AI for presentations: send a spreadsheet, get a quarterly report deck for the owner

The short answer

Send the agent the raw numbers as they are: an Excel export, a CSV, a screenshot of a table. Say who will read the deck, how many slides, and ask it to explain anything unusual in the data. You get a presentation file with charts and a short written verdict in the chat.

Then edit it the way you would brief a colleague: “slide 3 is too long”, “add a chart of costs”. When the content is right, ask for speaker notes and a one-minute version you can say out loud.

The agent does the arithmetic and the first draft of the story. You add what only you know about the business, and one last message has the agent check every claim against the file before the deck goes out; more on that below.

The test: a coffee roastery and one quarter of raw numbers

We built the data ourselves. A coffee roastery with 14 people sells to cafés, through its own online shop, to offices on subscription and on a marketplace. The Excel file has six tabs: revenue by month and channel, nine cost lines, headcount, six KPIs, the Q2 totals and four dated notes. It looks the way an operations manager's export usually looks: no formulas, no charts, no summary.

We also planted a few things an owner would want to hear about: a marketplace sale in August, a café chain that left mid-quarter, a courier price rise in September and a new hire. The company is made up. The answers are real: everything below was sent to our test agent on 29 October 2026, in one chat.

Step 1. Send the numbers and say who the deck is for

“Make a presentation” gets slides. “For the owner, numbers first, explain anything unusual” gets a report. The slide count keeps it short enough to read before a call.

The file came 2 minutes 39 seconds after the message. A .pptx opens in PowerPoint and Keynote, and Google Slides imports it. Ask for the same deck “in Google Slides” and you get a link to it in your Drive instead.

The eight slides follow the brief: a title, one slide with the four totals, revenue by channel against Q2, revenue and costs month by month, three slides on what looks unusual, and a closing slide with actions and a list of what this export cannot answer. Each of the five charts is a real chart object, so you can change it in PowerPoint without rebuilding the slide.

The analysis went further than the brief. The agent checked that orders times average order matched the revenue line before trusting the file. It connected the notes tab to the numbers: Daybreak Cafes explains the drop in August, the courier tariff explains September. And it found a loss we had not explained anywhere, one more wholesale account in September, and said there was no note for it instead of inventing a reason.

Step 2. Edit it like a colleague's draft

The first version was good, with one slide carrying four bullet points and nothing on where the money goes. Owners ask that question first, so we asked for both changes in one message.

74 seconds. The agent did not just delete two bullets: it moved the comparison into the chart, so the slide lost words and kept the information. Here is slide 3 before and after.

The new cost slide sorts nine lines from largest to smallest and highlights the two that make up 69% of spending. Every total matches the source file.

Step 3. Speaker notes and a one-minute version

A deck for the owner usually gets presented on a call, and the first minute matters most. Ask for both in one message.

21 seconds. We opened the file and found notes on all nine slides. They add what the slide does not say: “Do not defend the marketplace number here; say it is one discount week and point to the later slide.” On the wholesale slide the note says to ask the owner about the unexplained account instead of guessing.

Before you send it

Every total in the deck matched the source file, and the agent listed the limits of the data on its own closing slide, for example that courier spend sits in one line for café and online deliveries. One habit makes a deck like this ready for the owner: as the last step, ask the agent to “check every claim on the slides against the file and list anything that does not hold”. It takes one message and a minute.

A tip for the spoken summary: if you want every figure on the same basis, say so, for example “compare everything with Q2”. Then the owner hears each number against the same period.

Your chat history, with the figures you send, stays in your agent's isolated container. To answer, the agent sends requests to the model: on the default model they go through DeepSeek's infrastructure in the People's Republic of China, which you confirm during onboarding, and on Pro you can attach your own Claude or Codex, so requests go to that provider under your own account. More in Is an AI agent safe? 8 things to check before you let one into your chats.

What it costs

We read the balance in the agent's status line after each message. The first deck cost 9 , the two edits 2  and the notes with the summary 1 : 12  for the whole case, a little over four minutes of waiting in total.

Text work on the default model costs 1  per 20,000 tokens. The Free plan gives 200  in the first month and 100  every month after, with no card. Pro costs $13.90 a month for 400 , or $1.39 for the first month if you subscribe within 7 days of signing up. All rates are on the pricing page.

The same chat handles the documents around the report. To pull figures out of a PDF before they reach a spreadsheet, see Twelve things to ask an AI about a PDF. For contracts and invoices, see AI for documents: send a contract, get the risky clauses, then check the invoice against it.

Messages worth copying

Create your agent, send it the next export the day the quarter closes, and keep the edits in the same chat.