In a recent LinkedIn post, Emily D. shares her journey from spending countless hours on corporate presentations to advocating for a more efficient approach using AI. She highlights the common struggle many professionals face: dedicating excessive time to crafting visually appealing slides for visions they don’t personally own, leading to burnout and a lack of personal investment.
Emily D. begins by recounting her past experiences, noting the frustration of working on presentations that didn’t align with her own goals. She states:
“I’ve built hundreds of presentations in my life. Most of them weren’t mine. I still have PTSD from working to the last second on corporate decks. Beautiful slides for visions I didn’t own.”
This period, while honing her skills, left her unfulfilled. As Emily D. explains, the core issue was that she was effectively building “someone else’s authority” rather than her own.
The Shift to Personal Authority Building
Upon transitioning to build her own brand and client base, Emily D. faced the daunting task of pitching her services. This required a significant investment of time in personalizing each sales deck, a process she describes as arduous. She elaborates on the meticulous nature of this work:
“It was torture. Hours spent tweaking slides. Formatting tables. Making sure it didn’t look like I’d thrown it together in 20 minutes. Even though the message was already clear in my head.”
This personal experience led her to a key observation about common inefficiencies in professional settings.
Identifying Wasted Time in Presentation Creation
Emily D. points out that many professionals, particularly founders, spend an inordinate amount of time on the aesthetics of presentations when their primary goal should be disseminating their message quickly and effectively. According to Emily D., this often involves getting bogged down in formatting details and design quandaries.
She argues:
“Most founders waste hours on slides when they should be spending minutes. Stuck formatting, aligning text boxes and Googling ‘how to make this not look terrible.'”
The central thesis of her post is that the true value lies in the message and its delivery, not in the hours spent perfecting slide transitions or layouts. As Emily D. puts it, “What we actually need is to get our message out of our head and in front of people. Fast.”
Leveraging AI for Efficiency
To address this widespread issue, Emily D. reveals her collaboration with Templafy, highlighting their new AI presentation builder. She emphasizes that this tool, already utilized by major corporations like KPMG and Adobe, is now accessible to everyone for free. The process is designed for speed and simplicity: users describe their needs, and the AI generates a functional .pptx file that can be downloaded and edited.
Emily D. clarifies that AI is not a complete replacement for human input but rather a powerful assistant for specific tasks. She notes:
“I’m not saying AI replaces everything. It doesn’t. But it does replace the part where you spend 3 hours making slides look professional when you could’ve spent 3 hours refining your message.”
She concludes by reinforcing that a professional presentation’s primary function is to support the speaker’s message, not to be the message itself. The goal, as Emily D. suggests, is for the deck to “not get in the way” of the authority derived from the content and delivery.
📝 About This Content
This article is based on insights shared by Emily D. on LinkedIn.
📅 Originally posted on April 1, 2026 | View original post on LinkedIn →