Hello Reader
One of my favorite moments from the past month happened on a call with Charlie Treadwell, CMO at Elisity, and Jake Milstein, VP at Contrast Security.
Charlie was telling us about the day one of his sales reps came to him asking if she could have "the PowerPoint template that looks like the new ones Claude is creating."
He told her: "There is no template. You should never use a template ever again. Just tell Claude to make you the slide you want."
She had a lightbulb moment and hasn’t come back to Charlie’s team with a deck request since. Which means they can focus on other things.
If you're a marketer and you've got a 60-slide PowerPoint template sitting in a shared drive, you're about to rethink it.
The Deck Problem Every Marketing Team Has
If you lead marketing, you know how this goes.
A sales rep needs a deck for a meeting on Thursday. You either build it yourself, pull someone off another project or send them a template and hope for the best.
"Every marketer's worst nightmare is a salesperson making their own slide," Jake says.
And that's before you factor in the ongoing maintenance. Every product update, every new competitive positioning, every rebrand ripples through 40 versions of the same deck sitting in 40 different sales reps' drives.
Most marketing leaders I've spoken with over the past few months have tried to solve this with AI.
The results have been underwhelming.
ChatGPT gives you bullet points on white slides. Gamma produces something that looks like a presentation until you try to customize it, at which point the brand falls apart. Several of the marketing leaders I work with tested these tools, decided the output wasn't good enough and went back to hiring a designer.
What's changed is how Claude now handles the mechanics of slide design.
Where other tools are formatting text into a slide container, Claude designs each slide as an HTML page, applies layout principles and converts those pages into editable PowerPoint files. It then runs a loop, reviewing each slide for layout problems before delivering the file.
"If you use Copilot — picture on the right, bulleted list on the left — it's not bad,” Charlie says. “But the first time I watched Claude build a deck, it was drawing boxes and connecting lines, and writing headlines. It was creating the deck in a completely new way."
The output has editable elements, real design decisions and slides that don't look like they came from an early 2000s template.
How to Create On-brand Decks Every Time
Charlie has solved the deck problem. What used to take days or weeks of production time is now completed by Claude in less than 30 minutes.
But Charlie didn’t get to this point by accident.
It took him a hundred hours of testing and iteration, but now that he’s perfected the system, his sales reps can get an on-brand deck with the click of a button.
“It took a lot of iteration and then continuous improvement to get it right,” Charlie says. “I don't think there's an easy button to have Claude make your corporate PowerPoint template. You have to put in that initial effort to design the Skill."
If you’re wondering what a Skill is, it’s a set of instructions in Claude that loads automatically when you open a chat. Think of it as a standing brief that Claude reads before it does anything.
It can contain brand guidelines, design rules, file references, an icon library, layout logic, behavioral constraints — anything you want Claude to know and apply every time.
On a team or enterprise account, an admin can deploy a Skill globally so every employee gets it without having to set anything up themselves.
Charlie’s Skill has the following elements:
#1 — Information hierarchy before design. Before Claude touches a layout, the skill instructs it to identify the audience, then assign every piece of content to one of four levels: primary, secondary, tertiary or supporting. Design decisions follow that hierarchy. The most important thing on the slide gets the most visual weight.
#2 — 12 layout guides. These are loose structural patterns: 30/70 left-right splits, comparison layouts, emphasis slides. Claude uses these as a base and breaks the rules when the content calls for it.
#3 — An icon library with an index file. Claude can't see icons. So Charlie built an index file where every icon has a one-sentence description and a note on when to use it. Claude reads the index, matches icons to content and places them. Charlie discovered this was working when a piggy bank icon appeared on a slide about cost savings. He hadn't told Claude to use it. The index file had.
#4 — Hard rules around color. Specific guidelines and constraints: use this accent color for emphasis only, never on more than one element per slide, always white text on this background, never black text on that one.
"When I start seeing 100 employees at my company building PowerPoints daily and they're actually good,” Charlie says. “It makes the set up worth every single minute."
Here are some of the slides from a recent Claude-made deck:
How to Build Your Own PPT Skill
Charlie shares his Skill file with anyone who asks. Jake was one of the first to adapt it.
Jake swapped in Contrast Security's brand assets and expected it to work.
It didn't.
The slides had the completely wrong colors and fonts, black text on dark backgrounds. The copyright symbol became a registered trademark and drifted position slide to slide.
The core problem, Jake discovered, is that Claude knows how to design web pages, and web pages have structural rules that Claude treats as non-negotiable.
“You have to realize that Claude is designing for the web,” Jake says. “And the rules of a web page are there's a header with the logo and a footer with the copyright. Those are fundamental rules you can’t change. If you try, you’ll just end up with a messy deck.”
So Jake stopped fighting Claude, sat down with his designer, explained the constraints and asked her to build a new template around them.
This isn’t a copy-paste job.
Every brand has different constraints and the concessions you make at the template stage determine how well the Skill performs in production.
“I knew I had to make a bunch of concessions, and it wasn’t going to be perfect,” he says. “But the tradeoff was worth it."
The Deck That Built Itself
With the skill in place, Jake's decks essentially build themselves. He gives Claude the source material, walks away and comes back to a finished deck.
As an example, Jake was at an analyst conference when the Mythos cyberattack story broke.
He needed a board-ready deck explaining how Contrast Security had responded. He was sitting in conference sessions and had a vendor meeting in 5 minutes. He dashed off a prompt to Claude that said: “Read my Slack threads with the PR team, the email I sent my boss, look at the press coverage, and then build me a deck.”
When he returned from the meeting, Claude had built an entire deck including Contrast Security’s full response, video content, media placements, reach numbers and a slide with a pull quote sourced directly from a published article he hadn’t even read yet.
"It was amazing,” Jake says. “This would take some serious research and time to pull together myself, and Claude just figured it out."
His estimate to do this manually: three to four hours.
Accuracy on first pass: around 80%.
He admits that it needed a bit of cleaning up where text ran off slides or the logo moved, but the design decisions, quote pull and timeline construction — those were things Jake said he wouldn't have thought to do himself.
The use cases extend well beyond comms.
Connect Claude to Gong and you can generate a deck from any call transcript that includes competitive objections, customer pain points and key quotes.
Point it at a prospect's Salesforce account before a big meeting and it will pull the full relationship history, open opportunities and recent activity into a tailored leave-behind.
Charlie uses it for his board deck the same way. He gives Claude a list of topics, and it does the research using Salesforce and Hubspot data before building the slides.
Charlie and Jake haven’t created a deck from scratch in months and probably never will again.
"We rolled out the PowerPoint skill to the entire org with Charlie's directions," Jake says. "People are now unintentionally on-brand and I fucking love it."
(And yes, Jake asked me to put his quote in verbatim.)
5 Things You Need to Know Before You Deploy
Between them, Charlie and Jake have made every mistake worth making. Here's what they now tell their teams.
1. Use Opus, not Sonnet. Sonnet is faster and cheaper, but it’s also less creative and more likely to ignore the rules in your Skill.
2. Check every slide before you present it. Someone presented a Claude-built deck, hit a slide they hadn't read and said they didn't know why that was there. Just because Claude built the deck, doesn’t mean you don’t have to proofread it.
3. Give feedback by voice memo. Jake's method for iteration was to record a voice memo while going through the deck slide by slide. Say what's wrong, what needs to change, and what's working. If you complete one pass of all slides this way, it’s much faster than addressing fixes one at a time.
4. Screenshot problems and circle them. Describing a broken element in text takes longer than screenshotting it, circling the problem and handing it back to Claude.
5. Get the outline before the full build. On complex decks, ask for the outline first. Confirm the structure and then build. You preserve tokens and avoid rebuilding a 12-slide deck because the direction was off from slide one.
Jake’s final piece of advice?
"For the love of God, don't click Enhance Slide."
Just stick to the Claude Skill. The moment you let Google Slides "help," the Skill can't save you.