No One Cares About Your Deck – Here’s Why

Galen Low: Slide decks aren't about transferring information into people's brains. They're about getting a concept to resonate. That's arguably the thing that people get wrong when they try to outsource their slideware to AI and are disappointed with the results that come back. Heck, that's arguably what people get wrong when they ask their human design teams to just make these slides look more prettier.

But as it becomes more and more important to get people nodding along to an idea rather than sentencing them to death by PowerPoint, AI might be the only thing that helps us move as fast as we're being asked to move. So how can we use AI to streamline the way we create effective presentations without falling into the AI slop trap that betrays our audience's trust and prevents our message from landing?

And also, will slide decks even matter in a few years' time? To answer that, I've brought in an expert communicator and former project manager who has taken up the mantle of bringing a next-gen AI slide creation tool to market. We'll be diving deep into the right way to use AI for presentations, how to avoid the uncanny valley that turns people off, and what our possible future looks like when we're saving hundreds of hours in slide creation time. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to The Digital Project Manager Podcast—the show that helps delivery leaders work smarter, deliver smoother, and lead their teams with confidence in the age of AI. I'm Galen, and every week we dive into real-world strategies, emerging trends, proven frameworks, and the occasional war story from the project front lines. Whether you're steering massive transformation projects, wrangling AI workflows, or just trying to keep the chaos under control, you're in the right place. Let's get into it.

Okay, today we are talking about two of my favorite things, slideware and AI. But whereas I think and dream in PowerPoint, most people hate creating presentations are terrible at creating presentations, cannot stand other people's presentations, or sometimes all of the above.

So we're gonna be talking about how AI can help. We'll be covering how AI can be an effective thought partner to spare you the pain of slide creation, how humans can avoid creating AI slop in slide form, and why death by PowerPoint may become a thing of the past. With me today is Morgan Cornelius, Chief of Staff at Decky and founder of B2B marketing consultancy, mrcantile.

Morgan is a small business advocate, community builder, and product marketer with 15 years of experience. She was hired at Yelp, Instagram, and Twitter to launch their small business communities, leading the strategy, execution, and project management end to end. After spending years cultivating community and championing small business owners at some of the biggest platforms in the world, she decided to go out on her own and start her own marketing firm, mrcantile.

Most recently, she brought that same expertise to Decky, the AI-powered presentation builder, where she owns the go-to-market strategy as acting Chief of Staff. She's that person who doesn't just build a strategy, she runs the playbook, manages the moving parts, makes sure it actually gets done, and ensures the deck looks great when it's time to present. Oh, and she bakes a mean loaf of sourdough bread.

Morgan, thanks for hanging out with me today.

Morgan Cornelius: I'm so happy to be here, Galen. I feel like I have a kindred spirit in the eats, drinks, sleeps decks. So it's so nice to be with you.

Galen Low: Yeah. We are definitely gonna nerd out on slides, and apologies and you're welcome to my listeners.

Because honestly, it's something that I, like, feel really passionately about. You know, I said it up top, I love slides, I love PowerPoint, I love Keynote, I love Google Slides. It's my jam. It's honestly my way of turning just, like, everyday work stuff into, like, cheeky children's books. But it is a pretty big drag for most people.

And in a lot of cases, people, including me, we can spend a lot of time creating a deck and then, like, adapting it for a different audience and then, like, updating it and so on and so forth. So I'm excited to dive into the state of slideware and company presentations in general, and also just look at it through the lens of AI.

I do hope we go wherever the wind takes us, all sorts of places, but just in case, here's the roadmap that I've sketched out for us today. To start us off I wanted to just, like, set the stage by hitting you with, like, a big, hairy question that my listeners want your take on, and then I'd like to zoom out from that and just talk about three things.

Firstly, I wanted to talk about why presentations still matter today and what makes some better than others. Then I'd like to just step through a use case for using AI to create or adapt a presentation without it coming out as slop, maybe just how to find the balance between human craftspersonship and, like, AI efficiency.

And lastly, I'd like to just get your take on whether slide decks will still matter in three to five years' time, or will it just be robots presenting to robots? How does that sound to you?

Morgan Cornelius: I think that sounds great. Let's get into it.

Galen Low: Awesome. Okay, I thought I would just start out with one big, hairy question.

Most people, they find the creation and consumption of slides to be excruciating, and yet it's still the dominant method of presenting information in most organizations I've been exposed to. But now, with AI in the mix, I see a few progressive companies moving away from slides and into more, like, LLM-friendly formats like Markdown documents or Notion pages.

So I thought I'd ask you, is PowerPoint on its last legs as a method of communicating ideas at work?

Morgan Cornelius: That's a very good question. Actually, I would say no, it's not, mostly for the reason that while those Markdown documents or Notion docs are great, I think it is the number one... not I think, I know it's the number one visual aid that allows people to stay engaged as you're talking ad nauseam for 20-plus minutes oftentimes.

And what actually we learned when we were doing some, like, just competitive landscape research on just the general presentation marketplace, what we found is that actually Google and PowerPoint take up 90% of the market in terms of the presentation market in the US. So it isn't going anywhere. It's definitely here to stay.

I think it's a matter of how you layer on AI to make it work faster and more thoughtfully for you.

Galen Low: I love the visual aid bit because, not gonna lie, you send me, you know, like, a pageless Notion doc, right, which can be however long, my eyes kind of glaze over. I find myself being like, "Gosh, can I just create a deck of this and then have it read to me?" Which, like, coming back to my, like, children's book version of, like, work stuff.

Morgan Cornelius: Or even in the use case of if you are a project manager and you're sharing something with an executive team, the execs typically are just gonna want that high-level information, not the full dissertation on what's happening.

And so- Yes ... having a deck form of that and being able to circulate it to folks who just need the need to know, that goes a long way, and that's also another reason why.

Galen Low: I like that. It's like the art of distillation. Like when I was working at one of the larger consultancies, we learned the school of hard knocks.

Like we'd have like 40 slides and they're like, "Cool, make that two slides and like expect to present one to like this particular CEO, like client CEO." And we're like, "Oh."

Morgan Cornelius: You really have to choose your words wisely and your visual- Absolutely ... wisely.

Galen Low: Definitely an art. All right, let's zoom out a bit You've had a lot of experience in roles where, like we've been talking about, crisp and effective communication is very important.

In fact, you actually started out as a project manager, and like today, you are a chief of staff, both of which are like really relevant roles for my listeners, like hardcore doers. I thought maybe I'd ask like just why have decks been important in your work, and like what purpose do they serve, and also why can't they just be an email?

I know we touched on some of that already, but yeah.

Morgan Cornelius: Sure. I would say even from the beginning of my career, I've always held the position, whether it was straight-up project managing to heading up community and balancing and straddling internal and external audiences and teams, the way you're communicating what you want to accomplish and what you need to bring the entire group along, whether it's internal teams or getting an external group of small business owners on board with adopting a bunch of Yelp products, for example, you need to be able to say it in such a compelling and interesting way to keep people doing what you're doing right now, nodding and saying, "Okay, I get it, and I do feel like this resonates with me, and I do feel like this does benefit me."

One thing that I was really fortunate to come across really early on in my career was a book called Resonate by Nancy Duarte, and it's all about the importance of slides and how you articulate the words that are coming out of your mouth with a visual representation on the slide that feels like it is speaking directly to you, Galen, or to the sales team or to the executive team.

And so I think learning how to be really versatile and curating that every single time is what's allowed me to go from starting as like a very entry level project manager to, you know, being a chief of staff at a startup company.

Galen Low: I love the resonance concept because even just like reading words on a page, people who are really good with words, like they can sometimes pull it off, but that sort of alignment in the room, like having people nod, I think it's a different means of communicating than reading or just like looking at pictures.

It is like a togetherness. And yeah, I agree. I think it is like sometimes a mechanism that like propels us forward in our career is because of that resonance, because we've thought about our audience, because we've distilled things down and we aren't dousing people with information. Don't get me wrong, some people who present douse people with information, but actually that's not the goal.

The goal is actually to get that resonance going so that people feel like they're a part of a thing, that they agree with a thing, or at least we're able to like challenge a thing and like had a say And sort of the, like, classic death by PowerPoint is like, "We'll hold questions till the end. Sorry we ran out of time because we were blah blah blah-ing about all these things that you probably could have read."

Morgan Cornelius: Right. 100%, it resonates with your audience. You are bringing them along on the vision and the journey that you want everyone to go on, but it's also giving you that, like, non-verbal confirmation that they're understanding with the nods in the room, versus you don't get to see someone reading an email unless you have-

like, video camera access to somebody's computer, and then it would be concerning. So there's a lot of positives in having an opportunity to have a forum in which you can actually articulate that with a really powerful visual aid, like a deck.

Galen Low: I love that. I'm just thinking, you know those react videos where someone, like, reacts to a video?

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah.

Galen Low: That you could just have, like, an email react video. Here's me reacting to your email. Eh.

Morgan Cornelius: Exactly, actually. Exactly.

Galen Low: I mean, maybe that's a good segue. I'm wondering, like, in your opinion, what makes a deck a good deck? And then afterwards I'll flip it.

Morgan Cornelius: What makes a good deck, I would say, are a few things.

I mean, it's obviously your words that you're saying as you're presenting. Something at a high level needs to match that. What you don't want on the slide is just, like, a word block of just word text from side A to side B of the deck. It's ... People are gonna get distracted. I think too many graphics or visuals or anything, especially if you're a corporate employee, something that's completely off-brand is gonna start making people, especially designers in the room, they're gonna be like, "What did this person do?

Where is my deck that I created-" Right. "... for everyone at this company?" And it's a matter of like, you know, just keeping it super clean, keeping it on brand. It's keeping the text overlay very light, and really the, like, need-to-know high level. It's like the executive version of that deck that we're talking about.

It's those words should probably be the same in every- Version just tailored to the audience. So I would say, yeah, very cleanly that those are the main elements, and then really good strong visuals I think are always helpful. Nothing too busy, and I think that's a piece that what you're probably gonna ask on the flip side is what makes a bad deck.

I think there's a lot of decks that just get overly complicated, and I think a lot of that is a pitfall of the current state of a lot of AI presentation tools. I think a lot of them are like, "We're gonna hit you with a photo, and then we're gonna do, like, some, like, hieroglyphic thing in the back, and then we're gonna, like, add a purple to your brand color."

All of a sudden you're just so unsure of, as the viewer, where to look. The person's talking, but then you're also just getting hit with a lot of noise. And so yeah, I would say that would be the flip side of a good deck.

Galen Low: That's fair, yeah. And I do often get that feeling with some of the sort of slide or presentation AI tools that I've worked with, where it almost been prompted to try too hard to be creative and, like, funny and meme-ified, and it's like doesn't land with every presentation.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen some great presentations with, you know, hilarious memes to, like, add levity in the middle that resonate with people, that keep people's attention, but it's really curated, right? Like, this is something ... You said it earlier, like it, it should be the same message tailored to the audience, you know.

Whether it was my issue of maybe not providing enough, like, information about the audience. Like, some of the tools I've used don't even ask. It's just like, "Make this more pretty," and it can be, like, a bit of a turnoff of the technology to be like, "Actually, you know what? The template that design created, yeah, that'll be fine, actually."

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah. And I think that's where the friction has been to date, is that there's been, you know- ChatGPT, Claude, amazing thought partners to build out the outline of a deck with you. Like, "Hey, you know what? Maybe we start off here with an intro slide, and we kind of go into this and this, and then dive into the strategy and the teams that are gonna be focused on supporting X, Y, Z."

But when you take that outline and then turn it into the deck version, it oftentimes just gets completely lost in translation when you hit that Generate button. And I think that is where, to your point, having that added layer of human assessment and a human editing throughout the experience is kind of actually where Decky landed.

It was like, "Hey, we want you to use your brand designer's deck" And upload it to us, and then throughout the process, we're gonna show you a proposed outline that you can push back on. We're gonna propose different data points that you can push back on or approve, and then we're also going to give you a final editable deck that you can ultimately make final changes on.

And so with that, I think it's allowing us to have the best of both worlds, where you have that brand continuity and confidence, but also you have ... You're approving as things are going along versus what you just described, which is beautify this slide, and then you don't know what you're gonna get until it comes back.

And it's sometimes it's fun. But sometimes it doesn't make any sense, so.

Galen Low: No, I absolutely agree. It's funny because in some ways, the, like, tools are mimicking misrepresentation of how design happens in the corporate world, which is that. Which is like, "Hey, I think this slide is done," or, "Here's a big document.

Can you just make it pretty? Like, and then send it back to me, and then we'll be done, and off we go." And it's not a partnership. And like, yeah, you and I, we've worked in agencies and, like, you know, places where we've got design teams. We used to, like, have a proposal design team, and literally it was like, "Proposal's done, but it's ugly.

Make more pretty. We're presenting it tomorrow. Like, you know, just slap some pretty pictures in there, and off we go." Which, in my opinion, is, yeah, I agree. I think it's, like, the wrong way to approach design, especially as a language that needs to resonate and hit with an audience, especially, like, a valuable audience that's going to, you know, have an impact on your project or your product or your business.

All that stuff matters. It's an art form. And I think, like, that was ... And my background's project management and business development. So, like, pitching is an art. Like, in the room is an art. And as a result, like, the slide deck is an art. And yeah, it's j- I just, I think it's funny that, like, art imitates life.

These tools are just like, "Yeah, I'll just have a make more pretty button," 'cause that's what people do in design, right?

Morgan Cornelius: Right. It's like, you know, the amount of adoption that has gone on, even in the last six months, of AI tools specifically in corporate America, it's, like, up and to the right, staggeringly so.

But I would argue that no matter what AI productivity tool you are using right now, you're not just taking it straight from the, you know, output that you got and walking into a conference room and presenting it. Because humans, to your point, we can see it. We can see it a mile away, and that goes, that's the same with presentations, and even more so.

Because it's not just the words in an email that are talking about your go-to-market strategy, it's all the visual elements that are going into play that are on a slide. And it just basically outs you immediately in terms of if you are using an AI tool or not. And you want it to look human-made, because if

The minute you start making people wondering, "This looks AI. I think this is AI," they're not listening to you anymore. They're just sitting there like, "Oh, Galen didn't spend a lot of time on this."

Galen Low: Right, yeah. It's like that uncanny valley that just, like, betrays that trust. Even though, to your point, like, everyone's using the technology, everyone's being very, if not forcibly, encouraged to use the technology right now.

And yet, like, it's still the tripwire for us, right? To be like, "Oop, that looks like AI slop that I shouldn't pay attention to or trust." 'Cause, you know, whatever the X axis on the graph has the wrong word or it's misspelled or, you know. That's all it takes, right? It's in the film business if you have, like, bad CGI, it just, like, pulls people right out of that.

And I think it's a really good point. Like, I'm not a deep expert On some of the tools to create presentations. But like we've been talking about, it is sort of baked in now to some of the tools that we've been using, you know, from Google Workspace to Office 365 and the others. But I think there is an art to this still.

It's not taking the art away, but you said something earlier that really resonated, which is like, it-- the work's not done sometimes when you get it back from design or from AI, and it, there's a difference between like, "Oh man, now I need to fix it," versus, "This is part of the process." I was wondering, because I'm curious about Decky, and Decky is a tool that specializes in generating internal and external company presentations using AI.

Like we talked about, it's not the only tool on the market. Some of my experience with like creating slide decks is with early incarnations of Miro AI. I know that like Figma's got some stuff going on as well. So like some of them are kind of like design level tools. I believe Canva, you know, has a lot of slide templates.

I haven't really played with any sort of AI feature for that. But like we've been talking about, not everyone is necessarily rushing to have AI create their slides for them, and I think it's because it hasn't yet established trust, not because the technology can't do it. I'd argue that it's because we haven't been taught the right way to do it.

Also, because of what we've been talking about, we already had a poor relationship with human designers to be like, "Oh, you know, slap this with a pretty brush. Like all you have to do is whatever flood fill blue and then it's on brand and like just send it back to me in an hour." And I think that has impacted the way we actually have been able to leverage or not leverage AI or not welcome AI into the slide presentation creation process.

I was wondering like could you like take me through the right way to use AI to create decks? What are some of the use cases? What are the benefits? And like why are people like me so resistant to it?

Morgan Cornelius: One thing you said that sparked something that I wanna just say really quickly, and then I can show you a couple examples that I think will be helpful for people listening in.

One thing I think you said that I think is absolutely true is I think a lot of these AI deck generators to date have Come in with the intention of we can generate a deck for you if you don't have a brand. And I think that oftentimes that is tremendously helpful. And even for like Sigmas and Miros of the world, and Canva even, if you don't have a really clearly thought out brand yet, those are fabulous tools to help get you generating something quality that you can use over the course of the rest of your time in existence.

What Decky did is flipped it on its head and said, "Well, actually, there's like a lot of companies out there that- Have a lot of employees that wanna generate a lot of decks, and we wanna be able to adhere to those brand guidelines, but expedite the creation process and then have humans, like we discussed earlier, kind of do those checks and balances throughout the creation flow, and then further so in the final deck form that we output for you.

So with that, I can go ahead and share my screen. I'll go through a couple examples. I think some of the most common ones that we've seen, that I personally have used it for, is taking, like, an internal deck and turning it into an external pitch, for example. And I will go ahead, and if it's okay with you, I'm going to use a couple of slides that you shared with me.

Galen Low: Okay, perfect. Yeah. Sneaky. Happy to put you on the spot. Morgan's like, "Redact some decks and we'll do a little demo." I'm like, "Okay."

Morgan Cornelius: Yes. So thank you for being a willing participant. But essentially, so this is decky.ai, and so when you create your new account, you're gonna get something you're very familiar with at this point with AI tooling, is this kind of open search bar or open text box, I should say, where you can...

In this case, it's gonna ask you what type of deck do we wanna build? And so you can start typing in your prompt here, but just for the sake of this demo, I went ahead in your slide library in the left nav over here. You wanna go to your slide library first before you do anything. This is my, like, personal advice, is go into your slide library section, which will be empty when you are in there, and you click create new library.

Just pick one deck that you love, and the one deck that you often find yourself doing the file, make a copy dance with, and upload it here, the one that you think is the one that is, like, your go-to for any deck creation that you often have to put together, whether it's, you know, external pitches, internal meetings, all-hands meetings, whatever it might be.

So in this case, what we are going to do is we will take this deck of yours. We'll say use this library, which is this button right here, and we'll go over here, and it'll be attached right up here. And what I'm gonna say is, "Turn this internal business case into an external pitch deck for a potential partnership between The Digital Project Manager, you, and CMX," which is basically a global community for community professionals.

So there's a lot of synergies between your businesses. So I'm just curious, like, we have this brand shift opportunity. Could we partner with an, a third party like CMX to see if we could extend our reach? And so I'm gonna go ahead and hit send. And so in here, it's gonna start thinking, and it's going to come back and say a few things.

So, "Great concept. Let me research both organizations before diving in." And it's going to start researching both CMX as well as The Digital Project Manager, and what I can do... So it's gonna say, "Okay, we did these completed searches. Now I know and understand everything." So it's going out to your websites and finding this information.

And then it's going to ask A couple of questions, which I can... I ran through and did this one other time, so I can do-- I can share the output fast, but let's see how... This thing usually takes about five minutes total.

Galen Low: I mean, compared to what I would do to do research, 'cause, like, I would do this, right? And, like, part of me, I'm sitting here, I'm going like, "Did I just make Morgan do work for me for free?"

'Cause, like, that's great, you know? Like, CMX partnership, like, let's go.

Morgan Cornelius: Yes, I really do, like, not just for this example, I do think they could be a really cool partner for you. So who is the primary recipient of this pitch at CMX? So Galen, who do you think you would pitch there if you were gonna engage in a partnership?

Galen Low: The options on screen are the executive team, the partnerships team, the education and academy team, or what's that last one?

Morgan Cornelius: It's Bevy Corporate, so that's CMX's parent company. All right, okay. So Bevy is a community app.

Galen Low: Oh, okay, yeah. My first port of call and by the way, this is a great use case, 'cause this does happen internally, like, we're pitching ideas, we're sending them up the flagpole, we're reviewing them as a leadership team, and then it's like, "Okay, go."

And then my process would be great, like, remake the deck, but for a different audience. My first port of call would probably be the partnerships team in this regard, because you know, we don't have an existing relationship so it's kind of new. It is mutually beneficial, and so yeah, that's probably where I'd want to start.

Morgan Cornelius: Okay, perfect. So I'm gonna say confirm. And depending on what you put in here, by the way, Galen, is like, so my-- like I said I would go between creating an all-hands deck to creating a presentation deck for an audience outside of the company. And a lot of the time it will narrow and change up that audience for you depending on what you're saying in there, like who's gonna be at the all hands or what, you know.

So anyway, it gets very specific.

Galen Low: That's cool.

Morgan Cornelius: Okay, so next question for you: The narrative is a strategic story arc that connects every slide. Which angle best reflects the internal business case you want to turn into this pitch? Shared audience bigger together, the project management community gap, a new professional certification category, or CMX's expansion into adjacent professional communities.

Galen Low: Ooh, this is cool. I like that it's kind of dipped into, in, in its research, it's dipped into my deck, presumably into CMX's, whatever it could find on its business model. My default is to go with the shared audience bigger together. I think it ties in with that partnership model, and it's the typical language that we'd use to sort of pitch, because it brings that sort of mutuality to it.

Morgan Cornelius: Totally. I agree. And so if, let's say you didn't resonate, going back to that word. The word of the podcast is resonate. If you didn't agree with any of these four options, you can also go in here and type something else. So if you feel like, eh, it's not hitting it, you can go in here and say This is what I actually want it to be about, and it will pivot and adjust accordingly.

Galen Low: That's cool.

Morgan Cornelius: All right, we went ahead and answered that question. And so now what it's probably gonna do is figuring out what should the CMX team do or decide after seeing this deck? Do we wanna have them book a follow-up scoping call? Do we wanna have them sign a letter of intent or MOU? Do we want them to agree to a pilot collaboration?

Or do we want them to co-develop a partnership term sheet or other? Ooh. That's the fifth op- fifth option.

Galen Low: I think for this, pilot collaboration is probably where we'd start. And yeah, honestly, I'm coming at it from the perspective of, like, let's start, you know, dating first before we get married.

Morgan Cornelius: No, I think that's very wise, even in corporate speak.

Yeah. Okay, so now it's gonna ask you, this is, like, the last question. How in-depth should this deck be? Do you want it to be five to seven slides, tight and high impact, eight to 12, thought thorough but focused, or 13 plus, which is a comprehensive deep dive?

Galen Low: Ooh, this is interesting because folks who've seen decks from me know that they literally are like a kid's book approach, where it's like it might have one sentence on the slide.

I'm that kind of person who can get through 100 slides in 40 minutes, which is neither good nor bad, or maybe both. I'm interested what it will do, but I think let's go for the Goldilocks middle ground here and do, like, an eight to 12 slide prezo.

Morgan Cornelius: All right. I did notice you do a lot ... I do the same thing, again, kindred spirit deck builders, is you do a lot of building.

Like, I noticed that you, there's a lot of slides that build upon each other, and I, yeah, I think what will typically happen is Decky, as it's kind of having you answer these questions, it's also assessing the deck. In our case, we attached a specific deck we wanted it to use. In other cases, it might look through, if you uploaded more than one deck, it's gonna look through all three decks while you're answering these questions and then present you at the end, "Hey, this deck looks like it might be the best fit."

So in the case of the 13 plus, it's probably gonna pull the deck that has all those builds so that it can try and mimic your behavior so it feels most like you and that you built it to the specs that you wanted.

Galen Low: That's really interesting.

Morgan Cornelius: And so this is gonna map to a 10-slide pitch, thorough but not bloated, audience narrative goal length, we call that the angle, is locked.

And it's gonna give you this deck because that's what we gave it previously. So this is what I did before we all got on this. I answered all the questions. I said 20 slides selected, so this is- No, let's go ... proving to you I like a build.

Galen Low: I just didn't wanna be that guy. Is there an option for 99 plus slides?

Morgan Cornelius: I was the girl, so that's fine. So after you say that, and it... What's going on in the live demo is that it's saying, "Okay, we've selected this slide deck." Now it's saying, "This deck includes several market sizing figures and DPM metrics. Please confirm these assumptions." So this is where I'm talking about, like, that element of where you get to approve The data that it's recommending, they want to incorporate into the deck they're creating for you.

So it's making these assumptions, and it's citing the source. So it found this in the PMI Talent Gap report on your website. These are things that you said in your deck. This is something that was in the PMI consolidated financial statements, all this stuff. So then you can go ahead and hit approve. You can go in and say, "Not, take this one out."

So you can actually get very granular.

Galen Low: That's really cool.

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah, all that stuff. And also, if, like I said, if anything's not looking right, there's always gonna be this feedback section where you can say, "The BLS job outlook growth rate at 7% is incorrect. Like, strip that. Everything else looks..." Whatever you wanna say, you can go in there and be very specific.

Galen Low: Yeah, as I'm going through this, I'm, like, mapping it to what our process would be. I've been very blessed, you know, in the past to work with great internal creative teams who have a really solid understanding of the business, not usually to this degree, to be like, "Here are the stats that I pulled."

Usually my creative team, I wouldn't ask them to do that. And also, like, does it look right? Like, 'cause I'm supporting the story, like the narrative arc, not the how does the slide deck look. Which, don't get me wrong, like, a lot of my creative teams will do that. They'll be like, "Okay, what is the arc? And I added these things."

But not usually the business stats, which is interesting. And often, you'll probably relate to this, some of my listeners as well, it's like it's not always the same designer. Like, they don't have this library in their brains of, like, presentations you've done before. So the fact that it's pulling from a library of examples as it's going through this process, that's, like, a really interesting benefit to me because it's like, okay, I know stuff you've done in the past, and I'm gonna work it in, versus the traditional, like, I've only got four hours budgeted to do this deck.

So, like, I'm just gonna get through it as fast as I can and get your feedback. I don't really have time to, like, go and review previous assets unless you sent me a specific example. So, like, yeah, I can see how it's got the craftsmanship inbuilt, and it's not really a role that exists. It's kind of like a...

Well, I mean, it is a role that exists, probably your role, right? Chief of staff, does everything, knows the business inside and out, knows how to tell a good story, has an eye for design. But it is a unicorn role to try and find someone to do these things, like a single person to do these things probably under a time crunch.

So this is really cool.

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah, I mean, it's a total time saver. I think when we developed this particular feature in the automation flow, a lot of it was coming from, like, me and the team saying, "AI, everyone's still so skeptical of AI and, like, hallucinations." And we wanna be able to give you the peace of mind to say, "Here are the data points we recommend and we want to weave in, and here's the proof point of where we're pulling this so that we make sure that you have that peace of mind when you look at the slide."

And also in each slide where this stuff is referenced, it's in your slide notes. So if you're presenting and somebody's like, "Where'd you get that email subscriber number?" You can click down on that slide note and be like, "Oh yeah, it's from my internal DPM metrics."

Galen Low: That's really neat.

Morgan Cornelius: And so then you have it, like it's, like, your handy little tool.

So that all happens, and then it generates your deck. And so I go ahead and open this in Google Slides. You can also have this output in PowerPoint, so it's integrated in PowerPoint and Google Slides. But the other thing about a lot of the other AI deck tools is that you can't edit anything. So, like, you can actually go in here.

It's not one HTML image. You can actually go in here and edit anything that might feel off or wrong or Out of place or miscentered. It does a pretty darn good job. Like, this was an untouched deck that it generated, and it's, like, talking about DPM, our reach has limits. Today we primarily serve North America.

CMX is international. And so it's like, here's this idea about making a pilot to one another, DPM and CMX, a community for any project-based professional in any digitally enabled sector, powered by CMX's community expertise. And so it goes into, here's the partnership prize, here's what the certification could look like Here's what DPM is building, and here are the first three steps of launching this partnership or this pilot.

Galen Low: Not bad. And for folks who are listening to this, we're in Google Slides. It is my brand font, font size. This first three-step slide is not from me. This is definitely generated, but I, like, genuinely, I would create the slide exactly like that. You know? I would use this layout with, like, the bold sort of, like, impact heading on the left and then the three bullet points on the right Yeah, because honestly, coming into this, I was like, great, then I have to like fine-tune it and apply, you know, all these other brand guidelines that are a bit nuanced or that I'd have to like share our brand guidelines.

Luckily, like our creative team is great. We have like a really good brand book, but I didn't need that. So I'm actually, I've got- I'm quite impressed. This is cool.

Morgan Cornelius: Good. I'm so glad. Yeah, I guess I haven't shown you this more specific output. I told you I was like maybe gonna use your slides, but...

Galen Low: You know, I wasn't sure what to expect. And I think it's because what we've been talking about is some of the tools have been a bit lackluster probably because they're, you know, MVP.

They wanna get to market early. Some of the tools like, you know, Google Slides or Miro, like it's expected, like the users expect this to be there immediately. So they're probably under a lot of pressure to launch those features. But what you just stepped me through, the familiar interface, like it looked like ChatGPT to me with some extra bells and whistles, but as soon as we hit send, it started going through this interview process that it was very clearly a thought partner working with me along the way, not just, "Hey, I'm gonna generate something and then you have to go and mark or just redline it."

It was actually a collaborative process. It reminds me a bit of like if you use a tool called PressMaster for content creation, which is very interview-based, but this is... What I like is the questions that it asks. Like it's what I would want someone to ask me with suggestions that I would want someone to suggest, even if, and especially in a situation where there isn't often one person who I could be dialoguing with unless they were like a rather senior leader in the business who understands the business, understands the partnership parameters, understands the brand, understands what we're trying to do in alignment with our strategy, that like to pivot that deck, which was an internal pitch deck, to be like, "Should we do this?"

To a deck that's like, "Ah, actually, let's approach CMX with this." It was pretty painless.

Morgan Cornelius: It's very painless, and I would say start to finish, it's usually about, like, a 10 to 15-minute process usually, like max, I would say. I mean, we went through most of that in five minutes. It's the ... Once you do that, then it's generating the deck, and that might be the longest piece, which is, a- again, like, five to 10 minutes max.

But to your point, like, other places, I've had to hit refresh for 30 minutes. So we're trying to be as fast as we can.

Galen Low: It's funny, I keep coming back to how it mimics, like, real life. But returning to the question of how can we avoid making our decks look like AI slop, the answer is, like, collaborating.

Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's not a technical answer. It's not like, "Use these five prompts to make your decks 10 times more impactful for executive audiences." It's like, actually have a dialogue, you know, have clear expectations, brief well, but also be available to, like, answer questions so that we shape it along the way, instead of the standard, which is like, "Here are the slides that are ugly.

Make them more pretty, and then send them back to me," and, you know, you'll say, "It's done," and I'll be like, "I'll redline it." Like, it's just not a good way to collaborate. And then to the AI point, honestly, just for me, like, when you said like, "Oh yeah, you can edit this in Google Slides," versus like, "Here's a flat PDF that came back," because me providing feedback to AI, like, I find it really tedious right now.

It's like, "On slide nine, where you've said this thing, the third bullet point, that's the incorrect blah, blah, blah," and it's, it gets so tedious that, like, it becomes something where I'll be like, "Ah, good enough." And then I have slop, right? Not because the technology, but because I was like, "It's too tedious for me to provide feedback now, so I guess I'll just leave it."

Morgan Cornelius: Correct. It's either it's good enough or I might as well just do this by myself.

Galen Low: Yes.

Morgan Cornelius: Cause right now I'm prompting this thing for so long that I could be done by now. Like- Yes. Yeah ... I just ... it can get to that point. So that's the general back and forth that goes on with any deck creation in Decky. It starts with your brand and with your favorite deck, and that is why it's able to output something that we saw that's very high quality.

You know, in the interest of time, I can just voiceover two quick things One is using that same use case of, hey, we wanna do a pilot between CMX and DPM, create an external pitch deck. I went ahead and did this preemptively saying I uploaded that deck that we just went through into my slide library, clicked on it and said, "Use this deck."

And then I added this prompt which says, "Using this partnership pitch deck, create an internal briefing on the consensus reached between the digital project manager and CMX, which was we would move forward with a pilot together and then determine after that how much deeper we wanna go with one another on co-mingling our communities and resources.

We plan to kick our work off in June of 2026, and it will run for three months. People presenting this deck are senior project managers making a case to leadership. Cite any sources you pull that aren't from the materials I've shared." And so it went through the same thing. It looked up both websites. It then said, "Here are some good data that you can pull," which is like, you know, a general outline.

I rejected this because there was something that I didn't like in here, and I can't remember off the top of my head. So it basically said, "Okay, fine, let me do it again." It gave me a much better response, and it was shorter. I think what I said was, "This needs to be more succinct. This is executive leadership that we're presenting this to," so back to that, like, high level bullet point layout.

And then it went to, okay, this is approved. You selected this slide deck in advance, and here is the output. And so basically, what it shared was, it's like, hey, we're already established. There is no community built for digital first project professionals at scale outside of, you know, the US, and here's the data point.

And here's why we're partnering with CMX, and here is what we agreed to. And here's the pilot launch in June of 2026, and then it's our three-month plan And we're done. That's it. It's very short and sweet.

Galen Low: I like this set of use cases 'cause it's so real, right? Because you pitch it internally, they're like, "Okay, you know, let's do this."

Then you communicate it to somebody else, maybe you're pitching it externally, maybe you're, like, briefing staff internally, and then there's, like, a decision made, and it's like, okay, well now we need to, like, present it back, or like, okay, in the next QBR, like, can we share results or, like, what we're gonna do?

And this is this shuttling of information from deck to deck. I love it because I think it's fun, but, like, when you zoom out and you're like, "Okay, what did I just do? Oh yeah, I just, like, paraphrased the same idea 11 times over the past two quarters," whereas I probably... Like, it should just kind of transform on its own, right?

To progress through this, like, pipeline of from pitch to agreement to execution to, "Okay, we're done, and how did it go?" Without having to, like, just reinvent the wheel every time for different audiences. Yeah, this is great.

Morgan Cornelius: It just is such a time saver. And so to your point about the end of, you know, running through a long-standing, you know, go-to-market launch on a partnership or a pilot, like we've been using in our first examples, is this idea of taking all of the retrospective notes from said project after, let's say, the pilot's done, and actually being able to articulate it in a way that is worth socializing internally to actually make improvements for the next go around of some kind of implementation.

And so in this case, what I'll say is this is a separate use case. It touches on something we all as project managers or a community manager or anyone who has to communicate to internal stakeholders, you know, up the wazoo, it never ends. Right. Is the last thing you, everyone wants to do is sit in a retrospective meeting or fill out a Google Form about how you felt everything went.

So if you can actually pull teeth and get all that information, this is one thing that I generated using some account retro notes that you shared with me from something that you guys worked on. And I basically said, "Hey, can you take this and make up some Google Form responses and put it into an exec presentation proposing recommended process changes for the next time we go forward with something like this?"

And so it went through the same thing, so everything we've seen before. And then, actually, what I think you'll find interesting is It turned it into ... Well, this is more of your slide build layout. We shipped something hard, and then it was like, "What went well? Where we struggled, where the team told us," and then, "And we shipped it anyway."

But the friction was real and it was avoidable. I felt like for this spitting out without any me touching any of it, I felt like it embodied your voice, too.

Galen Low: Yeah, and, you know, for our listeners, I think what I had sent you was basically slides of a, like, a really rough slide deck based on just a Google Doc notes from the session.

Morgan Cornelius: Like, it was really messy. It was just ... No, all you sent was just notes. I- that's all I attach- Was it? Okay. All I attached for this one- That's why the- And then it suggested, "Here's the deck I think you should use for this," and it proposed this one. So this was an old deck, but it was unrelated.

Galen Low: Yeah, I can see that it's pulled from the library.

Some of the highlighting of, like, you know, my traffic lighting of what went well, what didn't go so well what are we gonna do better next time, like, that is what I would do. So this is actually ... Yeah, this is quite good. And, like, just to, like, really like, double down on that use case, internally we are quite, I keep saying messy.

Messy is not really the word, but it's like okay, we can work into a slide together on a call and, like, just take notes and blah, blah, blah. Sometimes we'll use Miro, and sometimes we'll use the Miro pirate themed project retrospective template, which by the way is not the best one to send to executive teams afterwards, right?

But it is the one to, like, have some fun with the team to do a productive retro. Like you mentioned, it's always uncomfortable. No one really wants to do it. If you can make it fun, that's great, but then like, okay, now we have this pirate themed Miro board that we have to explain to leadership of, like, "Are you sure you guys did a retro?

Like, or did you, like, plunder gold?" So this ... That would be a great one to be like, "Okay, well, let's put this into this format that now can fit into, like, a leadership session, like a QBR session, or, you know, even, like, a town hall or something like that," without having to just, like, copy and paste for, like, several hours and you know, de-piratify it.

Morgan Cornelius: You could even upload that pirate template into Decky and then have that be your fun side Preso outline f- if you will, for the right audience, and then you can go- I love that, yeah ... use the more buttoned-up version for the folks that need it to be like, "Okay, Galen is serious about his job."

Galen Low: The pirate Decky library, pirate themed, I should say.

Morgan Cornelius: Exactly. So those are kind of the three use cases I thought would be most helpful for your audience.

Galen Low: I'm gonna ask you a non-Decky related question, which is, you know, I'm liking what I'm seeing here. We talked about a number of things, like we were looking at the dials to twist for like stats that might be a turnoff, like there's the brand.

Like, if someone is not using Decky but they are planning to use AI or would love to try to use AI to generate a slide deck tomorrow, what would you advise them to do differently that they might not do when they're just looking at the make the slide more pretty button in Google Slides or, you know, any other platform?

Morgan Cornelius: So you're asking more broadly if somebody's gonna leverage AI to build a presentation?

Galen Low: Yeah, what kind of questions should they be asking? What the should they be looking for as the like gotchas of like that uncanny valley thing? And even, you know, like you had shown that prompt, and I thought it was a really good prompt of like things to consider to tell your tool rather than just assume it knows.

Do you know what I mean? Like, what are some of those points?

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah. I think if you were to just use any AI presentation tool, I think the watch outs are make sure that it's actually outputting something that reflects your brand, colors, themes, fonts, whatever. It might not get it 100%, and so you're gonna have to go in and probably make those edits yourself.

I would say be really specific. I think to the, you know, example that we're continuing to go back to, it's like if you give it a prompt and just say, "Beautify," it's not gonna hit the marks that you're gonna want. And so I would say think about who you're presenting to and what's going to resonate most with them.

It's gonna be who's the audience? What's th- the outcome you want to come out of that meeting? Who are the people that are gonna be presenting with you, or what kind of data do you wanna include? I would say all of those things are kind of the watch outs of making sure that you're implementing guardrails if you're not using something like Decky that will help you get an output closer to what you probably will need as a starting point.

I don't know how much more time will n- need to be spent after that on like perfecting the slides, but I do think those kind of baseline elements are gonna get you something pretty close.

Galen Low: Yeah, I think that's great and that's been my experience as well is like it sometimes all the prompting and human taste in the world won't solve the problem of, okay, well, it didn't quite get my brand, and there's more work to be done.

That is not a muscle I've built yet, right? Where it's like, okay, well, now we need to, whatever, take this PDF and put it into something and like kind of recreate these slides and this is... And then you get to that point where it's like, oh gosh, I could've probably just done this myself. Which is, you know, like we're both AI forward as well as being, you know, somewhat we'll say human centered, not AI skeptics as well.

But like we want this to work, but it's only gonna work by us also using it and getting better and providing feedback and voting with our whatever, seat licenses, to figure out w- you know, what is actually going to work for us. This is great. Thank you for doing all that.

Morgan Cornelius: My pleasure. It's been fun. I'm happy to be able to kind of drive you around, so that was great.

It was really cool. Yeah, I know. You know what's funny is, like this is a bit of a sidebar but related, is I was thinking about our conversation today and I was like, you know what? I wonder... I've never actually done the math on how many hours I've spent building decks. And so I was like, you know what? I probably won't be able to quantify my whole career, but I can very confidently say my time at Yelp, I was presenting at least four times a month.

Each deck, I probably was spending about four hours. I wrote it down. I was like, okay, four presentations a month times, I'd say, four and a half years out of my five years there I was doing that much in terms of volume. Multiply it by four hours a deck, it turned into 864 hours of my time. And then when I divided that by a 40-hour work week, it equated to 21.6 weeks of my time.

That's six months, Galen. That's, like, wild. I was like, "This is insane." And so I think the future of AI, the exciting thing about it is that- It is going to significantly reduce that bottleneck, and I think that people are no longer gonna be able to have an excuse of, "Oh, I didn't have time to build this deck just adequately."

You are going to no longer be able to fall back on that, and really, what's gonna become very clear is how much time you invested in the thoughtfulness and the content that went into the deck. And so I think that's kind of an interesting place for us to be in the space of AI presentation tools.

Galen Low: I actually love that.

I wonder if we can, like, dive a little bit deeper into that future vision as well. I think the challenge across everything that's being touched by AI right now is what do we do with the extra time? In my head, I'm like, "20 weeks of creating decks? That sounds cool. That's pretty fun." It is strategic. It's like a thing, you know, that we do, and maybe that's not so bad.

But of course, the value prop of being like maybe you don't have to spend 20 weeks, like, beautifying a deck, copy and pasting, figuring out the right words, or doing the research, assembling the narrative You know, I think for me, the wrong way to look at it would be like, cool, and then we just, like, get the slides, and we'll just present them and, you know, off we go.

And now we can go do other things like Mai Tais on the beach. But you and I think we're very passionate presentation people. So I was wondering, like, in the context of presenting information to people to get people aligned, to have something resonate, if we're not spending all that time crafting a deck, where would you put that time to make presentations even better?

Morgan Cornelius: Sure. I mean, I think if we're no longer spending, in my case, an average of four hours per deck, and AI is taking that presentation tax off my plate of to-dos, I can then invest, reinvest that time into being even more thoughtful with the content that I'm putting into the deck. I think that your accountability for how thoughtful and how strategic and how tailored your deck can be is then even more specific and polished than previously when you probably spend 60% of the time on the words and then another 40% on the deck that goes with it.

And now it's probably gonna be closer to 90% where you get to focus your time on actual thoughtful content that you're putting into these slides. And so I think the future of presentations is mostly just like it's not fewer slides, it's more just no more bad slides, and the content that goes with it is even more effective and resonates with whoever you're speaking with.

Galen Low: I like that. It removes the friction, but the role of the human is still strategic. I mean, I'm saying this as me, but I'm like, communicating information to people and persuading them or being convincing or being compelling even, you know, spinning a good yarn and telling a story is a journey. Like, you never get there.

It's not like, good, now we're the perfect storytellers. We can stand on a beach to any executive audience, like, off we go. It's something that we can always be better at, more effective at, more efficient at. It's a craft. It's an art form.

Morgan Cornelius: And I think to that end, I probably should be expanding on the fact that it's not just, like, the content that goes into the deck, but to your point, you get to have hours back on practicing and learning what you wanna say even more effectively because before some presentations, I am like the last twenty-four hours before I'm, like, repeating and repeating, and I would have loved to have used the last week, but I was busy in the deck.

Galen Low: Yeah, 100%. 100%. Yeah, very relatable.

Morgan Cornelius: Yeah. Kind of wild. So- ... that's kind of where I foresee our time being spent.

Galen Low: I like that Morgan, thanks so much for spending the time with me today. I've had a lot of fun. I love our chats. Just for even more fun, is there a question that you wanna ask me?

Morgan Cornelius: Well, okay, yes, but mostly because I was doing that math for myself on how many weeks I've spent building decks.

My one question is, if you can recall, or even in recent years, what's the longest you've spent building a single deck?

Galen Low: Oh my gosh. If a, like, conference presentation counts. By the way, for all my listeners, like, I've been doing conference presentations wrong. I realize that most people are, like, touring around something that they spent a chunk of time on, or an idea that they spent a chunk of time on and tailoring it.

I've been doing everything bespoke for every conference. And literally, I feel like... And again, this is, like, me. My gestation process is, like, weeks and weeks of, like, not even touching slides. But if you were to start at that slide moment, I've spent, like- Almost three solid weeks putting together a deck.

Like, and I mean, like, canceling all the meetings or like working in the evening and, like, definitely the equivalent of upwards of 100 hours, like, on a presentation. And I think a lot of that is ... Some of it is gestation for me, right? Like, I'm like still crafting the arc and figuring out the perfect thing and, like, getting advice and talking to people.

But I do think that it's so lonely for me. I don't have that thought partner or someone I can really bring into the depth of my thought and, like, be like, "Is this good?" Like, everyone is gonna look at it from the outside, which is very valuable, right? 'Cause, you know, the audience is that. They're gonna be looking in and going like, "That doesn't quite make sense.

I'm not sure what the point is here." But that crafting of the arc to, like, really resonate with an audience and a very diverse audience, I think, like, that's a thing that I'm, like, agonizing over. And in a way I'm like, okay, it's worth my time to land the punch in the room. But the exact same thing, like, A, it's lonely.

I wish I had, like, a thought partner who kind of got it. B, I would love to spend more time on, like, refining delivery. I'm that person who's like, I usually don't sleep at night before like, that presentation 'cause I'm, like, still rehearsing and I'm like, do I even know what I'm saying on this slide? And it seems like the delivery is an afterthought, so I'm like 100% with you on that.

But yeah, like, if I were to do the calculation on how much time I've spent in my career doing presentations, it's a big number. It's like up there with just being in meetings.

Morgan Cornelius: No, I'm with you, and actually that makes me feel better 'cause last night my husband was like, "Well, how many hours you think you spent on that 40-minute presentation you gave at your last company?"

And I was like, "I don't know, 50 to 100 hours?" And at first he said 100, and I was like, that's insane. And then I was like, actually, yeah, I might have done that. But- Yeah ... well, so thank you for commiserating on the time spent.

Galen Low: It is. It's time-consuming. I love it, but also, yeah, I love, like, the craft, but I'd also think it can elevate, so.

Morgan Cornelius: Yes, 100%. So anyway, okay, well, thank you. I was hoping I was in good company with that question.

Galen Low: No, I appreciate it. Yeah, could you imagine? I was like, "I don't know, like maybe two hours."

Morgan Cornelius: 15? Yeah. And I would've been like, "Well, I don't know why you invited me to this podcast." Yeah. Oops. We are two different people.

Galen Low: Oh, amazing. Amazing. For folks who are listening and they wanna learn more about you or Decky or mrcantile, where can they find you?

Morgan Cornelius: Sure. The easiest is finding me on LinkedIn, which is Morgan R. Cornelius. Feel free to connect with me there. Same handle on Instagram. And then I would say for Decky, if anyone listening wants to use or try out Decky for a month of upgraded Decky Pro, you can use the promo code deckydpm.

And then it's ... the website's just decky.ai. So those are the easiest places to go.

Galen Low: That's awesome. Thanks for that. I appreciate that. I'm gonna check it out too. I'll include the links to your profile and Decky and the promo code in the show notes for folks who are listening or watching. And yeah, that's great.

This was fun.

Morgan Cornelius: Awesome. Very fun. Thanks so much, Galen. Appreciate your time.

Galen Low: All right folks, that's it for today's episode of The Digital Project Manager Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you want even more tactical insights, case studies, playbooks, create a free account with us at thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.