A8 Slide Deck Creator
AI-powered branded presentation generation. One form, one click, one brand-perfect deck.
The Problem
Aptitude 8 is a HubSpot consulting firm that creates dozens of slide decks every week -- kickoff presentations, sales pitches, training decks, quarterly reviews, client proposals. Every deck needs to look on-brand, follow A8's design system, and be ready for an audience that expects polish.
This creates a persistent tax on revenue and delivery teams:
- Manual formatting -- reps spend more time on layout than content
- Brand inconsistency -- off-brand decks reach clients without anyone catching it
- Template misuse -- wrong slide types chosen for the message
- Content disorganization -- raw notes never become presentations
- Repeated work -- the same deck gets rebuilt from scratch every month
The AI Design Problem
Existing AI slide tools (ChatGPT, Gamma, Beautiful.ai) all share the same flaw: they generate both content and design. The result is slides that look nothing like A8's brand. Teams end up worse off -- they've spent time prompting an AI tool and now have to manually reformat everything into the branded template anyway.
The core tension: AI tools are good at organizing content, but terrible at respecting brand design. Teams need one without sacrificing the other.
The Scale Problem
With 8+ AEs, Solutions Architects, and delivery leads all creating decks, even small inefficiencies compound. A deck that takes 45 minutes instead of 5 minutes means hundreds of hours per year spent on formatting instead of client-facing work.
The Solution
The A8 Slide Deck Creator is a web application that separates content intelligence from design execution. Users paste raw content -- notes, transcripts, briefs, bullet points -- and Claude AI organizes it into a structured slide sequence. Google Apps Script then places that content into pre-designed, branded template slides with pixel-perfect fidelity.
The core innovation: AI never touches design. It only decides what goes where.
Unlike AI slide generators that produce generic-looking output, the Deck Creator works with A8's actual Google Slides templates. Every font, color, icon, and layout element is preserved exactly as designed. Claude's job is purely intellectual: analyze the content, choose the right layout for each message, enforce character limits, and structure a narrative flow. The script's job is mechanical: duplicate the right template slides, replace placeholders with content, remove unused slides, and deliver a finished deck.
The result: brand-perfect presentations generated in under 2 minutes from raw content.
How It Works
The web app presents a streamlined form with everything needed to generate a deck:
- Template Selection -- visual tile picker showing available branded templates
- Purpose -- guides AI tone and structure (Sales Pitch, Training, Client Proposal, Executive Summary, etc.)
- Target Audience -- informs content complexity and language
- Slide Count -- range slider from 3 to 15 slides
- Your Content -- paste in notes, transcripts, briefs, or bullet points (up to 50,000 characters)
When the user submits, a multi-step pipeline kicks off:
- Dynamic prompt construction -- the system builds a template-aware prompt with available layouts, character limits, and structural rules
- Claude API processing -- Claude analyzes the raw content and returns structured JSON mapping content to slides
- Template duplication -- the selected template is copied, preserving all design elements
- Content placement -- the script replaces placeholder text in each slide with Claude's organized content
- Cleanup -- unused template slides are removed, remaining slides reordered, unreplaced placeholders cleared
- Delivery -- the user receives a direct link to their finished presentation
Template Registry System
Each template is fully mapped in a registry that tells both Claude and the script exactly what's available. The two registered templates cover 17 total layout types across title slides, section dividers, bullet lists, multi-column layouts, stats displays, highlight grids, and closing slides.
New templates can be added by designing slides in Google Slides with `` text and registering the layout mapping -- no code changes to the AI or builder logic required.
Character Limit Enforcement
Character limits are built into both the prompt and validation. Titles cap at 40 characters, column headers at 20, body text at 120. Claude doesn't just truncate -- it rephrases content to fit within limits while preserving meaning. Every slide also gets AI-generated speaker notes with talking points and transition phrases.
Slide Duplication Architecture
A critical technical detail: the system always duplicates template slides rather than modifying originals. For each slide Claude requests, the corresponding template slide is duplicated and content is placed in the copy. Original slides remain pristine. This means the 100th deck generated is as brand-perfect as the first.
Tech Stack
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Platform | Google Apps Script (standalone web app) |
| UI | HTML Service with A8 dark theme design system |
| AI Processing | Claude API via Anthropic SDK (Sonnet 4.5) |
| Slide Manipulation | Google Slides API, Google Drive API |
| Template System | Custom registry with per-template layout mappings |
| Authentication | Google SSO (domain-restricted to aptitude8.com) |
| Analytics | Google Sheets (usage logging) |
Measured and Expected Benefits
| Activity | Before | After | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building a deck from scratch | 30-60 min | 2-5 min | ~90% |
| Reformatting AI-generated slides | 20-40 min | 0 min | ~100% |
| Organizing content into slide structure | 15-30 min | Automatic | ~85% |
| Writing speaker notes | 10-20 min per deck | Auto-generated | ~90% |
| Ensuring brand compliance | 5-15 min checking | Guaranteed by templates | ~100% |
Conservative estimate: 30-45 minutes saved per deck. For a team creating 10-20 decks per week, that's 5-15 hours of weekly capacity redirected from formatting to selling, delivering, and strategizing. At less than $0.03 per deck in API costs, the app pays for itself with a single generation.
Current Status
The app is live in beta, deployed as a standalone Google Apps Script web app accessible to all aptitude8.com domain users. Two templates are registered with 17 layout types, and usage analytics track 11 data points per generation to inform template design and AI tuning decisions.
What's Next
- Incorporate beta feedback from team usage to refine prompts, layouts, and UX
- Additional template designs to cover more use cases
- Processing mode toggle (Sonnet vs. Opus) for speed vs. quality
- Extended content processing for longer, more complex source material
- Integration with A8's Presale Summary App to pull deal context directly into deck generation -- closing the loop between deal preparation and client-facing deliverables