I taught a Schneider Electric mentee this exact workflow in one sitting. By the end he had slides that looked like his company's own. Five steps, two free tools, zero cost. This is the companion guide to the walkthrough.
One story, five steps, and a summary table you can keep beside your keyboard.
Bottom line: you can turn four free sources into a finished slide deck, an infographic, a white paper, and a podcast in one sitting, and it costs nothing.
This week I was mentoring someone from Schneider Electric through HITEC. He asked me to show him how I use AI. He already uses Gemini, so I stayed inside Google's ecosystem and walked him through NotebookLM and Gems. By the end, he had slides that looked like actual Schneider slides, built from sources we pulled off the internet in minutes.
This guide is that walkthrough. Five steps. Two free tools. Follow it once and you will never start a deck from a blank page again.
Go to gemini.google.com and notebooklm.google.com. Sign in with any Google account. Both are free. Gemini is your chat and your Gems. NotebookLM is your research notebook. You will use them together.
Most leaders are already paying for tools inside Google they never open. These two cover research, slides, audio, and writing without a subscription.
NotebookLM only answers from the sources you give it. That is the point. It will not wander off and invent things the way an open chat can.
Create a new notebook. Add sources: a website link, a YouTube video, a PDF, a file from your computer, a Google Drive doc, or pasted text. For the demo we added four sources on Schneider Electric: one article, two PDFs, and one YouTube video.
The quality of everything downstream comes from your sources. Four solid sources beat forty weak ones. Pick the documents you would hand a new hire on day one.
You can mix source types in one notebook. An article, a video transcript, and a PDF can all sit side by side.
On the right side, NotebookLM offers a mind map, a quiz, an infographic, a slide deck, and an audio overview. Click slide deck. In a few minutes you get slides built from your sources. We also generated an infographic, a strategic value assessment white paper, and a two-person podcast, all from the same four sources.
The slides came out looking like real Schneider slides. The infographic explained their ExoStructure platform in a single image. The podcast turned the sources into a conversation you can listen to in the car. Same inputs, four different formats, no extra work.
Slide generation takes about three to four minutes. Let it finish. The output is a starting point you refine, not a final deck you ship blind.
Open Gemini, go to Gems, click New Gem. Give it a name, write short instructions, and add references. References can be up to ten files or up to ten notebooks. Connect it to the notebook you just built.
Now when you ask a question, the Gem answers only from your four sources, not the whole internet. Ask "what is the main message here" and you get a real answer grounded in your material. We got back three clear themes in seconds.
A Gem is reusable. Build it once and you have a dedicated assistant for that topic you can return to any time.
Sometimes Gemini errors when you ask it to build Google Slides directly. Here is the workaround. Have it create a clean Google Doc instead. Download that Doc as a PDF. Go back to NotebookLM, add the PDF as a new source, uncheck everything else, and generate a slide deck from that one source.
NotebookLM's slide generation is reliable. Routing through a PDF gives you clean slides built only from the exact content you approved.
I left the errors in the video on purpose. Tools break mid-task. Knowing the workaround is the difference between quitting and shipping.
Keep this table beside your keyboard. Five steps, two free tools, four finished outputs.
| Step | Do this | You get |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Open Gemini and NotebookLM | Two free tools, one Google login |
| 02 | Add four sources to a notebook | A grounded knowledge base |
| 03 | Generate from the right panel | Slides, infographic, white paper, podcast |
| 04 | Build a Gem on the notebook | A dedicated assistant for your sources |
| 05 | Round-trip a PDF if slides error | Reliable slides every time |
None of this is theory. We built every one of these from four sources off the internet, in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
Pick a topic you present on. Pull four sources. Build the notebook.
The leaders who win the next decade will be the ones who put AI inside their real work, not the ones who talk about it. You just learned a workflow that takes four free sources and produces a deck, a one-pager, a white paper, and a podcast in one sitting.
Pick a topic you present on. Pull four sources. Build the notebook. The rest of the AI for Leaders series is on Patreon, new guide every month.
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