s 100% accurate, and it may rely on old information.
Try this with your team
Write the five sentences you’d want any AI assistant to know about your organization before it helps you. Would you be comfortable with that information sitting in the tool?
Going further
Before you add organizational context to a tool, check what’s safe to share with Can I Use AI for This Workflow?
More from this series
- Why Purpose Matters More in the Age of AI
- Mapping the Jagged Frontier: Finding Clarity in a Fast-Moving Field
- Where AI Excels, Where Humans Lead
- Finding Your Voice with AI: Why Personal Experimentation Matters
- Risk and Reward: Building a Thoughtful Process for Working with AI
- Aligning AI with Your Mission
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
Let me show you real quick what I was talking about with personalization. Under settings, there’s my profile: what personal preferences should it consider in its responses? Basically I’m telling it this is my job, these are the people I work with, some details about the company, brand guidelines, vision and mission, that kind of thing. I thought I had the values in there somewhere. It’s got everything else, but it does have vision and mission. So that’s helping it understand what I want it to do.
Let’s go back to a new chat. My question here is something I don’t know; it came up as a question. Can we use these systems for creating slides? The slides I’ve seen ChatGPT generate are very bland, not very good. That’s the last I heard. I haven’t looked into this topic in maybe a year, because I didn’t think it would get there. So let’s see what the current status is.
Hopefully it will recognize to search the web. Yes. And based on its research, this is what it found: it can create slides but has limitations. It’s not purpose-built for slides. Copilot is stronger. It can reorganize slides.
What I’m doing is research that’s relevant to my job. If I had an intern, this is something I might ask them to look into, and this is the report they might send back. It happened in a few seconds, which is great. It’s coherent, readable and digestible. Again, I don’t know for sure if it’s 100% accurate. It could be using old information.