posted by gut

A whole week?  LOL, I get it you said you have no time to start it.  THE worst aspect of consulting that I absolutely despise is over-formatting presentations.  Frickin' 30 minutes to make an effective slide, 3 hours to make one "professional".

Yeah, traveling for work all this week, Monday through Friday. Leave for the conference I am giving the presentation on Sunday morning, and being a speaker there, there are festivities to attend to Sunday evening, all day Monday, and I speak Tuesday morning.

So here goes...starting now hoping the AI helps at least gives me something to start with and just have to edit.

posted by justincredible

Maybe check this out:

https://www.slidesai.io

Let’s assume it would have taken me a whole workday to put together professional slides for 20-25 slide deck.

I spent an hour getting this downloaded/working (work laptop wouldn’t allow it, used hotel lobby and personal google drive, etc).

Free version didn’t have enough characters, and even the $20 version would only make 10 slides.

Had to make 10 slides from the first half of my paper, and 10 from the second half.

That all took me an hour ish combined.

I will need to spend maybe an hour/hour and a half editing the slides it gave mostly the pictures and some text.

So maybe 2.5 hours rather than 8…for $20.

And next time I just sign back up for $20 (I canceled already) and it only takes me 1.5 hours rather than 2.5 now that I know how it works…

I’m happy with it, would have been ecstatic if I didn’t have to do hardly any editing and if it wasn’t limited to 10 slides…

Gave the technical presentation Tuesday. 

Everyone says it went well, but who’s going to say “your presentation f&$king sucked”?

I spent about 2 hours after the AI spit out slides putting it in our company’s template and editing out the stupid shit that didn’t make sense (honestly far less than I expected). 

Overall I would recommend. Probably saved me half a day of work for $20. 

Here’s a picture of my fat ass, can’t show the presentation for IP reasons. 

You're welcome

posted by justincredible

You're welcome

👍

Bumping this one back up, can't believe it's almost been 3 years since this thread was created.

Anyone using AI now that wasn't before?

I was spending $0 on AI when I started this thread. Now I'm spending $125/month on Claude Max and ChatGPT. I have a Claude Max and ChatGPT subscription at work as well. 

Claude Code is very good, I use it extensively every day. 

I am testing out Claude Cowork right now to help me with my annual review. I just connected it with Jira (project management software) and it pulled every ticket I completed in 2025 and is grouping by project so I can easily come up with a list of all of the big projects I completed this year. 

On it more than ever for work, travel, and other random purposes. 

I've been crushing it for work decks/presentations. I was alway decent, but ChatGPT just streamlines....everything. 

I'm going to start messing with Gamma to actually generate the PPT file.

It's also helped a ton with learning Spanish, especially when texting. Before I'd just copy/paste from Google Translate. It's rather trash, and messes up a lot. 

I use it all the time for things I need to do in excel to make graphs and track data. Man it is a timesaver 

None

Using it a lot for work. It helps me with a lot of routine work. I also use it as a starting point for strategy. Personally I use it for fitness, diet and basic medical advice. I occasionally use it as a therapist. It’s taken the place of Wikipedia as my curiosity rabbit hole.

I bounce a lot of exercise and nutrition stuff off of it. I think it can be really useful for fitness. 

I use it for basic fun things, and use ChatGPT a TON for work (education) to help come up with ideas and streamline lessons.  I am pursuing another job within the district, and ChatGPT helped me with preparation.  I just go back and forth with it, and it does an amazing job.

I've used it for two major things just this month and it has opened my eyes to what a time saver it was.

I use it for work to find new engineering/industrial furnace companies in any given geography and get an excel tabled list about the companies along with their relative size (employees/sales) what type of furnaces/processes they run, what atmospheres are in their furnaces (many types of furnaces purposely put gases that are not air in their furnaces to inert them or use them as a reactive atmosphere with their product).

Our company uses gemini (google) and I have created a "GEM" that all I need to do is type in a name of a city and it will give me all of these companies in a tabulated list (with all the information I want, furnace/process types, company website, company size, what gases are used there for their furnaces, even a list of technical engineers at their company off linkedin).  All for within whatever radius of that city I ask (50 miles, 150 miles, etc).

All of this for a single city would take me or a secretary of some sort googling probably a few days. It takes gemini 30 seconds tops.

I then took this to help my wife. She is trying to get back into the workforce/career now that our youngest son (autistic) is out of HS. She was a SAHM who would find part time jobs that she could do on her own schedule over the years due to his schooling, etc.

Her resume was so splotchy and she was getting nearly no hits and even if she did it was short over the phone interviews that went no where. She was getting very discouraged.

I took her resume and asked gemini to help based on landing a job in "xyz" field for someone coming back into the work forced after more than a 20 years of being a SAHM and a lot of short term spot jobs.

It gave ways to combine work experience from multiple positions into just a few, gave timelines instead of exact dates and reworded a number of the bullet points.

She started sending that out 1.5 weaks ago, had 2 or 3 good interviews since, and is almost certain to land 1 of the positions this week.

Not going to lie, I am pretty amazed at the AI crap since I started giving it a shot at the beginning of Jan.

However, I still tell recruiters on LinkedIn that I won't teach AI math/chemistry as I won't help Skynet take over.