Alane Boyd 0:00

Hello, everybody. You're listening to the Biggest Goal podcast, and I'm your co-host, Alane Boyd.

Micah Johnson 0:06

And Micah Johnson.

Alane Boyd 0:07

And today we're going to talk about something that is not that much fun for most people. It is creating slide decks and PowerPoints. And we're going to talk about how AI really flipped it upside down and made it fast and easy and within design templates and just really go from need to execution so fast, whether you're an executive or on a design team. So super excited to jump in and talk about this episode.

Micah Johnson 0:36

Before we jump into that, let me talk about some of the quick upcoming events. So we have next week an AI Builders Peer Group. In September, we have both a one-hour deep dive on when to use code or cowork. So if that's a gray area for you, come and join us. And we have a three-hour Claude Foundations workshop that'll get you everything you need to get Claude up and running.

Alane Boyd 0:58

Micah, do you remember when we had our previous company? So our social media agency, I really struggled with how a PowerPoint should look, the design of it. I'd move things around. There would be no real headers, there'd be no real consistent font sizes or fonts. And it would be a chaotic mess.

Micah Johnson 1:18

Yes.

Alane Boyd 1:19

Did you block that out of your memory?

Micah Johnson 1:21

No, I didn't. I that's when you said, do you remember? You didn't even have to say slide deck, just based on today's topic. I knew exactly where you were going.

Alane Boyd 1:32

Well, so I learned from you. You taught me your ways, and I was like, wow, that that looks a whole lot better. A lot, a lot more designed. And then I had a team of, I think, 19 account managers, and they were all a bunch of me's. And they they couldn't just leave things alone. They wanted to change everything. I was like, oh my God, this looks like garbage.

Micah Johnson 1:53

Yeah. So let's let's kind of paint the pictures that some of our listeners will hopefully resonate with maybe what they have to do now or what their teams are doing now for creating slide decks, the what I would say the old-fashioned way now.

Alane Boyd 2:06

Okay, y'all. I have a big favor to ask. We have thousands of listeners every single month. But if you look at our reviews on Apple and Spotify and all those sites, we have less than 10 reviews. We need our listeners to go and give that feedback. We would be so appreciative if you just took a second, put us on pause, go leave us a review and come right back. Thank y'all.

Micah Johnson 2:30

First, we've got to manually pull all this data. So there's a lot of work to go to different systems, pull the data, analyze the data, calculate everything out. And that's just to get that's just to prep it to get it too. So there's there was typically like people that would have to go and do data analysis to get the data out of the various systems, prep that data, transform it into something that could be dropped into a slide deck, but it wasn't copy and paste. Then, even with a template, even with the master slide, we still had to go through every single slide. We had to manually edit it. We had to manually drop it. I mean, heck, to get something that looks really good with a a chart and a like think of like a pie chart and a slide deck. That sounds terrible to create.

Alane Boyd 3:23

Yeah, I'm getting highs just thinking about we, you know what I'm realizing? That it's been several years since you and I custom create slide.

Micah Johnson 3:32

Yes.

Alane Boyd 3:33

Now it has because even before Claude Co-work, we we had an agent start building our slides. Like it would use our so it's been a long time since we had to start from square one.

Micah Johnson 3:43

So if we know the old way, it's very manual, the data is manual, the reports are manual, the creations manual, it's manually happening across almost every single department in a company. Um, what does the new way look like? But if you have Claude connected up to your existing platforms, then you don't have to go and manually pull the data anymore. And you don't manually have to go and transform and analyze that data because that just becomes a simple step for AI to go to the platform that it's connected to, pull the data out for the time period that you're wanting to represent within a slide deck, transform the data and analyze the data in the way you want, and put that in its context window.

Alane Boyd 4:30

Yeah, let's talk just on that one little piece, like what an example of that. And the first thing that comes to mind is a transcript from a call. So sales call, transcript, and now you're onboarding them. Great. Let just have co-work run the transcript and create the sale the deck for you. I think that's like one of the when I think about data and connectors, I always think about numbers with a lot of times. And so these are actually just using words and it creates the next steps or whatever it might need to into the deck, and so it can come from a transcript.

Micah Johnson 5:09

I mean, really, it can do either or or a combination, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it I'm glad you included transcripts and words in there. Okay, so once it has the information that should go into the slide deck in its context one, or say it's short-term memory, then it can also leverage in tools like Claude Design a design system. And a design system, I don't know, maybe you could explain it better, Alane, than I can without getting too technical about it.

Alane Boyd 5:36

I mean, that the easiest way I can say a design system is just a fancy way of calling your brand guidelines. What are the brand guidelines? And it doesn't just have to be yours. You can have multiple design systems. So if it needed to be created using the client's design guidelines, create multiple systems.

Micah Johnson 5:56

Yeah, that's a cool, cool thought that you could have different design systems for different slide deck types or different clients, whoever is the audience for what you're creating. All right, so it'll load all the information that it needs from the connectors. It will transform it any way it needs, parse it any way it needs. It'll load the design system that you asked it to work with. And it can even load a template based on what you're asking it to do. Once it has all those loaded, it's a very small task for AI to take the information that it already has and populate the template in the design system that you've asked it to use so that the look and feel in branding is always the same. The template is always the same structure. The only thing that changes is what you used to have to do manually, which is pull the data and put it into the slide deck.

Alane Boyd 6:50

Yeah. One thing here that I I've noticed, Micah, in conversations is well, my design team would just be appalled if I used Claude to do to design the template. They they want to control that. Fine. I'm not here to argue with how you want to get your template created. You want to have a person create that and you see value in that time spent, fine. But that can be part of the design system. It's taking the design of the slide deck from a team member that designed it and putting that. That way you're not having to manually use that, create the data that goes, gets dropped into the template. You can have that as part of a design system.

Micah Johnson 7:30

I mean, I see this, and Alane, you and I have had lots of conversations about this, but this is a tool, right? So absolutely, a design team should be using a tool that could save them tons of time. I don't think anybody's saying fire your design team and only use claude design and just believe everything Claude tells you the design should be. By all means, do not do that. But get your design team to use these effective tools so that you have templates and you have design systems actually effectively designed by design professionals, and it's the best of all worlds. All right. So speaking of collaborating with designers, I think there's uh another step here that once, say, Claude has a slide deck created, you might want to run it past your marketing team, your leadership, your design team, and get their blessing. So again, the old way would be you would have to create it, you'd have to get the share link, or God, heaven forbid, you get the peep the PowerPoint file itself, attach it to the email and send an email out. Then you're on an email thread of, oh, that makes me want to throw up. Um what you can do now is essentially get a share link from Claude, send that to whoever you want feedback for, they look at it and they leave comments in context, like highlight a header and and say, like, this header should be a different color, or it needs to be bigger, or let's word it this way. And any number of people can get access to that deck in this case, leave comments, and now you have information in a fraction of time that you can that you've collaborated on to go back and improve from there and and get everybody's blessing.

Alane Boyd 9:21

Yeah, and I love some of the I love the collaboration piece. Um, and I I love doing that with our team because I get get to have their ideas and it's all in the same place there. But one of the things I got to see from watching you one day build a slide deck that I didn't know about at the time is how you can also comment to Claude and have it make the changes, or you can edit in place. Like you don't have to re-prompt in order to leave to edit something. And so you can just hit the edit toggle, edit the words yourself, and then save it and then go back and then but the comment to Claude piece is it's so nice because you can isolate the one section that you're wanting to edit.

Micah Johnson 10:03

And I think you know, the term collaborate has traditionally been, because that's all there has been, collaboration between people. But when we say collaborate in tools like this now, what you just pointed to, Alane, is that collaboration is actually collaboration between people and AI. So people might leave comments, but then we can pass those comments on to Claude. Claude can then take those comments and make updates for us. And there are editing features built in. So you can edit text directly, you can highlight things and leave comments back to Claude directly. And you can do, and and you can, you know, do your what we've seen with AI for the most part, which is just chat with Claude over an entire, say, slide deck that we're talking about now. You can get to like an end goal, your end goal in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.

Alane Boyd 10:56

We haven't even mentioned animation.

Micah Johnson 10:59

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alane Boyd 11:01

That one that is so cool how it builds in animation right there in the slide deck.

Micah Johnson 11:06

You can do that with one prompt. So we've experimented with this a lot. We can create slide decks in Claude, and then we can ask Claude, hey, take every main topic on every slide and make it so that we can just click through this or arrow key through this one step at a time as we're presenting. And in a couple minutes, we've got an entirely animated. I mean, we tried this with like a 60 slide deck, and it took a couple minutes for it to animate every main topic on the slide. And we didn't have any edits. It and I think about how much time it would have taken to go through high group and highlight the elements, then go to on click and then choose the animation transition and then choose the timing and go to the next one and go to the next one for 60 slides. No way.

Alane Boyd 11:55

No, it's so cool, and you don't need to be, you know, a design developer or anything like that to get it done. You're just a normal everyday person.

Micah Johnson 12:05

That's right.

Alane Boyd 12:06

Making things look cool.

Micah Johnson 12:08

All right. So if you are creating decks, if you know somebody who creates slide decks, if somebody on your team creates slide decks, please take a look at, well, after listening, after sending this episode to them, take a look and try creating slide decks and tools like Claude and Claude Design. Connect it up to the platforms that have the data, have it iterate really quickly, use the tools, chat with Claude, use the editing tools, use the commenting tools, collaborate with your team in these tools. I guarantee you will reduce slide deck creation time and create consistency in your business with this one action, with just this one use case.

Alane Boyd 12:52

So at the end of these, Micah, I thought it would be fun to start doing a little summary and why we see companies have an obstacle to getting these things implemented.

Micah Johnson 13:03

Oh, do tell.

Alane Boyd 13:05

And I had a little, and I'm being dead serious on the throwback that we could call it. It's the BO report.

Micah Johnson 13:17

I'm not gonna edit that awkward silence out.

Alane Boyd 13:21

So for those of you that don't know, and I'm gonna just explain it here, is that originally Mike and I came up with a name for our company called Biggest Goal, Biggest Obstacle, and we called it BGBOCO or Biggest Goal, Biggest Obstacle. Well, that was very difficult to explain. And so we just dropped the B.O. and have it called Biggest Goal now. L typed out biggest goal. Um, so for our BO report, it's gonna be the obstacles that we see companies have implementing what we're talking about in the episode.

Micah Johnson 13:56

Why don't you give us a taste of this BO report, Alane?

Alane Boyd 14:01

All right. So here's the BO. Where I see that companies have obstacles on getting the slide decks in there is that there's a misunderstanding on what designers do in this stage. Now they can be using tools like Claude Design and developing systems like a design system so that they don't have to do the nitty-gritty that they can be the person that sees the outcome that they're leading. I also see where there's an attachment to doing the task where they don't want to let go of not just the design, but getting the data in there, whatever it might be into the slide deck. So, you know, try it for a slide deck you have to create, even if it's just an internal one, so you can get your feet wet, try it out. It's really not as scary as you think. And I think for me, one of the biggest wins initially was using an outline from a conversation. And I needed to create very quickly a slide deck. So I needed to try it out for the first time within a couple of hours from getting the outline to an execution. And I would have been panicking without it. So try it out. It's not as hard or as scary as you think it is, and bring your design team along because we absolutely need those people that see things differently, that are creative, and that can help build the system that some of us non-designers can work at.

Micah Johnson 15:25

I love it. I think we should keep the BO report. We'll probably just have to say what BO stands for in this case, that it's the biggest obstacle, not the body odor report.