Copilot fixed the part of deck-building that was never the problem
Making slides was tedious. Tedium was never the reason nobody read them. A deck gets ignored when it doesn't make a claim the reader has to respond to, and a generated deck gets ignored for exactly the same reason, only faster and with better kerning.
Swapping the effort of building slides for the effort of writing a prompt doesn't produce an argument. It just moves the place where you avoid having one.
Why the generate button feels like the fix
Because the pain was real, and it was loud. Anyone who has assembled a deck at 10pm remembers the specific misery: the text box that refuses to align with the one above it, the chart that pastes in as a flat picture, the slide where you gave up and screenshotted the spreadsheet. Copilot genuinely removes a lot of that. Point it at a Word document with real heading styles and it will return a drafted deck, images pulled through, speaker notes written, in about the time it takes to make coffee.
So the association forms honestly. The part that hurt is gone, so the problem must be solved. It isn't. The part that hurt and the part that mattered were never the same part.
What actually goes wrong
It generates coverage, not a case. Ask for a deck on the Q3 result and you get slides on the Q3 result: revenue, headcount, pipeline, risks, next steps. Every topic present, nothing claimed. That's a table of contents with transitions. There's nothing for the reader to agree or disagree with, so they scroll to the last slide to work out what you want from them.
It can't tell you the number is wrong. Microsoft says this plainly in its own Copilot documentation: the generated content can be inaccurate, and Copilot can't evaluate accuracy. It will set a figure in 44pt with complete confidence whether that figure came out of the finance file or out of the shape of the sentence around it. Polish used to be weak evidence that someone had checked the thing. It isn't evidence of anything now.
It pays out fastest for the vaguest prompt. "Make a deck about the migration" returns something competent, plausible and entirely unowned in ninety seconds. That speed is the trap. It arrives before you've done the ten minutes of thinking that would have told you this was three slides and an email.
And because slides now cost nothing to produce, there's no longer any friction pushing back on length. The forty-slide problem didn't come from people enjoying making slides, and it doesn't get better when slides become free.
Decide the claim first, then hand over the labour
Write the sentence you want the room to leave with. One sentence, no clauses hedging it. If you can't write it, the deck isn't ready and Copilot can't make it ready.
Then do the drafting in Word, with the headings doing real work: each heading is a beat in the argument, not a topic label. Copilot reads that structure to decide where the slides break, so an outline that argues produces a deck that argues, and an outline that lists produces exactly what you'd expect. Open your organisation's template file before you generate, too, so the output inherits your theme and layouts instead of inventing a look. That only helps if the template is actually doing its job in the first place rather than being a starting position everyone quietly overrides.
That's the honest division of labour. Copilot is very good at the assembling. It has no opinion about whether the thing is worth assembling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Copilot in PowerPoint use my company template?
It will if you give it one. Open your organisation's template file first and then generate from inside it - Copilot treats that as a signal to keep the existing theme and build on the layouts already there. Generate from a blank start instead and you get its own design choices, which is where most of the "why does this deck look nothing like ours" complaints come from. Getting the Slide Master set up properly is what makes this work.
Can Copilot build a deck from a Word document I already wrote?
Yes, and it's the better path. Use "Create presentation from file" and pick the document. The catch is that it leans on your heading styles to decide where slides break, so a document formatted with bold text pretending to be headings gives it nothing to work with. Keep the file under about 24 MB, and include any images you want carried over, because it will try to bring them across.
Does Copilot check the figures it puts on a slide?
No. Microsoft's own documentation is explicit that Copilot can't evaluate accuracy and that its output may be inaccurate. Treat every number on a generated slide as unverified until you've traced it back to the source file yourself, including the ones that look boringly plausible.
Are the generated speaker notes usable?
As a prompt to yourself, sometimes. As something you'd read aloud, rarely. They tend to restate what's already on the slide, which is the one thing speaker notes shouldn't do. They're most useful as a reminder of what the slide was supposed to be for while you rewrite the point in your own words.
So should I stop using Copilot for decks?
No. It's genuinely good at the labour: laying out, structuring, drafting speaker notes, pulling a long document into slide-sized pieces. Use it for that. The thing it can't do is decide what you're claiming, and that was always the expensive part.
Why does the generated deck feel generic even when the prompt was detailed?
Because detail about the topic isn't the same as a position on it. A prompt that describes what to cover will get you coverage. A prompt that states the conclusion, names the audience and says what you want them to do gets you something closer to an argument, because you did the arguing.
Copilot can build the deck. It still can't decide whether you should be giving it.