Create Plus AI presentations from new Slack mentions

Plus AI takes a smart approach to presentation-building: rather than replacing PowerPoint and Google Slides, it enhances them. With Plus, you can create compelling AI-generated slides from prompts, then easily edit the content in the presentation apps you know and love.

As soon as you need to gather context from team conversations and share finished decks, though, working with Plus AI gets manual fast—unless you're using Zapier. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to automatically create and share Plus AI presentations whenever someone mentions the need for one in Slack. Let's dive in.

How to generate new Plus AI decks from Slack mentions

You can build this Zap from scratch in the Zap editor or click the template below to get started. (The template will save you some clicks by automatically populating your trigger and action steps.)

Set up your Slack trigger

Create your trigger, choosing Slack as your app and New Mention as your trigger event. (If you started with the template, this will already be done for you.) Connect your account, and click Continue.

In the Configure tab, choose when and for what reason this event will trigger. I'll set this to trigger when someone includes the phrase Create a Plus AI presentation in their message. When you're done, click Continue.

In a minute, you'll need to test this step—and to do that, you'll want to post your "highlight word" or phrase in Slack. Your message should also come with a prompt for Plus AI. If you need some inspiration, check out the prompt I wrote.

Back in the Zap editor, test your step—you'll see your post in the test data. Click it, then click Continue with selected record.

Set up your Plus AI write action

In your next step, choose Plus AI as your app and Create Presentation as the action event. Then connect your Plus AI account. After providing your API key, click Yes, Continue to Plus AI to configure the step.

Plus AI needs to receive a prompt in order for it to execute this job. That means you'll need to map data from your Slack trigger. In the Presentation Prompt field, click the plus sign (+) or type a forward slash (/), then click Text. While you're here, you can also adjust the number of slides you want to create (at least one, but no more than 30). After you're done, click Continue.

Now click Test step to send your test prompt, which will begin the presentation generation process.

Add a delay step

Plus AI presentations generate fast—like, in a single minute fast—but just in case you're sending complicated prompts to Plus AI or asking it to build decks with tons of slides, you might want to give the app a few minutes of buffer time. Otherwise, if the presentation isn't ready before you try to share it on Slack, your Zap won't work.

If you're building from scratch, add a new step, picking Delay as your app and Delay For as your action event. Then click Continue. To play it safe, I recommend delaying your Zap for 10 minutes. When you're done configuring, test your step.

Set up your Plus AI search action

Before you can send your finished presentation back to Slack, you need a search action to locate it. To set that up, add another action, choosing Plus AI as your app and Get Presentation as your action event. Your account will already be connected from having set up your trigger. Click Continue.

In the Configure tab, map the Presentation ID from your second action by clicking the kebab menu (⋮) next to the field, then Custom. A modal will appear. Select the ID of your new presentation from your Plus AI step. Configure other settings as desired, then click Continue.

Now test your step. You should see a test record with some data from your slides.

Set up your Slack action

There's one more step left: sending the slides to Slack. Add another action step, then choose Slack as your app and Send Channel Message as your action event. Your account will already be connected. Click Continue.

To configure this step, first pick the channel you want your message to appear in. Then add any message text you'd like to show up whenever you post your presentation. This should, of course, include the presentation! I'm going to type in a brief message followed by the relevant URL, which I mapped from the previous Plus AI search step.

You can configure a bunch of other settings here, like whether you want to send the notification from a bot or include links to this Zap in your message. You can also thread the notification within your original message, to keep the communication clean. Just map this field to the timestamp of the original message. I'm going to use Slack's link formatting syntax to send a clean, clickable link as opposed to a sprawling URL.

When you're done configuring, click Continue and test your step. Here's what my threaded reply looks like.

And when I click the link, a PowerPoint file with my customized deck opens.

If everything worked as expected, just remember to click Publish to turn your Zap on.