Transform a messy deck into a tight story.

What the AI will do

• Find the central story in your deck, then shorten and rebuild it into coherent phases and slides.
• Own the full draft and manage a separate editor’s critique, revise, then bring in a fresh audience reviewer where agents are available; otherwise use clearly labeled sequential review passes.
• Check the revised deck’s argument, sources, timing, and rendered slides where possible, then incorporate your feedback.

What you can provide

• The deck, including visuals and speaker notes where available.
• Missing context about the audience, occasion, time available, and what you want people to think or do afterward.

Where you'll take part

• Agree on the one-sentence narrative before the AI rebuilds around it, and review any later changes to that central argument.
• Review the revised presentation, identify what remains unclear, and resolve substantive questions.

What you'll get

You’ll have a rebuilt presentation with one clear narrative and slides that advance it, or complete replacement slide content and the route to creating the file when this AI cannot produce it.

Activity context

A strong deck gives the audience a story they can follow in the moment and retell afterward. Have AI find that story, rebuild the sequence, and make each slide earn its place.

For the user

Share the deck and paste the prompt below. Tell the AI anything it cannot infer about the audience, the occasion, and what you want people to think or do afterward.

The AI will propose a one-sentence narrative for you to agree on before it rebuilds the deck. Where separate agents are available, it will manage an editor and an audience reviewer before bringing you the revised presentation. You’ll review the result and tell it where the story or individual slides still feel unclear.

Guidance for the AI

These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.

Start with the activity and the user's context

Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.

Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.

Check the capabilities needed for this work

Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.

When useful access is missing:

• Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
• Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
• If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
• Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.

Ask focused questions and respect the answers

Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.

Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.

Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct

Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.

Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:

• Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
• Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
• Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.

Produce, check, and revise the result

Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.

Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.

Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.

Your AI prompt

Transform my deck into a clear narrative the audience can understand as they encounter it and remember well enough to retell later. Ask one focused question at a time when you need my input.

Act as the lead writer and own the narrative and draft throughout. Check whether you can use separate agents. If available, use a distinct editor and a fresh-context audience reviewer at the stages below. Brief and manage them yourself, reconcile their findings, and revise the deck; I should not have to coordinate the agents. If separate agents are unavailable, perform distinct writing, editing, and audience-reading passes in the same order, while making clear that these are not independent reviews.

1. Read the deck and understand its job.

Inspect every slide, including visuals, charts, and speaker notes where available. Establish the audience, occasion, time available, and the decision, action, or understanding I want the presentation to produce. Ask for missing context. If you cannot read the deck directly, inspect available import or rendering options and guide me through the simplest usable way to supply it.

Identify the main claims, supporting evidence, repeated material, confusing slides, and information whose role is unclear. Distinguish material essential to the main argument from detail that can support it elsewhere. Preserve factual meaning; ask about an unclear claim instead of quietly changing it.

2. Find the single narrative.

Propose the story in one clear sentence, such as: We should do X for Y audience because of Z; or: Because of X problem, we should do Y so we can achieve Z. Use the actual substance of my deck to make the sentence specific.

Choose an appropriate narrative structure. One useful sequence is to announce the problem, explain why it matters, show what solving it would make possible, and reveal the solution. Problem-agitate-solution or another structure may fit better. If two or three approaches are genuinely useful, describe them briefly and explain what each emphasizes. Recommend one, ask whether it captures my intended point, and wait for my response before rebuilding around it.

3. Build the phases and their smaller stories.

Once we agree on the narrative, lay out the phases of the presentation. Explain what the audience must understand or feel at the end of each phase and how that prepares the next. Within each phase, build a smaller sequence that advances that part of the argument.

Build the leanest main presentation that carries this story within the time available. Cut repetition and detail that does not advance the argument; move necessary reference material to an appendix or speaker notes.

Allocate time across the phases and check that the whole presentation fits.

Map existing slides and evidence into this structure. Identify what to combine, split, remove, move to an appendix, or add.

Make each slide contribute a clear point. Use titles that state that point, the evidence needed to support it, and a visual or concise wording the audience can absorb while listening. Preserve necessary qualifications and source references. Mark missing evidence rather than inventing it.

4. Build the draft presentation.

Use your available tools to produce the revised deck, including slide content and relevant speaker notes. Keep authorship coherent: use the agreed narrative and outline to write the whole draft, rather than assigning disconnected sections to different writers. If your environment cannot edit or create the presentation file, deliver complete slide-by-slide replacement content with titles, exact body text, visual directions, and notes, and explain the specific route needed to create the file.

5. Have an editor challenge the draft, then revise it.

Give the editor the draft deck, source material, audience and purpose, agreed narrative, and time limit. Ask for an editorial critique of the argument and sequence: where a claim lacks support, a transition fails, material repeats, a slide can be cut or combined, or an important point is buried. Require specific slide references, reasons, and proposed changes. The editor should challenge the draft on its merits rather than defend the writer's choices.

As lead writer, evaluate each material finding against the sources and agreed purpose. Make the changes that strengthen the argument and explain in your working notes why you reject any consequential recommendation. Reconcile conflicting advice into one coherent draft.

Bring changes to the central proposal or agreed narrative back to me before applying them.

Complete this revision before the audience review.

6. Have a fresh audience reviewer read the revised deck.

Give a separate reviewer the revised presentation and only the context its audience would have, such as who they are and the meeting occasion. Include speaker notes only if their content would actually be spoken. Do not supply our drafting conversation, the editor's critique, the intended one-sentence narrative, or an explanation of why the deck works.

Ask the reviewer to describe the argument in its own words, the key points it would retain and retell, and the action or decision it thinks is being requested. Have it identify where it got lost, what seemed unsupported, and which slides required too much effort to understand. Require specific examples. This is an AI reading exercise, not evidence of actual audience recall.

Compare the reviewer's account with the agreed narrative and intended takeaway. Revise the places where the deck failed to communicate them. Have the reviewer read the updated material again without coaching it toward the desired answer; use a fresh reviewer where possible. Continue until material misunderstandings you can resolve are addressed, and identify any remaining issue that requires my judgment.

7. Check and deliver the presentation.

• Read the titles in order to check whether they tell the agreed story.

• Inspect the actual rendered slides where possible for legibility, crowding, clear visuals, and transitions.

• Check that the presentation fits the available time and that its ending makes the requested action or takeaway clear.

• Verify revised claims, figures, and necessary qualifications against the original sources.

• After fixes, recheck the affected slides and any editorial or audience findings they were intended to address.

Deliver the revised presentation with its one-sentence narrative. Briefly state which reviews were independent, what could be inspected, and any substantive issue still unresolved. Ask what misses my intention, make the requested revisions, and repeat the relevant checks.

Done when

You have a rebuilt presentation with one clear narrative, coherent phases, and slides that advance the story. If file creation is unavailable, you have complete replacement slide content ready to turn into a deck.

These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.