Building Your Pitch Deck With AI (Without the Slop)

We already publish a prompt that reviews pitch decks, and founders kept asking the obvious follow-up: can AI help me write one in the first place?

It can. But you have seen what happens when someone asks an AI to "make me a pitch deck." The result looks polished, and underneath the polish there is nothing an investor can hold onto. Reviewers spot it in seconds, and once they do, they read the rest of the deck looking for what else is not real.

The problem is not the AI. It is that "make me a deck" hands the AI the one job that has to be yours. So we wrote a prompt that runs the build the way we would coach it in person, and this page explains how to use it.

The principles

The story comes from you. The prompt will not draft a slide until you have told it, in your own words and out loud if you like, what you saw, what you built, what you believe about this market that others do not, and where you are now. It finds the story in what you said. It does not impose one.

Nothing gets invented. Every fact in the deck comes from your files, your email, your telling, or research you confirmed. Where something is missing, the prompt leaves a marked gap for you to fill rather than a plausible number.

Real visuals only. Product screenshots, prototype photos, diagrams, native charts built from your spreadsheet. Never AI-generated imagery: a render where proof belongs tells an investor the product does not exist yet.

The design comes from your brand, not from the model's habits, so your deck does not look like every other AI deck an investor saw this month.

The AI is a contractor, not a co-founder. It reads your files, mines your email for the LOI you forgot about, researches competitors with sources, builds the charts, crops the logos, and keeps track of where the build stands. You supply the beliefs, the judgment about what is proven and what is hoped, and the final wording.

How the build runs

1. Gather. Drop everything you have into a Project. The AI reads it, lists what is missing for each slide, and, if your email is connected, searches it one contact at a time for the strongest evidence you have: signed pilots, pricing conversations, a customer's own words.
2. Ramble. The AI asks you to tell the story of the company the way you would tell a smart friend over coffee, unorganized. Talk for as long as you can. This is the most important thing you will give it: it is where the narrative comes from, and it is the voice sample that keeps every later slide sounding like you.
3. Spine. Before any slide exists, the AI drafts one headline per slide, twelve to fifteen of them, and you fix the story at that level until it holds. Fixing a story in headlines takes minutes; fixing it after the slides are built takes an afternoon.
4. Build and iterate. Slides come in sections: problem and solution; business model, market, and impact; traction, competition, and team; financials from your spreadsheet; exit and the ask. After each section you go through the slides one at a time with the AI, on content and design, adding and cutting slides as the story demands. Do not spend these rounds polishing sentences; that comes next, and it is yours.
5. Hand-edit. When the build is done, download the deck and rewrite it yourself, sentence by sentence. Anything that does not sound like you gets rewritten; anything you would not say gets cut. Read it out loud, then do it again. In our experience nearly every word changes, and the draft was still worth it, because editing a real structure beats staring at a blank slide. The AI stays available for a review pass on your edited deck, but it does not touch your wording unless you ask.

Before you start

The prompt works in Claude or ChatGPT. It checks what is available at the start and, for anything missing, tells you what it would add and asks whether you want to set it up or go without. You will get a better deck with all of it in place.

• A paid plan. The free tiers stop after a few exchanges and often lack the file and connector tools the build needs. Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus ($20 a month) is the floor; it runs the same models as the top tiers, so the deck is just as good, and the difference is how often you wait. Claude Max or ChatGPT Pro ($100 or $200 for one month) gets most builds done in a sitting. You are raising real money; twenty dollars is not where you economize. At the time of writing, we find Claude's Fable 5 a bit better at this kind of work than OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, but the models change every few months.
• A Project named after your company (both Claude and ChatGPT have Projects). Drag in everything: spreadsheets, projections, old decks, one-pagers, grant applications, technical papers, your website address, logo and brand files, product screenshots or photos.
• Your email connected (Gmail or Office 365), instead of pasting emails. Your strongest traction is usually in your sent folder.
• A way to make a real deck. Claude and ChatGPT can both create PowerPoint files, and both can work in Google Slides through a connected Google account. The prompt will not proceed on a text outline.
• Voice dictation, for the ramble. Talking gets more of you onto the page than typing does. We use Wispr Flow; your phone's dictation works too.
• Web access, for competitors, market numbers, and logos. Usually on by default; if the AI asks permission to search, say yes.

Start the build

Open your first chat inside the Project and paste this:

I'm building an early-stage investor pitch deck. Fetch E8 Angels' Pitch Deck Generation Prompt at https://www.e8angels.com/resource-library/pitch-deck-generation-prompt and follow it, starting at Step 0.

If your AI cannot open links, open the prompt page, copy the full prompt, and paste that instead.

The AI starts by asking which plan you are on. On a $20 plan it will recommend working in short chats, one section per chat, because a single long chat re-reads everything on every turn and runs into your usage cap partway through the build. Then it asks where the deck should live, a PowerPoint file or Google Slides, and explains the trade-off so you can choose. After that it runs the five stages above.

Moving between chats

At each natural break (after the spine, and after each section) the AI offers a handoff. If you take it, it gives you one block of text and, if the deck is a file, the latest deck file. Copy the block, open a new chat in the same Project, paste it, and drag in the deck file. That is the whole procedure. The block carries your ramble, the research so far, and a tracker of where the deck stands, and it points the new chat back to this prompt. A long paste may show up as a small attached-text chip in the message box; that is normal.

Nothing the AI creates during a chat is saved into your Project on its own, so keep the latest tracker it hands you. If you would rather stay in one chat, say so; the only risk is a temporary usage limit that makes you wait.

The last mile

When you have hand-edited the deck and it sounds like you on your best day, run it through our feedback prompt for a fresh read. Everything runs in your own account; nothing is sent to E8.

And if you are an early-stage company taking on an environmental problem at scale and raising angel capital, we would like to have a look.

Apply to E8