But there is a good alternative that will save you hours of work, enforce good design principles and guarantee that you don’t put too much information on a single slide. Meet beautiful.ai, an artificial intelligence-driven presentation platform that’s easy to use. In fact, you really can’t go wrong.

Beautiful.ai was launched by a San Francisco-based startup in 2018, reaching 1 million users in 2021. But it wasn’t until the ChatGPT phenomenon that swept TikTok late last year and flooded mainstream media that other AI-powered apps such as beautiful.ai were included in lists of apps to try by tech-savvy influencers. I had saved a TikTok post that talked about beautiful.ai and referred to it when I had a big presentation to create.

To my surprise, beautiful.ai lived up to its hype. Once you’ve signed up for the free two-week trial (it will cost you $12 a month to continue), the workspace will open and you simply click the button that reads “Create a presentation.” Here you’ll pick a theme that consists of a color palette and font on the left, and you’ll see a preview on the right with a title slide and a few sample slides. Click “Create presentation” and you’re on your way. Note that you can upload your own fonts and change colors at any time. Your selections will automatically be applied to the entire presentation.

First up is the title slide. After typing in the title, you can click to add a label above the title and a subheader under the title. Click the “add image” button to see a gallery of professional images available to you or upload your own image by dragging it into the dialogue box. Once you’ve done that, you can easily change the layout by clicking on the “Layout” button that has now appeared at the bottom of your screen. Options like this one appear as you need them.

Now you’re ready to add your information slides. My best advice to you is to have an outline of your presentation prepared ahead of starting work in the app. Click the plus button to the right of the title slide to see a gallery of slide templates arranged by purpose. When you click on one, you’ll open up a sub-gallery of templates to choose from. Continue creating slides until you’re finished. You can also duplicate a slide and modify it by hovering on the plus buttons and choosing “duplicate.” If you decide that your information would look better in a different format, you can click on the button at the top of your screen that shows the type of slide you’re using and then select “Switch Smart Slide” from the dropdown. All of the items you’ve already added to the slide will be brought over to the new slide.

If you have a slide with text boxes of an image gallery, you will be able to add items up to a point, but the app will tell you when you’ve reached the limit. This ensures you don’t crowd your slide with too much information.

Now it’s time to review your presentation. Beautiful.ai automatically adds subtle animations as each slide loads. You can see the final result by clicking the play button. Sharing your online presentation is easy — hit the share icon and copy the link. You can also download as a PDF, an editable or regular PowerPoint, Google Slides document, or copy the embed code to post to a website.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can have beautiful.ai make an entire presentation for you via the new Designer Bot AI added earlier this year. Like with ChatGPT, you write a prompt describing what you want and in less than a minute, beautiful.ai will have created a 10 to 20 slide presentation that you can then edit as described above. While the result was not close to what I needed, it could be improved with a more explicit prompt and it certainly represents a fast track way to start a new project.

Leslie Meredith has been writing about technology for more than a decade. As a mom of four, value, usefulness, and online safety take priority. Have a question? Email Leslie at asklesliemeredith@gmail.com.