Ex-McKinsey Consultant tests Claude for PowerPoint

Can modern AI tools create consulting style slides for you? This question is more up to date than ever because about one month ago in early February Anthropobic, the creators of Claude created the new PowerPoint plug-in Claude for PowerPoint and it promises to finally achieve what Copilot for a long time was not able to do and this is to create professional slides. In the past over the last year since the advent of LLM models, I did use and tried several LLMbased slide creation tools I always felt that the gap to what would needed to be there to create these high quality pages is still substantial. So let's see if Claude for PowerPoint changes that to the better. So let's see how AI can help us to improve our slides. Here I have a pitch deck or an excerpt of a pitch deck that we use at from learning to pitch corporate trainings which is one of our services. Of course our actual pitch deck is a bit more substantial. I left a few slides in here to serve as style guide for additional slides that are to be created here by AI. And let's first look at what copiler can actually do and until very recently copilot at least to my knowledge was not able to actually build slides itself at all. It was just able to create some text outlines. And now to my knowledge this is a rather new feature. There is this new slide with co-pilot button where with a prompt you can create a slide indeed. So I will now insert here a prompt that I wrote to help me write a slide. This prompt is supposed to help me create a new slide highlighting certain offerings that we have at form learning. And here you directly see a problem that we have and this is that apparently this prompt is too long. So it does have a 800 character limit which doesn't seem too generous frankly but let's see if we can cut it down here a bit. So now I deleted a few sentences and let's see what is happening what copilot can do for us. And what you need to give it is that it's rather fast. It very quickly created this type of layout. If you look at it clearly it does not at all meet professional standards. Right? So there's here on the left this is a very significant white space. There's no proper title element, random stock photos included. This the colors are not at all adjusted to what we work within the template. This is just black, which is not how other header elements are formatted in here. So trust it goes without saying that this is not how a professional slide should look at. So let's contrast that with what Claude can do for us. You can access Claude here from within the toolbar. And to also directly highlight a few caveats or limitations. First of all, this is labeled as a beta version. So also anthropic itself is not claiming that this is a final rounded product but a better it was developed as a I think developer preview somewhere also on the internet. In addition it does require you to have currently a paid claude anthropic subscription and by that of course it also becomes clear that it does require you to have active internet connection. So if you're on the way, which might be a problem for consultants, you're in the taxi, in a plane, etc., not access to stable internet, you will not be able to use this to leverage this. And so let's see how far we get. And I will do it two tests. So first of all, I want just to give it the very same prompt I gave to copilot and see what it can create for me based on that. So I will copy here the prompt I just used. I will paste it in here and I will run it. First of all, it doesn't seem to have a character limitation like that. So, let's give it some time and see how far we get here indeed. And so, first, what you can see it's doing it, it's inspecting the slides that it does have access to and trying to infer some knowledge about the content, the styling, and so on. This is something that clearly Copilot did not do, or at least not in a very great way. So, it's still in the process of ingesting data. So now we can already see that it's taking a bit longer than copilot, but let's give it the time that it needs. So now it reports back to me what the color palette is that it inferred. Probably here also to the defense of copilot. The color palette likely is not necessarily correctly specified here in the PowerPoint back end. Now it asks me here to confirm some steps. So I will now say always allow because otherwise it will ask me quite a lot of questions in here. You can see it also already starts to create a page in here. So now after quite some time, it created a first version, but it's not done yet. Clearly, this is not a finished slide, not a good-looking professional slide, but it's also still work in progress. But I think it's helpful that at least it provides an intermediary version that then you can have a look at as well. You can see how the system is improving the slide live as we speak right now and running these improvements. So it seemed to have come to an end. I

will include here how long exactly it ran. This was significantly longer than the co-pilot version. At the same time, of course, the fair comparison should rather be how long it would take you to create something like this by yourself, which likely would be at least as long, probably not significantly longer, but if not longer. I will include here the time how long it took. So, let's look at this page. I would say this is a bit better than what Copilot created, though. This is from my humble perspective still flawed based on consulting standards. To point out a few things, let's start with formatting. So here clearly this yellow bar is reaching too far here into the footer. Here this bar is not properly aligning the text with where the action title starts. Typically this should be more aligned like this. Here the bullets are not formatted properly. No spacing here between the bullet and then the text. This is like with such an N or M dash. It was also not the right way to now demark a period between um weeks. So overall, I would not say it's great, but let's maybe feedback it exactly that. So please make sure that there is enough space between the yellow box and the footer. So I'm going to type here a few instructions with some obvious points. You can read what I wrote in here. And let's see if now the system can indeed improve it. Just a few things here to point out. Of course, overall this yellow bar here doesn't really make sense. Of course, it's picking up here the layout from here, but here there was text in there, right? And this is what's missing. So, this is from my perspective a misunderstanding of the layout of how this should be ran. In addition to that, it also is not making good use of actually the hierarchy of colors, right? So, typically here you have the lighter blue here for this title style element and then the darker blue for this subtitle style element. Typically, the darker colors represent higher hierarchies. So the colors likely should be switched. So try to input this here as well. Let's see if it picks up on that. Here we have the lighter one, but then we don't have darker one subtitles in here. So here rather this color which arguably is then subtitled to the curriculum is also in a lighter color. But let's see how far it gets. Now we're waiting it to complete. Let's also comment on the model. So currently I'm using OPOS 4. 6 which is to my knowledge currently the latest and greatest model that anthropobic is offering. Sonnet might be faster, right? So if you are optimizing for speed, it might be worthwhile to test if maybe with Sonnet you can create similar results. The OPUS is the most powerful one and now to test the abilities of what the system can do. Trust it's fair to not work with the OPUS model. Indeed, while it continues to finish, let's also comment on the content, right? So the system freely created the content based on this prompt. Frankly, I don't think this is a good way of phrasing it in the sense that here there are these three training programs, but then the sub bullets in here are different. The structure is different. So here it talks about the format, the target group, the benefits. Here for the second one about the duration and delivery components for the third one again on the audience, goal and approach. So here also this is your audience. This is design for so different terminology for similar meaning. So typically if you create a slide like this you want consistent logical structure of the information that you provide. You might here to the left even include some type of legend some type of buckets that you then use to then provide the same structure of information on all the three programs to also make it comparable and better understand the differences. So it seems to have now completed. Frankly I don't think it did a good job to actually fix the highlighted issues. Maybe my prompt was just too cryptic though. Trust fair enough for what was provided here. But essentially almost all of the issues still exist, right? So it didn't properly align the text to the title. There's still the lack of the gap between the yellow bar and the footer. Here the hierarchy of colors is not preserved and so on. So while I do think that Claude here is doing a significantly better job at co-pilot, there still is this significant gap to what probably would still require from such a system to use it in a production environment in a consulting setting indeed. But to be fair, I didn't do a lot to actually help Claude for PowerPoint to create a good professional slide. I was just providing a basic prompt which was more alluding to the content rather than the look and feel, the style that I was looking for. So let's see how the slide can improve if I now train Claude. And I will do the following. I will input a markdown file with best practices with instructions on how a good slide should look like based on some of my material. And I will also input here now several documents from leading consigning firms such as McKenzie, BCG, Bane and the likes to provide a style guide provide best practices on how good slides look like. And let's see if Claude for PowerPoint is able to pick up the best practices and learnings and return an even better slide for me. So let's start with the markdown file. If you don't know what that is, that's essentially a text file like this, including instructions that we use to train the system. This, to be fair, is not an extremely fleshed out

version yet. That's just a draft I put together in 15 minutes or so with some basic instructions. Let's see if this already helps. So I will not tell you, hey Claude, I want to train you with additional instructions on how to create effective slides. Please for future slides take these into consideration. So this is the markdown file. that I created and I will now upload it to the system. What's also important is that currently claw does not support memory which persists session by session. So whatever input we give it, we always need to provide this input again at the start of the session which is of course not ideal though very likely this will get fixed very soon that you are able also to provide session overarching instructions like this. At the moment this is not possible and you would need to train the system again for every session that you do. So let's in the same style also add files of consigning firms. So I here saved about five documents from consulting firms I found online which hopefully help here as style input. So totem just that I uploaded the documents told them that these are best practice documents and I asked the system to now extract learnings from what these slides have in common and then apply these learnings to future slides that are being created. So it now is taking some time to digest all this input. Let's see how long it takes and then continue asking it to recreate the slide. Now taking all of these learnings into account. So while Claude is still loading, allow me to say that we are indeed offering corporate trainings for teams for corporate clients on these topics such as communication, slide writing, problem solving, professional readiness and the likes. So if you are a leader leading a team either in corporate or in consulting and you want your team to pick up on these skills which typically can only be acquired after working several years in leading consulting firms, please reach out. There's a link in the video description where you can book an initial consultation with us and then we can see if we can support you and your team to develop these skills as well. So Cloud for PowerPoint now did digest the material. So let's ask it to create the very same slide again taking the new learnings into account. So, please recreate the slide you just created on a new page. Take all the inputs into account and disregard your old initial slide. And then I'm pasting at the very same prompt I pasted earlier. So here you can see that I changed the position of the slide. Claude is still running on it. I switched it up one position putting it in front of the co-pilot slide and this directly now confused the whole system now taking it longer. So apparently if you're now reshuffleling the deck while it's running in the background this is creating problems for Claude. But here you know in this specific case it didn't seem to have now recognized this. To be fair was just one slide in a very short deck. I would be a bit concerned if this works if like in a 100page document you are indeed reshuffleling a significant number of pages while the system is running. So now it's completed. Let's look at the result. Frankly, I do not think this looks significantly better at all. There are other problems here. Now the action title is not formatted correctly. So not in the style of the other pages. The footer is still not formatted correctly. Her font size was increased. Also other layout considerations. from my perspective have not really been followed. It essentially looks like the same page, arguably even worse. So I cannot see at all that now this system was able to in any meaningful way pick up on the best practices shared, which is of course a little bit of a bummer. But this is then the conclusion from this little test here. My personal takeaway from this test is that on the one hand side, it's great how quickly this is now improving compared to some other systems in the past. This is definitely moving in the right direction. That being said, as of today, there's still a significant gap of what such a system would be able to do in order to be used in a production environment by consultants to actually support them in the site creation. As of now, I would not use it in consulting. At the same time, given the speed that this is developing, it probably can be expected that within a few months, maybe six months or so, this system once again improved significantly. And likely even this year we might see a system that can support consultants in a productive way. Also ironing out the shortcomings we just identified. What do you think about that? Let me know in the comments. Super interested to hear your perspective as well. Big thanks to all the channel members. If you took value from this video, hit like button, hit subscribe to stay up to date on all the content. Looking forward to stay in touch and see

you next week with a new video.