How to Automate Google Slides Presentations with AI
I am about to save you a few hundred hours this year. Ready? Stop building presentations by hand.
I know. You have your template. You duplicate last week's, swap the numbers, update the title slide, call it done. But we both know the truth. You open Monday's deck. Delete old metrics. Type new ones. Break the formatting on slide 4 because Google Slides hates you. Fix it. Forget the footer date. Your manager notices mid-meeting. Classic.
Google's Slides API has existed for years now. Devs have been using it to create decks, jam text into slides, drop images in, do bulk text replacements. The problem? You needed someone who could actually code to make it work. Your average marketing manager or sales rep was never going to spin up a Node.js script for this.
AI agents just blew that door open.
What Can You Actually Automate?
Here is what the Slides API actually lets you do: create presentations, add new slides, shove text into text boxes, place images, run find-and-replace on every slide at once, clone slides, nuke elements you do not want, reorder the deck. It is a lot.
Wrap an AI agent around those capabilities and you do not touch a single API call yourself. You just say what you want. The agent picks the right operations, calls them in the right order, handles the edge cases.
These are the workflows I see teams automating the most:
- Weekly report decks where the structure stays the same but the numbers change every Monday
- Sales pitch decks personalized for each prospect using CRM data
- Meeting recap presentations generated from transcript notes
- Brand update rollouts where you need to change a tagline across 50 decks at once
- Onboarding decks customized for each new hire with their team info and start date
The Old Way vs. The Agent Way
The old-school approach was: build a pipeline. Write a Google Apps Script or cron job that yanks data from a sheet, formats it, shoves it into a template. And honestly it works. Until the template changes. Or you add a metric. Or someone renames a column. Then the whole thing crumbles and you spend your afternoon debugging a script nobody remembers writing.
Agents skip all that plumbing. Hook up Google Slides, write a prompt: "Make this week's report from template XYZ. Revenue hit $125K, signups at 340, churn is 2.1%." Agent reads the template, finds the placeholders, does the swaps, gives you a link. Done.
The big difference? Context. Change the template layout and you do not rewrite code. You tweak the prompt. Add a new metric and just mention it. No maintenance, no debugging, no 2 AM Slack fires about the Monday report failing.
Where It Gets Interesting: Multi-Tool Workflows
The real power shows up when you combine Google Slides with other tools. A presentation by itself is just slides. But a presentation built from live data, that is useful.
Take the sales deck scenario. Your rep has a Stripe meeting tomorrow. The agent grabs the deal from HubSpot. Searches the web for Stripe news. Creates a fresh deck. Adds a slide about Stripe's business, a slide on their pain points, a slide mapping your product to those pains, a next-steps slide. Every slide has content about this specific deal, not boilerplate. Rep walks in looking like they prepped for two hours. Actual time: two minutes.
Or meeting recaps. Product roadmap meeting just wrapped on Fireflies. Agent grabs the transcript. Pulls out decisions, action items, open questions. Builds a deck with a slide for each. Shares it. That is 45 minutes of recap work you never have to do again. And the action items? They are in a deck everyone actually sees, not buried in a Slack thread.
Why Not Just Use a Presentation AI Tool?
You might be wondering: why not use SlidesAI, Beautiful.ai, or one of the other AI presentation tools? Those tools are fine for creating standalone decks from a text prompt. But they do not connect to your data.
They cannot pull a deal from HubSpot and build a deck around it. They cannot read a meeting transcript and extract action items. They cannot find-and-replace your old tagline across every deck in your Google Drive. They are isolated. They solve the "make slides look nice" problem but miss the "get the right content onto the slides" problem entirely.
Agents handle both problems at once. They plug into your real data, figure out what belongs on each slide, and use the Slides API to actually build the thing. You get a deck that looks good and says something true about your specific situation.
Getting Started
If you want to try this, here is what you need:
- Connect your Google Workspace account to Cotera (OAuth setup)
- Enable the Google Slides tools (create presentation, add slides, insert text, replace text, etc.)
- Write a prompt describing your workflow
- Run it
Setup is about 10 minutes. After that, you just ask for what you need and the deck appears.
My suggestion: start with weekly reports. They are predictable, same structure every time. Throw some placeholder text into your template like {{REVENUE}} and {{SIGNUPS}}. Tell the agent to clone the template and swap placeholders with this week's numbers. Once you see that working, you will want to try CRM-powered sales decks and meeting recap generators. It is addictive once it clicks.
The era of spending your Monday morning copy-pasting numbers into slides is over. Let the agent do it.
Try These Agents
- Auto-Generate Sales Deck from CRM -- Pull deal data from HubSpot and generate a personalized pitch deck
- Bulk Update Brand Text Across Decks -- Find and replace outdated text across all your presentations
- Meeting Transcript to Slide Deck -- Convert Fireflies transcripts into structured recap presentations
- Auto-Generate Weekly Report Deck -- Fill your template with this week's metrics automatically