Workflow 28: How to Reuse Old Slides for a New Talk With AI

I don't generate slides for a talk anymore. I reassemble them.

I've been speaking on stages since 2019, in the Philippines and six other countries. Which means there's a folder with years of decks in it, and most of what I need for any new talk already exists somewhere in there.

So when I get booked, I tell Claude what the talk is and who's in the room. It searches the folder, pulls the relevant slides from different decks, and puts them together into the new one.

Nothing new gets invented. Every slide is one I've actually presented.

Starting a talk with nothing to reuse? The Presentation Builder in Workflow 21 drafts a new outline instead.

What this replaces

Digging through years of old presentations to find the slide you remember making.

Or the worse version: generating a fresh deck with AI, which looks polished and contains things you've never said and don't know how to talk about. I've watched people do this and then get frustrated on stage. Why is that slide there? Why did it add that? Because you asked it to invent a talk you hadn't given.

Blueprint

Your decks go in. A new deck comes out, built from pieces of the old ones.

Trigger: manual, when a talk gets booked or changed. Inputs: the topic, the audience, the time slot, and your folder of past decks. Output: a deck assembled from your existing slides, adjusted for this room.

Two jobs it handles:

• Building a new talk. It finds the relevant slides across every deck and puts them in order.
• Changing an existing one. An organizer shifts the focus, another speaker is covering part of your topic, or a fact on a slide is now out of date. You tell it what changed and it edits the right slides.

Organize

What needs to exist:

• One folder with every deck you've presented
• Decks in a format AI can read and edit. Mine are in Google Slides
• A rough sense of your recurring topics, so you know what's in there

One folder matters more than it sounds. If your decks are scattered across three drives and a download folder, the AI can only reuse the ones it can see.

Systematize

You are my slide library. You have access to [FOLDER], which contains
every presentation I've given.

When I give you a new talk, do this:

1. Ask me: the topic, the audience (students, professionals, founders,
   etc.), the time slot, and anything the organizer specifically asked for.

2. Search every deck in the folder for slides that fit.

3. Build the new deck from those existing slides. Do not generate new
   content. If a section needs something I don't have a slide for, tell
   me what's missing instead of creating it.

4. Put them in an order that works for a talk of this length.

5. Tell me which deck each slide came from, so I can check context.

When I ask for a change to an existing deck:
- Find the exact slides affected
- Make the change
- Show me what changed, so I can review it

Rules:
- Reuse, don't invent. Every slide should be something I've presented.
- If my request is vague, ask before assembling. Vague requests produce
  jumbled decks.
- Keep my style. Don't restyle slides to look consistent if that changes
  what they say.

How to set it up

1. Put every deck you've given into one folder.
2. Connect that folder to Claude.
3. Test it on a talk you've already given twice, and see whether it pulls the slides you would have.
4. Be specific in every request. The quality of the assembly tracks the clarity of the ask.
5. Review every deck before presenting it.

What makes a slide worth reusing?

For me, it's practical enough that people take a photo of it. That's my rule for any talk: the audience should leave with something they can actually use.

Those slides get reused the most, because they work in almost any room.

Assign

AI searches, assembles, edits, and shows me what changed.

I review every deck before I present it, and I decide whether it's something I can actually talk about.

The review isn't optional. It jumbles slides when I'm vague, and it has no idea whether a sequence will make sense spoken aloud. Only I know that, because I'm the one standing up there.

But the bigger point is what this workflow deliberately doesn't do. It doesn't write the talk. The content is mine, built up over years of presenting it and seeing what lands. AI's job is purely retrieval and assembly: finding the right pieces fast, especially the night before, when an organizer has just asked me to change focus.

Rule of thumb from this build: give AI examples to work from, not a blank page to fill.

Integrate

The slide library sits next to the presentation builder, and they do different jobs:

• The presentation builder is for a new talk, drafting an outline and a design prompt
• The slide library is for reusing what exists, and for fast changes to a deck I already have
• Every talk I give adds to the folder, so the library gets more useful each time I speak

The last point is the one worth noticing. Most of what makes this work was built by presenting, not by setting anything up. The workflow just makes years of that work findable.

Next: a free way to store your clients' information and meeting history safely.