How to create visuals and diagrams you can use at work with AI
🧠 Knowledge Series #59: Presentation slides, frameworks, data visualizations, process diagrams and more.
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Hi product people 👋,
Thanks to generative AI, the web is quickly in danger of becoming a swamp of so-called AI slop, where no one is quite sure if the content you're consuming is real or AI-generated.
But while many of us are concerned about the use of generative AI in social products, one area we're less worried about - and more excited about - is the potential for generative AI at work.
We lean on tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Copilot and others for text generation and data analysis, but the opportunities for creating visuals feels a little less known right now. And in this Knowledge Series, we’re going to explore some of the most powerful ways you can use generative AI at work to create visuals assets throughout your work day.
From creating product frameworks to adding data visualisations to documents and crafting process diagrams from a single line of text, AI can be a powerful addition to your visual communication toolkit at work.
Coming up, we explore how to use AI tools to create visual assets for documents and processes including:
Process diagrams and user journey maps
Presentation slides and interactive documents
Product frameworks and canvases
Videos and demo materials
Data visualisations and interactive dashboards
Process diagrams and user journey maps
First up, let’s take a look at how AI can help us to generate some process diagrams, user journey maps and other visual elements.
For this first example, we’re going to use a product called Napkin. This is a startup that feels pretty magical when you first use it. It works simply by allowing users to paste in the text that they’ve written and from that, it will extract the relevant pieces and create visuals that compliment it.
In this example, I take an extract from a recent newsletter regarding Deepseek and Napkin automatically suggests a series of different visual ways to complement it:
As well as traditional graph visualization, I’m presented with a bunch of sketch type diagrams that I can scroll through to evaluate.
Here’s some of the options it generated for me:
This first iteration is in the style of a more traditional corporate deck you might share with stakeholders or colleagues, while this second option takes a different approach using a less formal pen / pencil style sketch diagram:
In the end I decided to opt for a more traditional graph and Napkin allows me to embed this directly into my document. The number of diagram styles is continuously updated and you can clearly see how this could be super valuable for the times where you’ve crafted an email or document with some updates on but you also need to back it up with some visual artifacts.
A similar tool that’s helpful for this is called Excalidraw. In this example, we’re going to ask Excalidraw to create a user journey diagram based on a basic text prompt that outlines the journey.
I start with this prompt: