Use AI to Create Presentations with MCP

Creating presentations from existing articles can feel like busy work—copying, pasting, and reformatting content just to fit a new medium. But what if you could automate that process?

That’s exactly what I set out to do using MCP (my Model Control Platform) and a large language model (LLM). Here’s how it works:

I often use slides.com for my presentations, but it doesn’t have a public API for creating slides programmatically. However, it does support creating decks from templates. By leveraging MCP, I can have an LLM generate the template JSON for a slide deck, based on the content of an article.

In practice, I simply ask the LLM (via Cursor, my editor, configured with MCP) to create a slides presentation from my article. MCP fetches the slide specification, structures the content, and generates the JSON for the slide deck—all behind the scenes. I can preview the slides, make tweaks if needed, and get a link to the new presentation.

While slides.com’s lack of a full API limits some possibilities, MCP bridges the gap, making it easy to repurpose content and streamline my workflow. I can even specify color palettes or other preferences for the generated slides.

The best part? MCP isn’t just for developers. With integrations in tools like Cloud.ai and (soon) ChatGPT, anyone can take advantage of this automation. If you want to build similar experiences for your users, check out my MCP Fundamentals workshop.

Let’s spend less time on busy work and more time sharing ideas. See you around the internet!

Oh, and if you want to play with this MCP server (and check out the code), you can find it at slides-mcp.kentcdodds.workers.dev/.

Picture this, you've been asked to create a presentation for a meetup or conference or some sort of internal work thing. And so you have to create a whole bunch of slides and things, and you already have an article about this. So just getting those topics into the slide presentation is all you have to do. Well, that's kind of annoying. It's a bunch of busy work.

What if we could make an LLM do that for us? Well, thanks to MCP, we can. And I have this article right here. We'll use this as an example. So slides.com is where I like to do my presentations.

And they don't really have an API, but they kind of have this way for creating slides based off of a template. And so maybe we could have the LLM generate the template. And I have the article contents for this article right here in Cursor, and Cursor's been configured with this MCP server. So I can say, could you please create a slides presentation based off of the content in this article? And because it has the MCP server, it's going to know, oh, OK, let me get the slide specification so I know how I need to structure the content for the JSON that I generate for the slides presentation.

And now it's going to generate the actual slide deck itself. So it's behind the scenes right now. It's actually generating the JSON for this slide deck that it's going to be creating. So I can expand this and see, oh wow, there's all the slides we're gonna have. So we'll run that tool.

And sweet, it created the presentation for the article Stop Being a Junior. I can review that, and here is the link. I'm actually going to wait on clicking on this link because it's actually still creating the link. It's a pretty long URL. Like I said, Slides doesn't have a proper API.

And maybe if it did, then we could do even more with this. And this is actually one of the reasons why MCP is so powerful, because even though Slides doesn't have a proper API for something like this, they could build their own MCP server and give a really, really awesome user experience for this. So now that it continued, I know that the link is done. I can click on this and yep, it wants me to open this giant URL. I'm gonna go ahead and open that and here we'll create a new deck and look, Stopping Engineer.

Sweet. Okay, So it's got a whole bunch of things. Of course, it's not always perfect. I'll need to move things around, but it does make things way, way easier for me to take those thoughts that I already had and bring them over into Slides. And on top of that, I could actually tell it the color palette that I want it to use and different things like that, if I wanted to at that point.

Again, if Slides.com had an actual API for this, like a proper API, then this would be even better. But it's cool because with MCP, I can use that in cursor in my editor, or I can use it in a regular non-technical person tool like Cloud.ai. And in the near future, we'll also have chat GPT support as well. And if you want to find your users in those locations, then my MCP fundamentals workshop will help you a lot in teaching you how you can build really awesome experiences like this for your users. I hope that you join me.

We'll see you around the internet.