Stop wasting hours on slide design and start focusing on your message!

If you dread building slide decks, this video is for you. Dr. Shannon Gregg, President of Cloud Adoption Solutions, demonstrates how to use the latest AI-driven features in Google Slides and Gamma.app to transform simple text into professional, beautiful presentations in seconds.

What you’ll learn in this video:

How to use the new “Beautify” feature (look for the banana!) in Google Slides.

Transforming complex text prompts into high-quality, framed graphics.

A look at Google Labs and the future of AI-generated infographics and studio visuals.

A comparison with Gamma.app: How to generate full outlines and slide decks from a single line of text.

Professional tips on Slide Theory: Why fewer words on a slide lead to better audience engagement.

Whether you’re presenting a PhD dissertation or a sales pitch, these AI tools act as your personal graphic designer. Watch as Shannon takes a complex topic—Lewin’s Theory of Change—and turns it into a visual masterpiece instantly!

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

If you, like me, are not a huge fan of creating PowerPoint slides or slide decks for your meetings, boy, do I have some exciting news for you. Google has released a few new features that will allow you to create beautiful slides without much time. So let me show you, and at the end, I will also give you a little insight into how to use Gamma.app, which I think many of you have heard about from me before.

My name is Dr. Shannon Gregg. I am the president of Cloud Adoption Solutions, a Salesforce consultancy, and I also teach professional selling and sales technology at Point Park University. Let’s get into it.

So, if you go into your standard Google slideshow and you start to insert some information, you will see—once you have enough words in here—’Beautify this slide.’ Now, you may be a little bit better at creating slides than I am, and maybe you want to add some photos. I mean, you can definitely insert some photos inside of there, and Google will take that into account for you. So let’s say I want to find something for ‘freeze,’ and I’ll stick that stock image in there. Here’s somebody who’s freezing.

So now you see down here at the bottom, there’s this little banana with ‘Beautify this slide,’ and you can use that in a couple of different ways to help you visualize. Let me go ahead and click that. So, that’s pulling through some visualizations that are working on the words that I have entered into the slide. In this particular case, I literally grabbed two sentences from my PhD dissertation, which, excitingly, was on the theories that will help you to identify CRM user adoption. I work in Salesforce all day, don’t blame me!

So, Google’s going to start to generate a slide that is much more beautiful. Look how fast that was. This is much more beautiful than what I had in here already. So let’s go ahead and replace that; let’s pull that over into its own slide. Let’s do it.

Alright, so let’s check this out. Now, you can see that this filled this out, and I’ll close this so you can see it a little bit more. Lewin’s theory of change: the process. It’s predicated on three primary steps—unfreeze, change, refreeze. This is all true; these were the words that I put inside of here. So you can see it used the photo that I stuck in there very quickly, gave it a little frame, created this background, and also created this graphic, which I think is incredible. You saw how fast that happened, so that was awesome. I’m totally digging this.

If you have presentations to give and are not a graphic designer, or don’t have time to have somebody help you create one, this is a really great way for you to get around that. So then, Google also has, now, a way that you can start creating slides all the way from the beginning. They’ve got this beta version of creating polished slides from simple text prompts, which I believe is Google’s answer to Gamma.app. Google has said, ‘Oh, really, Gamma? You’re doing that? So can we.’

So let’s try this one together. I’m gonna show you how Gamma works in a second, but I also see now you can create images, which is awesome—that’s where the banana comes from. This came out of Google Labs. You may have seen this on my Try New Tech podcast with Jason Anthony a while ago, where you can create studio-quality visuals, so that can be done. Infographics are incredible for marketers, product marketers, and people who are trying to create simple visualizations for very complex sets of data, so that is something that is really fun to play with. Of course, there’s templates and you can import; that’s been in Google Drive slides for a long time.

So, let’s try this out. I want to say the same information: ‘Lewin’s theory of change is predicated on these three primary steps,’ and let’s see what Google comes out with here. You can see that it’s starting to help me visualize this, it’s generating this, and we’re going to find out if it’s as fast as the last one where I started making my slide myself and then allowed Google to beautify it. Now, instead, Google’s starting all the way from the top to create a slide that takes just my words and puts this into a presentation.

Alright, wow, that was quick! So let’s go ahead and stick that in there; insert as new slide. So: ‘Lewin’s theory of change. Unfreeze: reducing the solid form of the organization, melting the status quo. Change: the transition phase, managing the change and introducing new practices. Refreeze:’ and it’s made this ice like a diamond, ‘solidifying the new shape, making the change permanent and sustainable.’ You guys, I think that’s pretty beautiful.

Now, it didn’t replicate all of my words like this one did, which—general slide theory, when you’re making a big presentation, you don’t want to have too many words because it puts a wall in between you and the people who are listening to you. You’re interrupting their thought pattern and forcing them to read all these words. So, this actually is a better slide. If you’re a presenter who’s giving a presentation, presenting a slide that doesn’t have too many words is so much better for your audience to allow you to connect with them. I know sometimes people like to use those bullet points as a crutch, but I’m begging you not to do that.

Alright, so now we’ve got two examples from Google, both of which I think are magnificent. If I were presenting on the theory of change, either of those would work pretty well. This was my theory; this is the one that Google came up with by itself. It’s a little bit more smooth because it didn’t pull in some random photo of somebody who was freezing.

And now, when you’re in Gamma.app, which I believe was probably the inspiration for Google, you can start by generating slides from a one-line prompt, you can paste in the text, create from a template, and import a file if you already have something that exists. We’re going to go with ‘Generate,’ because that’s what we just did in Google.

Now, when you are using Gamma.app, you can select the number of slides that you want to have. I do want you to know that the general rule of speaking is you should spend about three minutes per slide. So if you’re choosing ten cards, that should probably be for at least a 30-minute presentation, maybe up to 45 minutes. So, for us to get this done quickly, we’re just gonna go with two cards, and we know we want it to be a presentation. Of course, you can change some of these other things here too, but I really just want you to see how this works quickly.

So, using my words about Lewin’s theory of change, based on those three steps—unfreeze, change, and refreeze—you can see how quickly Gamma created this outline. They’ve got an outline here that says: ‘Here’s this theory of change, and here’s the three stages explained,’ which Gamma went and found for itself because I didn’t give it that prompt.

I’m gonna go ahead and click ‘Generate’ so that you can see how quickly it will generate those slides. Of course, you can add cards and you can change the way that all of these look. On all three of these, you can make edits to the overall presentation of the slide, what it looks like, the colors, the pictures, those sorts of things. So, you can see now that Gamma.app is presenting the three stages explained. It’s creating pictures, all of which can be edited.

So for unfreeze, change, and refreeze, you can see it kind of pulled into something that was a little more complex. I do not think that you should present something that has this many words on a slide, but if you are trying to create slides as a study guide, maybe that would be helpful. So, you can see how these three different tools created something different quickly, but they’re all very nice graphics—much nicer than that first thing I showed you where I just put words and grabbed a stock photo from Google Slides.

These three, I think, are great ways for you to quickly create a presentation if you know full well what your subject matter is going to be. Love to hear from you in the comments below which tool is your favorite, or if there are any other ones that you have used before. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you jumping in and learning more about how to create slides using AI.