Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast, where we talk all things leadership, business, communication, and trends in organizational life. I'm your host, Dr. Janel Anderson.

Imagine this. You're staring at a blank slide deck. The cursor is blinking at you like it is daring you to create something brilliant. You have ideas, plenty of them. But translating those ideas into a cohesive, visually appealing presentation is daunting.

Well, that was me last week, prepping for a big speech. If you've seen me present, you've probably seen my slides. They're okay. Better than most, if I do say so myself. But I wanted these slides to really wow the audience. And I really wanted them to fit the theme of my speech, which was about the future of work. So I decided to try something new. I turned to AI. Specifically, I used Gamma App, an AI powered tool designed for creating dynamic slide presentations.

In today's episode, I'm going to pull back the curtain on that process. How I decided to use Gamma, and then how Gamma helped me turn my outline into a polished slide deck, and what it taught me about the future of creative collaboration with AI. Whether you love working with slides or you dread them, you are going to want to hear this. So here's how I went about it. I had heard about Gamma. I'd also heard about another tool called Beautiful. And I know that there were even other tools besides those two out there.

So I went first to ChatGPT and I asked ChatGPT to evaluate two different tools, Gamma and Beautiful. And I also wanted to know what else I was missing because I knew there were other tools out there. So this is the exact prompt that I used with ChatGPT. I'm thinking about using an AI tool to help me create slides for a presentation I'm giving soon. I'm considering using Gamma App and Beautiful AI. Can you compare and contrast these two tools on user experience, price, quality of output, and anything else you think I should be considering? Also, if there's other tools that you think I should consider, please include them in the analysis. So that was my exact prompt. Sounded as if I was talking to a person.

I often joke that ChatGPT is my college intern. You need to give it very, very specific instructions, and then you need to double and triple check its work and probably have it iterate a few times before you have anything worth even beginning to use. So that was my ask of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT provided a very thoughtful. Well, not thoughtful, because ChatGPT is not real and does not think, but thorough. Let's say thorough, a very thorough analysis and it included a couple of other tools that I wasn't aware of. Now I then double checked a few things because you need to when you're using generated AI content. So I double checked a few things, especially price.

I didn't want to go in on something that was going to be cost prohibitive, so I double checked its price, the price points and um, then there were. Those were easy to check at face value, but then there were a few things that I just kind of had to go on a bit of trust and hope like the, the learning curve and the, like the kind of the usability, how user friendly was it? And yeah, so I really just kind of went with whatever ChatGPT said for that and hoped that it knew what it was talking about. I did double check the price, but the reason I was wanting to a decent user experience or a low learning curve is I did not want to have a Photoshop experience. I don't know if I've ever talked about Photoshop on the podcast, but Photoshop is a powerful photo and visual editing tool. But it does so much and I am not needing it for its sophisticated power. When I do need it, I have to pretty much go relearn how to do the thing that I need to do the basic editing of an image that I need to do because it is so sophisticated and it does so much and I see the menu of options and I just get overwhelmed and I then I have to go like find a tutorial and learn how to do the one little thing that I want to do. So I really did not want to have a Photoshop experience. Again, nothing against Photoshop, it's a great product, but it just does way more than I usually need it to do.

So after reading the analysis that ChatGPT gave me on the options that I had asked and the additional options I wasn't aware of, and doing a little bit of independent research on my own, I decided to go with Gamma and then I gave ChatGPT this prompt. Thanks. I'm going to go with Gamma app. What input should I prepare for it so that it gives me the best results? An outline, a full script of the speech, or something else. Again, ChatGPT gave me a very thorough response and guided me to write a detailed outline of what I wanted on each slide. And it gave me several options to go with.

Number one, it said start with a clear outline. Highly recommended. Why Gamma works well when given a clear structure. An outline allows it to generate content and design slides efficiently. Without overwhelming it with too much detail. And then it offered some advice on what to include in that outline. A title or a main idea for each slide, key points or bullet points, any data, statistics or visuals that I would like to incorporate. And then it gave me an example of what that outline might look like. And then it gave me another option.

The second option was to provide a full script if I really needed to give Gamma more direction. And it said a full script would ensure that AI would capture the exact message. And this was ideal if I had a polished narrative that I wanted AI, that Gamma to really focus on and design the full layout. And then it said what to include was basically like full sentences for each slide and examples and anecdotes, and again, pretty much a full script. Well, I don't speak from a full script, so I knew that that option was not for me. It also gave me a third option, which was to combine an outline with visual cues for best results. So it said to add some visual preferences alongside my outline, kind of for each slide that would help Gamma better match the ideas that I had in mind. So it said include title and bullet points like an outline, but then also any sort of additional notes on visuals, like add a chart here or use an image of a team collaborating there, that sort of thing.

And then again, it gave me an example of that, and it told me why I should do all of this for Gamma. It also said if I wanted to share any supplemental materials, like if I wanted it to make me a page of sources at the end, or anything like that, that I could include that and Gamma would do that too. And then it also reminded me that after Gamma generates the slides that I can refine them. And it gave me some ideas about how to do that, how I could tweak the notes and add speaker notes and add change the pictures and things like that. Didn't quite tell me exactly step by step how to do those, but it turns out that Gamma was pretty intuitive on how to do that. So then the very next thing I did was to start with creating a clear outline and really kind of thinking slide by slide. Now that's not too different from my usual process. In my usual process, I draw a grid on a piece of paper and each grid represents a slide.

And I think about what I want to go on each slide as I've already thought through the content and how the content is going to flow. Now I'm truly moving into, like visual design of the slides, and I just sketch it out literally with a pencil. And paper before I go to PowerPoint to create any slides. So having that grid that represents what I want on each slide and then you know, that design on paper first before going to PowerPoint has always been a winning strategy for me. But this time instead of doing that I was making like a good old fashioned outline like in your seventh grade English class. Not necessarily main point one, sub point two, that kind of thing. But it really was a much more text driven outline than I would typically prepare. The presentation of the speech, by the way is called From Polite the present.

The title of the presentation by the way is called Politeness to AI Connection with People Navigating our Digital Social Landscape. So you'll notice perhaps the prepositions politeness to AI because it's not a thing that you can do with and connection with people because that is where we work together. Although I might say that this project of creating these slides was definitely collaboration with AI and I'll explain more about that a little bit later. But the speech itself covers some of the themes that I've talked about here on the podcast recently. But it also goes deeper into the role of politeness in the systems that we use and how that politeness makes a difference in fields like healthcare and education and even self driving vehicles. It's really quite fascinating if I do say so myself. Anyway, the outline focused me in much the same way that my grid typically does. I knew what I wanted to say and the supporting research was done.

I just need to wrangle. I just needed to wrangle it into some sort of form. So I created an account on Gamma app. Now that is different from Gamma AI by the way, two totally different products. So if you're looking for the Visual Slide creation tool, it's Gamma App. So I created my account and I answered some questions about what my use was, was it professional, was it personal and so forth, and what tone I wanted the presentation to have. And then there were some templates of different tones that I could choose from. I purchased a paid account because I needed more than eight slides.

The free account made eight slides and I knew mine was going to be closer to 15, maybe 20. It turns out I think it was 14 when all was said and done. And I also didn't want Gamma's branding on my slides. If you have a paid account, then the automatic branding of Gamma gets removed. But if you want to play around, I highly recommend just using the free version. Sign up for an account, try the free version, see what comes of it for you.

Okay, so then I uploaded my outline and I literally sat back and it was nothing short of amazing. And I honestly wish I had been recording the screen because I would love to show you what it looked like when Gamma started generating the slides.

I mean, it's just nothing short of wow. The slides drew on the screen in front of me. They like generated right in front of me, including the text and the styling of the slides and the layout and the pictures that were on each slide. It was honestly, again, nothing short of amazing. But then came the hard work. So Gamma gave me a draft, then it was time to go slide by slide, changing out the text, having Gamma generate new images, changing the prompts for how to create those images. And, you know, because my speech was about the future of work and AI and politeness and human connection and everything, I did want it to look futuristic, but not so futuristic that it looked like science fiction. So there was a decent amount of regeneration of images that Gamma had generated through generative AI that were on each slide.

Some of them were just really super far out there, or some of them had kind of a dark tone to them because of some of the themes I was talking about in the speech. And the slides were so dark, it was almost spooky dark. So I, again, I did not want it to look like science fiction and I didn't want it to look depressing either. So there was a decent amount of regeneration of photos and moving things around on the slides that I had to do. Now I had to rework, redesign to some extent, and finesse each and every single slide. Absolutely no slide was perfect right out of Gamma. And in fact, I would say most of them required a decent amount of iteration and rework. But even so, it was much faster than my typical process.

So my typical process is once I figured out what I want the slide to look like, I'll probably start with the slide I've previously designed that's kind of like that, but then the images will be different. And so what I then do is I go out to all the various websites where I purchase stock images and I'm searching and searching and searching for just the right image, and then I go to buy it, and I discover that the credits in my paid account have either expired or insufficient for what I want to buy. And I have to, like, find a credit card, enter the credit card information, add more credits, and so on, and it's expensive and it's very, very time consuming. So again, that process of selecting paid images is painstaking. So, but even though I had to prompt and prompt and prompt and rewrite those prompts a million times. It was faster and it held together as a theme, much more so than if I was going about this through my typical process. Now, again, I did not, I really want to underscore, I did not use any of Gamma's slides straight out of creation. And I can't underscore this enough.

When you're using any AI tool, whatever it gives you is a first draft, it's a working draft. It's better than starting from a blank page in most cases if you give good prompts. Now, my outline was really good, but even though it was good, I still saw like, it generated a slide for my introduction. And I was like, I don't need that. That's awful. I mean, that's pointless. Nobody needs to look at that. I can just deliver my introduction with me talking straight to the audience.

I don't even need a slide for that. So there was, you know, a process of discernment, like, is this the right slide? Is this slide necessary? And then there were some process of moving elements around, which was relatively straightforward on Gamma. But the templates on each page are somewhat fixed. You can't move things exactly where you want them. You do have to work within their templates. But there were some things you could do with spacing and font size and so on to try to get things in the places that you wanted to. But again, when I rewrote the prompts, let's say for a photo, it would give me a photo of, I don't know, a person with a bunch of thought bubbles as they're looking at a screen.

And I was like, that's not really the vibe I want. I don't want them like standing in a hallway by an elevator. I want them sitting at their desk and I don't want them on a mobile phone. I want them on their desktop computer or a laptop computer. So I was going in and specifically changing the prompts picture by picture, because you can select a picture and then you can see the prompts that Gamma used to create that visual. And then you can go and tweak it. One of the prompts was to have this of the style of the images was that they should be black and gold and metallic and future looking. But again, it made a lot of like R2D2 kind of robots that I really didn't want in the slide deck.

I mean, maybe one or two R2D2 robot style robots in the slide deck is okay, but there was just a lot of A lot of robots. So I kept having to change the robots out for people. But when I gave a more refined prompt, I got a better, a better looking image. But so in this way, it really did feel like Gamma and I were collaborating. We were like co conspirators on this slide deck. It was like I was sitting side by side with somebody who was a combination like fast graphic designer slash photographer slash creative partner who could just like really turn things around quickly. So this process again is similar to how I use generative AI for other things. It's fast and it gives you a good running start, but then it requires a lot of double checking and reworking to get it right again.

As I said earlier, I think of generative AI as like, you know, my cheap college intern who doesn't cost very much per month but needs to have their work double checked, super eager and does things really fast. Now I am including the final deck that I actually used for the presentation in the show notes. So there's a PDF of that connected to the show notes for this episode. This is episode 191. So if you want to see what Gamma and I created together with ChatGPT's initial guidance, you can head on over to janelanderson.com/191 for episode 191 and we'll have the slides, the PDF of the slides linked up in those show notes in those show notes for you to take a look at.

And if after you take a look at the slides, you want to hire me to give that speech in your organization or for your association, please, please reach out the organizer of the conference that I gave these slides to, or one of the organizers, several people involved, but one of the organizers said this was amazing, your energy was terrific. And this is something that everybody in the workplace needs to hear. So if it does seem like something that would be of interest to you, I encourage you to reach out.

I would love to explore that possibility with you. And who knows, maybe you and I and Gamma together, the three of us will create the slides for. For your audience, or I should say co create the slides. All right, so that is my experience of using Gamma to create slides for a recent presentation. Again, I cannot say enough about the speed of generative AI. And if you have the patience to continue to work with it and refine it, it's going to be an amazing tool for you. If you don't have the patience and you think that the thing that it's going to make is going to work out of the box, then it is not the tool for you. Again, I want you to think of it as your co creator and that you are in charge and that you will still have to do a lot of work even after it gives you a rough, rough first draft.

All right? I encourage you to give it a try. And if you do, please drop me a line or hit me up on social media and let me know how it's going for you. I would love to see what you create and in fact you could even just send me the PDF of whatever it creates for you. I'd love to see it.

Now remember my friends, the future of work is not only about technology. It's about the values we uphold, the communities we build, and the sustainable growth we strive for. We need to keep exploring, keep innovating, and keep envisioning the absolutely remarkable possibilities that lie ahead. Stay curious, stay informed, stay ahead of the curve.

Tune in next week for another insightful exploration of some of the trends that are shaping our professional world. Now if you learned something in this podcast or you simply enjoy the content, please subscribe to my channel on YouTube, subscribe to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice, and follow me on social media. These are all excellent no cost ways for you to support me and my work over on YouTube. Make sure you hit the subscribe button and knock that little bell so that you get notified every time there's a new episode out. You'll find me at youtube.com/janelandersonPhD wherever you're listening or watching, please leave me a review or some comments. It helps other listeners find me and it helps me know that you're along for the ride. Until next time, keep thriving and keep working towards the future.

Whatever that looks like for you stay connected, stay curious, and I will see you next time.