AI-Assisted Presentation Tools: Course-Level Integration and Initial Evaluation of Student Adoption and Experience in an Assessment Task

Generative artificial intelligence has enabled a new class of presentation tools that build complete, editable slide decks from a short prompt, yet evidence on student adoption of these tools in authentic assessment tasks remains scarce. This article reports a course-level integration of AI-assisted presentation (AI-PPT) tools in an undergraduate module on contemporary Spanish popular culture at a Sino-British university in China. Informed by Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations framework, the instructor first modeled use of Gamma and AiPPT.cn in course materials; students then received training and ultimately retained the choice of whether to use such a tool for the final paired presentation, with no consequence for marking. An exploratory evaluation analyzed data from 42 students obtained through a post-assessment survey combining closed- and open-ended items. Just over half (52.4%) adopted an AI-PPT tool, and prior AI-PPT experience did not clearly distinguish adopters from non-adopters. Adopters justified their choice by what the tool could do for them, primarily through positive perceptions of its convenience and efficiency, whereas non-adopters mainly invoked what they preferred to retain: ownership, expressed through control over task execution, independent thinking, and personal expression. For these students, non-adoption represented an active preference rather than a deficit. Adopters rated ease of use, preparation-time efficiency, and final presentation quality positively overall, yet in open-ended responses 68.2% reported output-quality limitations, mainly information inaccuracies, and 27.3% post-output modification or verification burden. Regardless of adoption status, all respondents reported a positive change in perspectives toward future AI use, while 59.5% also reported greater awareness of AI’s limitations and the same proportion greater caution about relying on it; 78.6% considered future AI-PPT use likely and none unlikely, indicating that declining adoption for the assessed task did not entail rejecting the technology. These findings suggest that AI-PPT tools can redistribute rather than eliminate effort, and that successful course-level integration may be better reflected in students’ informed judgment about when and how to use AI than in adoption rates alone.