AI Tools in PowerPoint: Beyond the Prompt Box - Speed up your workflow with CoPilot and much more

1. Introduction: People associate AI and PowerPoint with Copilot prompts and automatically generated slides. But some of the most useful AI powered features in Microsoft PowerPoint work quietly in the background, helping users design more effective presentations, improve delivery, streamline formatting, and to create richer presentation experiences without relying on full AI generation. In this course, we'll explore the practical AI and AI assisted tools built directly into PowerPoint from intelligent layout suggestions and live presentation coaching to automatic captions, recording tools, and smart content enhancement. Rather than replacing the presenter, these tools are designed to support faster workflows, stronger communication, and more polished presentation design. By the end of the course, you'll understand how to use PowerPoint's built in AI features to improve both the creation process and the final audience experience. 2. Copilot prompt : This course, you will learn how to use AI tools to build better slides faster. While the tools are placed throughout the interface, the Copilot panel is always accessible by the bottom right icon. Some features will automatically launch Copilot and prefilled prompts. And if you close the panel, you can just click on the icon to resume your work right where you left it. Some features will automatically launch Copilot and pre fill prompts. If you close the panel, you can just click on the icon at any point to resume with Copilot right where you left it. 3. Image generation: To generate an AI image directly in PowerPoint, you can go to Insert pictures, generate an image. From here, you can type a short description of the image you want to create and PowerPoint will generate the visuals based on your prompt. For a simple example, I will just type a fish. Copilot may ask you a number of questions to help get the result you want. In this case, it's asking what style I'd like. I'm going to choose a realistic photo and a tropical fish. So now PowerPoint has created the image, it's put it on as a full screen image on my slide, and it's given some information about it. For example, we could add a caption or title overlay, or if you wanted to, you could have switched it to a different style or color. For my example, I'll just choose auto generate. Otherwise, you could have typed in the specific title. A So now Copilot has added a title, which is, of course, fully editable and a subtitle. Again, editable. You can change the fonts, colors, anything you like. PowerPoint has also created a semi transparent dark rectangle. Of course, these are all editable so you can go and make any adjustments to whatever you think looks good. You can even make changes to the photo at any point, either through Copilot or by right clicking and making adjustments to color and also brightness. If you wish to make further adjustments via Copilot, you can click on the Copilot icon and carry on from where you left off. 4. Image background removal: To access PowerPoint's AI picture editing tools, you can right click on an image and choose Edit Picture. This opens a set of intelligent editing options designed to help you quickly enhance visuals without leaving PowerPoint or using external software. You can quickly remove or replace backgrounds, apply visual enhancements, and make adjustments. So for this example, I'm going to remove the background by clicking Background and remove. PowerPoint will automatically use AI to detect the subject and separate it from the background. You can also use color fill, which will replace the background with any single color of your choice. Once you hit Save, it will update your slide with the new color or the background removed. Control Z will undo and then restore the background as it was. You can always go back to Edit picture and make a different adjustment. I would normally just remove the background without selecting the color fill because that gives you more flexibility when using it in PowerPoint. Now we can set the background of the slide to the color we had and then adjust this as necessary. We could even do things like make copies of it. And if you want, you could actually use AI to further change the colors, and you can even rotate it and flip it around. There is a lot of flexibility when you have images with the background removed in PowerPoint. 5. Image enhancement: From your Edit picture options, you can also use Auto Enhance, which improves the image instantly by adjusting clarity, brightness, and overall visual quality to make it more presentation ready. Here we have an image that's a bit low in brightness and contrast. We can right click, choose Edit picture. Enhance and auto enhance, and in a few seconds, Copilot will make the adjustments. Copilot will give you a before and after slider. If you accept it and then hit Save, you'll have the after version. Often, if you're not sure what needs adding, this is a quick way of being able to enhance your image to make it more presentation ready. 6. Upscale small images: Low resolution visuals can become pixelated and blurry, reducing clarity and making the presentation look unprofessional. PowerPoint includes AI assisted image upscaling that can improve how images appear on your slides. Here, I've used a deliberately low resolution version of this image. I'll just scale it up. And you can see that it's quite pixelated and blurry. If we right click on this, we can go to Edit picture. And under Enhance, we can choose upscale. We can use this slider to move left and right to see the before and after. And you have a choice to accept or discard it. PowerPoint will also show you the size it was before and the size it was after it's been scaled up in pixels. So I can hit Accept and save. Now we've got our upscale image. It's worth noting that while this can produce some good results, the effect can be quite strong because it's only trying to fill in missing detail. I would always recommend you start with the highest quality image possible. 7. Image effects: When you select an image and go to Edit picture, and then enhance PowerPoint has a selection of effects that can be applied. These are AI assisted and algorithmic adjustments to the image's appearance. Unlike the older image effects that you can find under format picture, cystic effects, these newer effects use AI assisted image processing to apply visual transformations directly to the image itself, which means you get similar features to Photoshop filters built into PowerPoint. PowerPoint will save the image with the effects burnt in, and you can undo that initially if you wish. I would recommend saving a copy of the image in case you need to get back to the original. An easy way of doing that is pressing Control D on the slide you have of your image. That will make a duplicate slide, and then you can apply the effects and see what you think. You can always then go back to the original slide with the original image on if you wish. There are currently six effects of which some allow you to adjust the strength of the effect. Glass adds a frosted blur effect. Oder creates stylized outlines, sphere places a glowing or behind the subject of which you can change the color. Pixel applies adjustable pixelation. Glitch creates digital distortion effects, and scatter breaks the image into AI generated particles and fragments. 8. Select and move or erase: The select Area option allows you to make quick AI assisted changes directly to parts of the image. So select your picture, right click and Coos Edit picture, and then select Area. You can either draw a box around the object like this or click. You can hold down Shift to select or deselect. And you can even use the brush to draw on it. Now I've just selected this yellow balloon. I'm going to hold down Shift, click on these parts to include the string, and then click Move. And now I'll be able to reposition the selected object. PowerPoint will automatically fill in the original space, and it will attempt to integrate the object smoothly into its new location. This allows you to alter your composition without leaving PowerPoint. So now I can click and drag this and position wherever I want. And click Save. If you aren't happy with the results, you can press Control Z to undo this. As with all these edits, because they're burnt into the picture, I would always duplicate the slide first so we could go to the thumbnails, select our slide and press Control D, and now make changes to this one. Next, I'll show you the brush tool, which allows for manual selection of different areas. I'll select the brush over the area I want to erase. Then click raise. PowerPoint will now remove this object and it will use AI generated fill to rebuild the background and blend the surrounding area naturally. This is useful for removing distractions or unwanted objects from visual. These tools are designed for quick visual edits and work best with clean images and simple backgrounds. 9. Text options: Option within Edit picture allows you to add or replace text directly inside an image using AI assisted editing. After selecting your image, open Edit picture and choose text. You can choose one of the stars from the selection and then edit the text and also change the size and position. I'll select this, drag it down here. Type my text. And align it. You can also make it a bit smaller by dragging down from the corner. Just realign that. You can also change the font. The font size can be changed up here, and you can add other effects such as changing the color, the thickness. And many more. There is also an option to change the transparency so that you can blend the fill of the text into the image. The styles PowerPoint shows you have been created to match the color and lighting of the original image, and to help blend the text more naturally into the scene. So we can now hit Save. But it's important to note that unlike a normal text box, the generated text will be burnt into the image and is therefore not editable once you hit Save. You can always duplicate the slide before this to make sure that you can get back to the image if you want to. So before we add the text, we can press Control D to duplicate, right click on their edit picture. Now we can always go back to the original image if we choose to or click text. We can add our text anywhere and edit what's in this box. And then this can be clicked and dragged to a line to the middle of the page. You can also make any changes to the text, such as fonts, font size, alignment, and other effects such as transparency. When you click Save, it will be burnt into the picture, you can always go back to the previous slide if you wish. 10. Enhanced crop tool: The other option in the Edit picture menu is crop. The crop tool has been expanded to include more flexible transform controls, including rotation while cropping. You can now not only trim using the crop handles, but you can also rotate the image within the crop frame. This lets you adjust the angle of the photo while keeping the crop area fixed, so you can better align subjects, straighten visuals, or create more dynamic compositions without leaving PowerPoint or pre editing the image in another application. PowerPoint lets you lock the image into preset formats such as 16 by nine, four to three or nine by 16. You can also use a custom ratio. This ensures consistency across slides and helps you fit images perfectly into your layouts without distortion or manual resizing. 11. Edit with Co Pilot for text: It with Copilot feature is available when you write, click on text. This lets you quickly rewrite or improve selected slide text without leaving the slide. Copilot will generate an updated version of your selected text, which you can accept or edit further. You can use this to shorten or summarize text, improve clarity and tone, convert paragraphs into bullet points, or adapt content for different audiences. In this example, I'm going to type simplify for clarity. This first example shows the original text, which is dense, jargon heavy and hard to scan. The result is clearer, shorter, and more audience friendly. This second example shows a paragraph that can be changed to bullet points to improve how quickly and easily the information is understood. So we can right click, Edit with Copilot. This option is available as one of the presets. Make it a list. And Copilot has now converted this into bullets, which makes it a lot easier to see the main points. 12. Design suggestions: Design suggestions in PowerPoint is an AI powered feature that automatically improves the layout of your slide. It can be an excellent way to rearrange layouts into cleaner formats or quickly generate slide variations. When you add content like text and images, PowerPoint analyzes it and provides alternative design layouts that improve alignment, spacing, hierarchy, and visual balance. I will show you a simple example of how this works with these six different images, which are all different sizes and different aspect ratios. So I'll click design suggestions PowerPoint will now give you these following options. You can click on anyone to see if you're happy with it and how it looks. And all of these images are still editable so you can click and move them around or change anyone as you wish. So by using design suggestions, we've taken those six images, and we've not had to crop or align any of them as PowerPoint has done that all for us. This can be a real time saver, and it's great that it's fully editable afterwards. With this simple text and image layout, you can see how quick and easy it is to create a variety of layouts, helping you quickly turn basic slides into polished designs without manual formatting. Again, you can click to select any one of these, and they are fully editable afterwards. 13. Interactive help system: You can use Copilot like an interactive help system inside PowerPoint to get answers, fix issues, and improve your slides without leaving the app. Instead of searching Google or menus, you can ask Copilot questions about how PowerPoint works and get instant guidance. Copilot in PowerPoint works in two main modes that support different ways of working. One for directly editing your slides and one for chatting, planning, and getting help. Understanding both helps you use Copilot more effectively, depending on whether you want to build content or explore ideas. In example one, we'll switch to chat mode, and we'll ask anything we want about this presentation or any features we want to use. For example, I'll type. What's the difference between a theme and a template? And PowerPoint will return with all the detail clearly laid out to make it easy to read. For example, two, we'll switch back to allow editing mode. Starting with these four boxes, I want to find out about how alignment works. So all type, how do the alignment tools work? We get useful information about the various ways of aligning objects, as well as some useful tips. We could now manually align the objects we need, but as we are in editing mode, Copilot asks if it can align the objects for us. I can say yes. Copilot will ask how we want it aligned. I'm going to say middle and which slide it is, and then it will align it for us. I would generally recommend things like aligning, you work out how they're done and run them manually in PowerPoint because that's a lot faster, and it's great to know. But being able to ask Copilot to edit the slide for you can be really helpful. 14. Summary: If you've enjoyed this short lesson, please share a slide or deck that you've created with the help of the AI tools in PowerPoint. I'd love to see them, and I give feedback to every single one that's added. Please also leave a very short review to let me know how you found it.