Canva study: AI slides can only take you so far
Presenting is one of the oldest skills we lean on at work. So when we set out to study how AI is changing how people present, I expected productivity gains. What I didn’t expect was this: AI has made it so much easier to create slides, but 74% of professionals still get nervous presenting.
Our new study, The Presentation Paradox, surveyed 4,000 professionals across four continents on how AI presentation tools are changing the way we work. It found that even AI-made slides can only take you so far. Whether they land still comes down to you and how well you connect with the room.
Nine in 10 of us (91%) use AI monthly to build slides, mainly for design (57%), brainstorming (56%) and drafting content (49%), and it’s giving us real time back, with 48% saving more than an hour on each one. We’re seeing the same momentum at Canva, with more than 100 million people creating presentations every month, and it’s one of the top uses for our ChatGPT and Claude integrations.
As AI use grows, we’re still figuring out where it helps and where we need to bring our whole selves into our work. We found half (51%) are happy to start every presentation with an AI draft, but when it comes to delivering it, things get more nuanced: 71% trust AI to build slides, but not to present or tell the story, and 86% say great presentations still come down to human connection.