How to use AI to prepare presentations that actually persuade
One prompt that applies a 2,400-year-old framework so you can prep faster and present better
Hey Adopter,
You’ll walk away from this article with a single AI prompt that structures your next presentation for persuasion, not just information. It works for budget requests, project proposals, quarterly updates and client pitches.
The real problem with presentation prep
You have a meeting Thursday. You need slides by Wednesday. So you open PowerPoint, dump your thoughts onto 12 slides, reorganize them twice and call it done.
The presentation isn’t bad. It’s just forgettable. Your audience nods politely, asks a few questions and moves on without doing the thing you needed them to do.
This happens because most people prepare presentations by information, not by persuasion. They ask “What do I need to say?” instead of “What do they need to believe?”
The difference sounds small. It changes everything.
What the Greeks figured out that we forgot
Aristotle codified the Five Canons of Rhetoric around 300 B.C. Roman orators refined it. The framework has survived because it works.
The five canons are invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Each one solves a specific problem:
Invention forces you to think about your audience before your content. What do they believe now? What must they believe by the end?
Arrangement structures your points for impact, not logic. Where you place evidence matters more than what the evidence says.
Style matches your language to your audience. Executives want outcomes. Finance wants numbers. Engineers want specifics.
Memory identifies what you must know cold so you can stop reading slides and start connecting.
Delivery covers pacing, pauses and presence, everything beyond words that makes people trust you.
Most presentation advice focuses on delivery. That’s like practicing your swing without knowing where the fairway is.
Why AI makes this framework practical
Here’s the problem with the Five Canons: they take time. Working through each one manually for a Tuesday budget meeting feels like overkill. So people skip it.
AI changes the math.
A good prompt can walk you through all five canons in three minutes. It forces the right questions, suggests structure based on your specific audience and flags language that won’t land.
You still do the thinking. The AI just makes the framework usable for people who don’t have an hour to prepare.
Below is the prompt I use. It works in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any capable model.
The presentation prep prompt
Copy this entire block. Replace the bracketed sections with your real details. The more specific you are, the better the output.