How to Create Presentation Outlines in Seconds with Google Gemini

When business leaders are preparing for an important presentation, their teams sometimes need to shut down their other work for days or even weeks to clear time for the prep work: multiple meetings to bat around ideas, long email threads to pin down the overarching narrative, and a constant stream of notifications as various stakeholders mark up the draft slides.

Many organizations are willing to dedicate lots of people to getting these presentations right, simply because they are that important. Imagine, for example, a SaaS CEO preparing a keynote for a major new AI product launch. That one presentation could help determine the entire future of the company.

With Google Gemini, business leaders can get a jump-start on the presentation. Instead of hours-long syncs, leaders can now create structured outlines in seconds, translating their roadmap into a high-level vision for their teams to follow.

Step 1: Gather Context
Before you even open Gemini, take a moment to jot down your vision in some raw notes. This doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Try setting a timer for five minutes, and simply write out as many bullet points as possible on key themes, killer narratives, and must-have metrics. You’ll likely be surprised by how much you come up with in a short burst.

Next, you can create a notebook in Gemini for your presentation. Simply open the left panel in the Gemini, click on “+ New notebook” and give it a title. Next, add existing materials like quarterly earnings reports, official brand guidelines, or a previous successful presentation. Gemini’s ability to process large amounts of data means you can upload these foundational documents as the context for your prompt.

Step 2: Prompt Gemini with Your Voice

Start chatting with Gemini, which will tap into the sources to help provide more personalized and helpful responses.. You can also use Gemini Live on your phone by clicking the microphone icon and using your voice to deliver your instructions, just as if you were speaking to staff.

Using your notes for inspiration, you might say something like: “I’m the CEO, giving a presentation to [audience] at [event], and I want to create a detailed outline for my team to get started. I want to include a few important topics, including [areas of focus] and how our company is innovating with [company initiatives]. I’m envisioning time for a customer Q&A to end the presentation. Include suggested questions we could ask of a customer from the [industry] industry about how they are using our [product] to achieve [business outcome].”

For our SaaS CEO, let’s say the presentation is for enterprise clients at an annual summit, covering recent growth metrics and how the company is innovating with its new AI-powered predictive analytics tool.

Step 3: Refine and Iterate Through Conversation

Gemini will generate a customized and comprehensive outline based on the prompt and sources you’ve provided. You can treat this initial result as a starting point, taking a moment to review the output and continuing to finetune with follow-up prompts.

You can easily refine the structure of the outline simply by chatting with Gemini, which is built to be conversational. If the outline is too dense, for example, follow up with a prompt asking Gemini to make the section on Q3 metrics more concise. Or, if you spot an important gap, simply instruct Gemini to add a section summarizing the competitive landscape.

This back-and-forth will help Gemini provide the outline that is the most helpful to you and your team, likely saving many hours of meeting and emails.

Step 4: Format for Handoff

Once you’re satisfied with your outline, you can ask Gemini to create a slide-by-slide breakdown or a structured table. This ensures your team knows exactly what information belongs where, before they even start to put together a presentation deck. You can even ask Gemini to start the presentation for you by selecting “Canvas” from the tools dropdown menu and prompting the app to create a presentation based on the outline. You can then export this draft presentation to Google Slides so the team can collaborate to build the final product.

Without Gemini, this initial outline might have taken multiple employees several weeks: chicken scratch on whiteboards, attempts to translate messy notes into formal briefs, entire meetings dedicated to clarifying a single point. Now, you can save time by creating a notebook in Gemini and adding the relevant sources as context, including your own notes and prompts to get a jump-start on the presentation.

Not only are employees armed with the critical information and structure they need to start building, but the entire project starts off ahead of schedule.