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Rideful Slides

How Do I Create a Presentation with AI?

Describe the deck you want in Rideful's built-in chat and the agent builds it, then works on it with you — point at a slide, say what's off, and it edits that slide rather than rebuilding the deck. Works from Claude or ChatGPT too.

Rideful has an AI agent built into the app. Instead of dragging shapes and formatting text, you describe the deck you want in plain language: the agent plans it, builds it slide by slide on your template, then changes one thing at a time as you ask.

Prerequisites

  • A Rideful account — that's it. Sign up at rideful.io.
  • Optional: an AI assistant with MCP support — Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat, or Claude Code — if you'd rather drive Rideful from there. See Connect via MCP.

Two Ways to Start

From the dashboard

Go to rideful.io/slides. A chat composer sits above your deck grid, on Home and inside any folder. Describe the deck:

“A 6-slide deck introducing our dog-walking startup to investors.”

The agent on the dashboard asks at most one short round of questions — in practice just which of your own brand templates to build on, if you have any. It derives the deck name from your request, puts the deck in the folder you're in, and uses 16:9 unless you say otherwise. Everything about content — slide count, narrative, visual style — it leaves to the agent that builds the deck. It writes a brief of what you agreed, creates the deck and opens it, with the chat panel already there and the agent building from that brief. Nothing is asked twice, and the brief is in the file rail if you want to read it.

From inside a deck

The chat panel sits on the right of the editor, open by default. It does the same job for a deck that already exists: describe what you want added or changed. A whole deck, one new slide, or one change to one element — the request can be any size.

What to Say

The more specific your prompt, the better the result. Here are examples organized by use case:

Pitch Decks

"Create a 10-slide investor pitch deck for a fintech startup.
Cover: problem, solution, market size, business model,
traction, team, and ask. Modern dark theme."

Business Reviews

"Make a quarterly business review presentation with sections
for revenue highlights, key metrics, team updates, and
next quarter goals. Professional tone, use a clean layout."

Training & Onboarding

"Build a 12-slide training deck about our new employee
onboarding process. Include a welcome slide, company values,
tool setup checklist, and key contacts. Friendly tone."

Product Launches

"Create a 5-slide product launch announcement. Bold, colorful
design. Cover: what's new, key features, pricing, timeline,
and call to action."

Team Updates

"Make a weekly team update deck with 4 slides: wins this week,
blockers, upcoming priorities, and shoutouts. Keep it minimal
and easy to scan."

With a Brand Template

"Create a client proposal deck using our Acme Corp template.
8 slides: intro, the challenge, our approach, timeline,
team, case studies, pricing, and next steps."

What Happens Behind the Scenes

  1. It writes a plan — the color palette, the fonts, the layout approach, and a slide-by-slide outline. The plan shows in the panel as a collapsible Agent Plan strip that ticks off as work completes, and the agent waits for your go-ahead before it starts building. After a handoff from the dashboard it doesn't wait — the request you already answered is the approval.
  2. It researches, if the deck needs facts it doesn't have. A researcher searches the web and writes research.md with numbered citations and a sources list, and the slides carry footnotes back to them. You can open the report from the file rail. It skips this when you supplied the content or asked for a formatting change.
  3. It scaffolds the slides — all of them at once, in narrative order, choosing for each slide the layout from your template that best fits its content.
  4. A designer fills in each slide, in parallel — adding and styling the elements. Designers never move anything your template positioned, which is what keeps the slides aligned with each other.
  5. An evaluator looks at every slide — it takes a screenshot and judges the rendered result rather than the numbers, so it catches text on top of text and contrast that a coordinate check cannot see. A designer's own “done” doesn't count; only the evaluator's pass does. Failures go back for a fix, up to twice.
  6. A final pass checks the deck as a whole — title formatting, recurring elements, color, margins, fonts — and fixes what it finds rather than asking you about it.

You approve the design changes

Before a designer changes anything on a slide, the run stops and asks: an Approve / Reject card appears in the chat with the details of what it wants to do. Scaffolding the slides is not gated, so those appear as the agent works. Turn on Auto-approve tools in the composer's + menu to let a run go through without stopping.

The panel itself — the plan strip, what each subagent does, the file rail, stopping a run, the daily limit — is covered in full in The AI agent.

Refining Your Presentation

After the initial creation, refine any part of the deck by describing what you want to change. The agent updates specific elements surgically — it doesn't regenerate the whole deck.

  • “Make the title on slide 2 bigger and change it to dark blue”
  • “Add a new slide after slide 3 with a comparison table”
  • “Change all backgrounds to a darker shade”
  • “Remove the last slide and add a Q&A slide instead”
  • “Swap the order of slides 4 and 5”
  • “Use the same accent color on every section divider”

You can also edit by hand in the editor at any time — both paths change the same deck.

Tips for Best Results

  • Mention your brand template by name if you have one imported — the agent uses its layouts, colors, and fonts automatically
  • Specify the number of slides — “create a 7-slide deck” gives the agent a clear structure to work with
  • Describe your audience — executives, team members, clients, or investors. This affects tone, content density, and design choices
  • Request a design style — “dark theme”, “minimalist”, “colorful and bold”, “corporate clean”
  • List the sections you want — “cover problem, solution, market size, team, and ask” helps the agent structure content logically
  • Read the plan before you say go — adjusting the direction there is much faster than restyling afterwards

Common Issues

  • Too-vague prompts: “Make me a presentation” gives the agent little to work with. Add context: topic, audience, number of slides, and tone. The more specific you are, the closer the first draft is to what you want.
  • Skipping past the plan: the palette, fonts and outline are there to be corrected. Changing direction before slides exist is much cheaper than restyling after.
  • Not using available templates: if you have a brand template imported, mention it by name. Otherwise the agent designs from scratch and your slides won't match your brand. See How do I use brand templates?
  • Trying to describe exact pixel positions: you don't need to. Describe what you want at a high level (“add a stat callout for revenue”) and the agent handles positioning. If something isn't where you want it, say “move the revenue number to the top right.”
  • Asking for an image in the chat: the in-app agent works with text, shapes, lines, and charts. You add images yourself — paste one with Cmd/Ctrl+V, drag it onto the slide, or use Insert Image in the toolbar — or over MCP with element_create_image.

From an MCP Client

The same decks can be built from Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat, or a coding agent like Claude Code. Connect your assistant to Rideful's MCP server (see Connect via MCP), then describe the deck exactly as you would in the app. Your assistant will:

  1. Check for brand templates (template_list)
  2. Discover available fonts (util_list_fonts) and select appropriate pairings
  3. Present a design plan — color palette, fonts, layout approach — for your approval
  4. Create the deck with slide_bulk_create, all slides in one atomic operation
  5. Refine individual elements from there, without regenerating the deck

Why the design plan step matters

The design plan is one of Rideful's 4 hard constraints — it prevents a generic-looking deck and gives you control over the visual direction upfront.

Two things worth knowing on this path: enable extended thinking on your assistant if it offers it, which gives it more reasoning time for layout and typography; and images are added with element_create_image from a public HTTPS URL.

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