The short version: Yes, PowerPoint has had built in AI tools for years, starting with Designer, which suggests slide layouts for free, plus Presenter Coach, which critiques your delivery, and now Copilot, which drafts whole decks but costs extra on top of your Microsoft 365 subscription. Most people asking this question want the paid Copilot features and don’t realise the free ones have been sitting there the whole time.
The confusing bit: “built in” means at least three different things
When someone asks me does PowerPoint have AI, they’re usually picturing one thing: type a prompt, get a finished deck. That’s Copilot, and it’s not free. But PowerPoint has quietly had AI features baked into it since 2016, and most people who ask this question have never clicked the button that’s been sitting on their ribbon the whole time.
There are three separate layers, and I think confusing them is why this question gets asked so often:
- Designer (also called Design Ideas), included free with most Microsoft 365 subscriptions, suggests layout and formatting for slides you’ve already written.
- Presenter Coach, also free, listens to you rehearse and flags filler words, pace, and pitch.
- Copilot for PowerPoint, the paid add-on, drafts entire decks from a prompt or a Word document, rewrites your text, and can turn a rough outline into slides in one go.
Only that third one writes content for you. The first two just polish or coach what you’ve already made. That distinction matters more than people give it credit for.
Designer: the free one, and it’s been there since 2016
Designer sits under the Home tab in PowerPoint desktop and PowerPoint for the web. Add a bullet list or a photo to a slide and a panel opens on the right showing three or four redesigned layouts, done in a few seconds. It’s one of the better free AI features Microsoft has shipped, because it does one narrow job well: it stops your deck looking like it was made by someone who’s never touched a design tool.
It’s included with Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Business Standard, and Business Premium. If you’re on an older perpetual license (PowerPoint 2019 bought outright, no subscription), you won’t have it at all. That’s the first thing to check if you’re wondering why you can’t find it: Designer needs an active Microsoft 365 subscription, not just a copy of PowerPoint sitting on your laptop.
To check whether you have it: open PowerPoint, go to Home, look for a “Designer” icon on the ribbon (it’s usually on the far right). If it’s greyed out or missing, go to File, then Account, and check what your subscription includes. I’ve had clients swear they don’t have AI in PowerPoint when they were simply on a plan that doesn’t unlock it, or using a version installed years ago that’s never updated.
Presenter Coach: the one almost nobody uses
This is my favourite of the free tools and the one I recommend most, because nobody uses it and it costs nothing. Go to Slide Show, then Rehearse with Coach. It listens to you practise your talk through your microphone and afterwards gives you a report: how many filler words you used, whether you read slides word for word, your pace, and even your pitch variation.
I ran a keynote rehearsal through it before a conference talk in Tel Aviv last year, half out of curiosity, and it flagged that I said “so” 34 times in an eleven minute run through, and that I’d read three slides almost verbatim rather than talking to them. It was uncomfortable to read but it was right. No human colleague was going to sit through a rehearsal and count my filler words for me, but the software did it without complaint.
It’s built into PowerPoint desktop, PowerPoint for the web, and works on both Mac and Windows. No extra cost, no extra login. If you present regularly and haven’t tried it, that’s the single most underused feature in the whole app.
Copilot for PowerPoint: the expensive one
This is the AI most people mean when they ask the question, and it’s the one that costs money on top of what you already pay Microsoft. Copilot for PowerPoint can take a Word document or a rough prompt and generate a full deck, complete with speaker notes, and it can rewrite existing slides to be shorter, longer, or in a different tone.
Here’s the uncomfortable part nobody puts in the marketing copy: Copilot for Microsoft 365 is currently priced at around $30 (roughly £24) per user, per month, added on top of an existing Business Standard or E3/E5 subscription you’re already paying for. That’s not a small add on for a solo consultant or a five person agency. For a team of four, that’s an extra £96 or so a month just to unlock the generative layer, on top of whatever you already pay for Microsoft 365 itself.
Microsoft has also folded some Copilot features into personal and family plans at various points, and pricing on this shifts often enough that I’d tell anyone to check their actual current bill rather than trust a number in a blog post, mine included.
I tested it building a client pitch deck earlier this year: fed it a two page brief on a rebrand strategy, asked for eight slides. What came back was fine. Not good, fine. Generic stock layouts, bullet points that restated the brief rather than sharpening it, and a title slide with a photo choice that had nothing to do with the client’s industry. It saved me maybe twenty minutes of blank page staring. It did not save me the actual thinking, and it did not write anything I’d have put in front of a client without a heavy rewrite.
That’s the part worth being blunt about: the built in AI in PowerPoint, paid or free, formats and coaches. It doesn’t think for you. If your deck’s content is weak, Copilot will make weak content look tidier, not stronger. I’ve seen founders hand over a thin argument, run it through Copilot, and come out the other side with a well designed deck that still didn’t answer the one question their investor was going to ask.
Other AI touches people miss entirely
A few smaller ones worth knowing exist, because they’re useful and cost nothing extra:
- Automatic alt text: PowerPoint uses AI to generate image descriptions for accessibility, saved me real time on a 40 slide deck last year that needed to meet an accessibility standard for a public sector client.
- Live captions and translation: during Slide Show mode, PowerPoint can caption and translate your speech in real time, useful if you’re presenting to a mixed language audience, which I do more often than I expected living between the UK and Israel.
- Ink to Shape and Ideas from images: draw a rough shape or drop in a messy photo of a whiteboard, and PowerPoint will tidy it into clean vector shapes. Small, but it’s been in the app since before “AI” was the word everyone used for it.
Should you use it, or look elsewhere?
This is where I’ll say the thing most posts on this topic won’t: for a lot of small businesses, PowerPoint’s built in AI is not the best tool for the job, and paying £24 extra per user for Copilot isn’t automatically the smart move just because it’s convenient to have everything in one app. If you’re building decks from scratch regularly, dedicated tools built specifically for AI generated presentations often do a better job of structure and narrative than Copilot does, because that’s the one thing they were built for. I’ve covered the free ones worth trying in this rundown of free presentation tools, and several do a better job of turning an outline into a coherent story than Copilot did in my test.
If the appeal is “AI without another subscription,” it’s also worth knowing PowerPoint’s Designer and Presenter Coach already sit alongside a wider set of tools that don’t cost anything on top of what you’re already paying, which I’ve rounded up in this list of free AI tools that don’t need a subscription.
The honest calculation is this: if you make one or two decks a month, Designer plus a free outside tool for structure will cover you, and you don’t need Copilot at all. If you or your team are producing client pitches, board decks, and proposals every week, the time saved by Copilot’s first draft speed might justify the £24 a month, but only if someone still edits what comes out, because none of it is client ready on the first pass.
What this means if you’re training a team on it
The mistake I see most often with agencies and small teams isn’t picking the wrong tool, it’s rolling out Copilot to five people and assuming they’ll figure it out from the interface alone. They won’t. Someone needs to show the team what a decent prompt looks like for a slide deck, what to check before sending anything to a client, and where the tool’s weak spots are, which is exactly the gap I walk through in how to train your team to use AI tools. Buying the subscription is the easy part. Getting five different people to use it well and consistently is the part that costs you time if you skip it.
And if you’re weighing whether AI in tools like PowerPoint means you can cut a marketing assistant’s hours, I’d read this before you do: which AI tools can replace a marketing assistant, and which ones can’t covers where the line sits, and deck building lands closer to “can’t” than most people assume.
Frequently asked questions
Is PowerPoint’s AI free or do I have to pay extra?
Designer and Presenter Coach are free with an active Microsoft 365 subscription (Personal, Family, Business Standard, or Business Premium). Copilot for PowerPoint, the feature that drafts full decks from a prompt, is a separate paid add-on, priced at roughly $30 (about £24) per user per month on business plans, on top of your existing subscription.
Why can’t I find Designer in my PowerPoint?
Two common reasons: you’re using an older perpetual license (bought outright rather than subscribed to), which never gets Designer, or your subscription tier doesn’t include it. Check File, then Account, to confirm which plan you’re on.
Does PowerPoint’s AI write good slide content, or just format it?
Designer and older AI features format and polish; Copilot goes further and drafts actual content, but in practice it produces generic, safe copy that needs a heavy edit before it’s client ready. It saves time on the blank page, not on the thinking.
Is Copilot in PowerPoint worth paying for as a small business?
If you build decks weekly and speed matters more than a perfect first draft, it can pay for itself. If you make one or two presentations a month, free tools like Designer and standalone AI presentation builders will likely cover what you need without the extra monthly cost.
