Engineering-Style Presentation Creation Techniques with AI and Marp

This is Ishida from the Agile Group.

Recently, on March 24, I spoke at Mameyose "Considering AI Utilization for Scrum Masters – A Practical Approach to Strengthening the Three Pillars: Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation". Thank you very much to everyone who attended this milestone 50th event. Once again, I felt how much attention is focused on the combination of Scrum Masters and AI.

In my talk, I mainly discussed how Scrum Masters can utilize AI, but I also touched on AI-assisted presentation creation. This article will introduce that content in more detail.

I have published a template repository for presentation creation on GitHub. For detailed usage, please refer to the repository’s README. In this article, I will focus on the “benefits of creating presentations with AI” and the “features of the template.”

Creating presentation materials takes surprisingly long. If you outline the general flow, you often follow steps like these:

1. Organize what you want to convey and plan the structure
2. Draft the content for each slide
3. Adjust layout and design in PowerPoint or Keynote
4. Review and revise repeatedly

Among these, you tend to spend a lot of time especially on 1. Planning the structure and 3. Polishing the design. Planning from scratch can easily stall you, and once you start refining the design, there’s no end to it.

By leveraging generative AI, you can address the above challenges as follows:

• Generating structure proposals: Simply provide a requirement like “I want to present about XX” and receive suggestions for chapter divisions and an outline.
• Draft generation of slide text: Once the structure is decided, you can leave the bulk of the slide text to AI.
• Conversion from specifications/requirements: You can input existing documents like specs or meeting minutes and have them summarized and restructured for a presentation.

Another important point is that AI, which excels at text generation, pairs well with Markdown. Writing slides in Markdown allows you to request content generation and revisions as a natural extension of conversation. There is no need to manipulate binary files like in PowerPoint, and diff management becomes easier.

mamezou-presentation is a presentation template for Mamezou that combines Marp + GitHub Actions + GitHub Pages. It is released under the MIT License, so external parties can freely use and modify it.

mamezou-presentation/
├── presentation/
│   ├── 01_intro.md        # Slides (concatenated in numerical order)
│   ├── 02_main.md
│   └── ...
├── images/
│   └── title.svg          # Image for title slide
├── mamezou-theme.css       # Mamezou brand theme (purple)
└── .github/workflows/      # Auto build/deploy settings

Slides are managed by splitting them into files in the format presentation/NN_name.md, which are then concatenated in numerical order. There is no need to cram all slides into a single file, making it easier to manage by dividing files by section.

The standout feature of this template is that just pushing to the main branch automatically generates HTML/PDF and publishes them to GitHub Pages.

You don’t have to remember commands like “How do I run the build?” or “How do I export to PDF?” Just write Markdown and push, and the presentation deliverables are automatically prepared.

git add presentation/01_intro.md
git commit -m "Add slide"
git push origin main
# → GitHub Actions triggers and automatically generates and publishes HTML/PDF

For local development, using the Marp for VS Code extension in VS Code lets you preview slides in real time as you edit Markdown. You can quickly iterate through the “write → check → revise” cycle.

This template supports AI workflows via GitHub Spec Kit. It integrates with Gemini CLI and Claude Code, allowing you to proceed with AI-driven slide creation using the following commands:

By writing “what to talk about” as specifications, AI proposes the skeleton of the slides. Humans can then focus on review and fleshing out the details, leading to higher-quality presentations in less time.

Additionally, by leveraging the Spec Kit’s Constitution (rules and constraints), you can unify the tone and style of the AI-generated text. Defining rules as a Constitution ensures a consistent style across multiple slides. For example, this template defines the following rules:

• Use a plain tone (da/dearu style) for slide body text (introductory sections may also use the desu/masu style)
• Avoid Japanese quotation marks (「」) for emphasis; use the HTML <strong> tag

If you place Mermaid format (.mmd) files in the repository, GitHub Actions automatically converts them to PNG, making them ready for embedding in slides.

graph LR
    A[Write specifications] --> B[AI proposes structure]
    B --> C[Draft in Markdown]
    C --> D[Push]
    D --> E[Auto build & publish]

Managing diagrams as text makes them ideal for version control.

It also includes features to support the live presentation:

• Presenter Mode: Press the p key in the browser to switch to presenter mode with speaker notes.
• Countdown Timer: A timer app, created using AI, to manage presentation time; customizable alongside the agenda.
• JavaScript Extensions: Since the slides are HTML-based, you can embed JavaScript for high levels of customization, such as creating shortcuts to each section.

To summarize the above content, creating presentations with AI offers the following benefits:

The ability to “focus” is particularly significant. With AI and the template, design uncertainty disappears, allowing you to concentrate on content quality.

This time, prompted by the talk at Mameyose, I introduced efforts to create presentations using AI.

The template repository is released under the MIT License, so external parties can freely use and modify it.

• Repository: mamezou-ishida/mamezou-presentation

If you’d like to try it or have feedback or requests like “I want to try this” or “It would be great if this feature existed,” feel free to open an issue on GitHub. Give AI- and Markdown-based presentation creation a try.