Turn Slack Mentions Into AI Slides (Small Biz Edition)

Most small businesses don’t have a “presentation problem.” They have a presentation timing problem.

A client asks for a campaign recap. A partner wants a co-marketing pitch deck. Your team needs a quick plan for next week’s social media push. And where does the request show up? Slack—usually as a casual “Can someone put together slides for this?” that turns into hours of copy/paste, formatting, and chasing context.

Here’s a better way to approach this: treat Slack as the intake form for marketing decks. When someone mentions a deck request in Slack, an automation can generate a first draft using Plus AI (inside Google Slides or PowerPoint), then post the finished link right back into the same thread. The result is faster content production, cleaner handoffs, and fewer “who’s doing the deck?” messages.

This post is part of our Small Business Social Media USA series, where the goal is simple: help American small teams ship better social media and campaign work with less chaos. Automating decks sounds like a niche trick—until you realize how often decks are the backbone of social media planning, approvals, and reporting.

Why “Slack → AI presentation” is a real marketing workflow

Answer first: Because marketing work already lives in Slack, and AI presentations are only useful if they start with the right context and end with an easy handoff.

If you run social media for a small business, you’re constantly translating messy inputs into something stakeholders can scan:

• A week of scattered ideas becomes a content calendar
• A performance snapshot becomes a monthly report deck
• A new product announcement becomes a launch plan
• A sales promo becomes a creative brief + ad concept slides

The painful part isn’t “making slides.” It’s collecting the ingredients:

• What are we promoting?
• Who’s the audience?
• What offers or deadlines matter?
• Which posts performed last month?
• What’s the tone/brand voice?

In many small businesses, those answers are in Slack threads, not in tidy docs. So the smartest place to trigger work is also Slack.

One opinion I’ll stand by: AI content tools are most valuable when they’re paired with automation. Otherwise, you still end up doing the manual labor of moving info between apps.

The tool stack: Slack + Zapier + Plus AI (and why it works)

Answer first: This stack works because each tool does one job well—Slack captures the request, Zapier orchestrates the workflow, and Plus AI generates editable slides inside familiar presentation software.

Slack: where the request happens

Your team already uses Slack to coordinate social media campaigns, approvals, creative ideas, and results. You don’t need another request system. You need Slack to trigger work cleanly.

Zapier: the traffic controller

Zapier connects thousands of apps and lets you build “if this, then that” workflows (Zaps). For this use case, Zapier listens for a new mention (or a specific phrase) in Slack and then kicks off the slide creation.

Plus AI: AI slides without forcing a new workflow

Plus AI creates slides from prompts, but the key detail is this: it enhances PowerPoint and Google Slides instead of replacing them. That matters for small businesses because:

• Your templates already live in Slides/PowerPoint
• Stakeholders want a file they can edit
• Brand consistency is easier when you’re not exporting from a new tool every time

What you’ll need: this automation requires a paid Zapier account and a Plus AI Pro account (as noted in the original tutorial).

Step-by-step: create AI presentations from Slack mentions

Answer first: Build a Zap with four steps: Slack trigger → Plus AI create → delay → Plus AI get → Slack message.

This is the practical build that turns Slack into a deck generator. You can implement it for marketing decks, social media reporting, internal updates—anything repeatable.

1) Set a Slack trigger you can control

Use Slack’s New Mention trigger. Then narrow it down so it doesn’t fire on every @mention.

A clean approach is a “highlight phrase” your team agrees on, such as:

• Create a Plus AI presentation:
• Deck request:
• Build slides:

Keep it consistent and train the team to write the prompt right in the message.

Recommended prompt format (copy/paste):

Create a Plus AI presentation: Social media campaign plan for [BUSINESS]. Goal: [LEADS/SALES]. Audience: [WHO]. Platforms: [IG/TikTok/Facebook/LinkedIn]. Include: content pillars, weekly posting plan, 5 post ideas with hooks, and a simple KPI plan.

This small formatting choice is the difference between a usable deck and AI-generated filler.

2) Create the presentation in Plus AI

Next, Zapier runs Plus AI → Create Presentation.

Map the Slack message text into Plus AI’s Presentation Prompt field. Set a slide count that matches the job.

• For a quick content plan: 8–12 slides
• For a monthly performance recap: 10–15 slides
• For a client pitch: 12–20 slides

My rule: start smaller. People actually read smaller decks.

3) Add a delay so the deck is ready

Plus AI can generate fast (the tutorial notes around a minute), but automation fails when you assume “fast” means “instant.”

Add Delay by Zapier → Delay For.

• Conservative setting: 10 minutes
• If your prompts are short and slide counts are low: 2–5 minutes

You’re buying reliability, not speed.

4) Retrieve the finished deck

Add Plus AI → Get Presentation.

Use the Presentation ID returned by the creation step. This gives you the deck URL (and other metadata) that you can pass back to Slack.

5) Reply in Slack with the deck link (ideally in-thread)

Finally: Slack → Send Channel Message.

Two best practices:

1. Reply in the original thread by mapping the original message timestamp. This keeps channels clean.
2. Send a neat hyperlink instead of a long URL (Slack link formatting is your friend).

A simple message works:

• “Draft deck is ready. Please review slides 2–6 for accuracy.”
• “Here’s the first pass. Add brand examples + final CTA before sending.”

That’s it. One Slack mention becomes an AI-generated, editable slide deck, delivered back to the team where the request started.

Real small business use cases for social media teams

Answer first: The highest ROI decks are the ones you recreate every week or month—content plans, performance reports, and launch briefs.

If you’re publishing for a US small business, these are the repeatable presentation types that tend to eat your time.

Content calendar deck for approvals

Many owners and partners don’t want a spreadsheet. They want a quick deck they can skim.

Have your Slack prompt ask Plus AI to generate:

• Month theme + promos
• Weekly posting cadence by platform
• 10–15 post ideas (with hooks)
• Reusable creative guidelines

Monthly social media reporting deck

Turn a Slack note like “We need January’s results for the meeting” into slides.

Prompt ingredients that produce better decks:

• “Include a slide for top 3 posts and why they worked”
• “Include a slide for next month’s tests (2 hypotheses)”
• “Keep metrics to 5: reach, engagements, CTR, follows, leads”

If you want to go further, you can extend the Zap later to pull metrics from a dashboard or spreadsheet—but even a narrative-first draft saves time.

Launch plan deck (especially useful in Q1)

Early-year planning is when decks multiply. Product updates, spring promos, new offers—everyone wants a plan.

Have Slack prompts generate:

• Audience + positioning
• Offer details + timeline
• Platform-by-platform creative angles
• Influencer/partner outreach plan
• Measurement plan tied to leads

Sales enablement mini-decks

Social media doesn’t live alone. Small businesses need alignment between marketing and sales.

Generate quick decks for:

• FAQ objections (from comments and DMs)
• Competitor comparisons
• “How to talk about the offer” messaging

Prompting tips that prevent “generic AI slides”

Answer first: Give Plus AI constraints, structure, and your business context—or you’ll get a deck that looks polished but says very little.

I’ve found that most AI decks go wrong in predictable ways: too vague, too many buzzwords, not enough specifics. Fix it with better prompts.

Use these prompt upgrades:

• Add a role: “Act like a US small business social media strategist.”
• Add constraints: “No more than 12 slides. Use short bullets. Avoid fluff.”
• Add examples: “Use a friendly, practical tone like [brand].”
• Add local context: “Target audience: customers within 20 miles of Austin, TX.”
• Force outputs: “Include 10 hooks. Include 5 CTAs. Include 3 A/B tests.”

And include brand assets when possible:

• Product names (exact)
• Offer terms (exact)
• Pricing or ranges (if appropriate)
• What you don’t want (words to avoid, claims to avoid)

A quotable rule: AI is great at structure. You still own the truth.

Guardrails: approvals, privacy, and brand safety

Answer first: Automate drafts, not decisions—then add guardrails for sensitive data and brand claims.

A few practical policies keep this workflow safe:

• Don’t paste sensitive customer data into Slack prompts (or any AI prompt). Use anonymized summaries.
• Require human review before sending externally. Your Zap can generate a deck, but it shouldn’t email it to clients without approval.
• Standardize templates. If you have a brand deck template, build the habit: AI drafts the content, your template provides the look.
• Add a “definition of done.” Example: “Deck isn’t final until slide titles are rewritten and numbers are verified.”

This matters even more for regulated spaces (health, finance) and for small businesses where a single inaccurate claim can create real headaches.

Next step: make Slack your marketing production hub

Your social media workflow already runs through Slack. Turning Slack mentions into AI presentations is a clean way to ship plans and reports faster, especially when you’re juggling content creation, approvals, and lead-gen goals.

If you try one thing this week, make it this: create a dedicated Slack phrase like Deck request: and standardize the prompt format your team uses. Once the habit is in place, the automation feels obvious.

What would happen to your posting consistency if every “we need a deck” message turned into a first draft automatically—and your team only spent time on the parts that require judgment?