Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Camille Holden

Camille Holden is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP and co-owner of Nuts & Bolts Speed Training, which she runs with her husband Taylor Croonquist. She designs presentations for corporate clients, trains teams in PowerPoint, and teaches courses on LinkedIn Learning that have reached hundreds of thousands of people. Half French, half American, she works out of Ventura, California, and spends more time than she’d like to admit inside other people’s slide decks.

In this conversation, Camille talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Camille, you’re delivering two sessions this year at the Presentation Summit: From Canva Curious to Canva Serious and The Machine Behind the Woman. Why bring Canva into the conversation this year? Is it a complement to PowerPoint, or a replacement?

Camille: Canva is a real player in the presentation space because entire industries and job functions live inside it. They’re using Canva daily, and not just for slides. A tool that solves that many problems at once is worth a lot, and Canva has built a following of people who genuinely love it.

It’s also moving fast. Fast enough that you can point at features in PowerPoint today and trace them back to Canva. I think that’s good. It pushes PowerPoint to be better.

So, my answer is a complement. PowerPoint still owns enormous market share, and there are industries that are never going to hand their decks over to Canva. PowerPoint is the Kleenex of presentations. When someone says, “send me your PowerPoint,” they mean send me your presentation, whatever you built it in.

That said, I don’t find the replace-or-complement debate all that useful. Tools coexist. They aren’t exclusionary. I’d rather this field stay crowded, with everyone pushing everyone else to get better. And as AI matures and conversion between the two programs improves, which I’m hoping for, complement is going to be the only answer that makes sense.

Geetesh: In The Machine Behind the Woman, you look at using AI to run a business, and not to just generating slides. What’s one task you’ve handed off to AI that surprised you with how well it worked?

Camille: Figuring out how to spend my time.

I have it analyze how long tasks actually take me and which tasks I do best at which point in the day and then build my schedule around that. It has gotten good at it. Good enough that I rely on it now to plan my week.

When you have multiple clients, multiple projects, and everything pulling at you at once, the hard part is knowing what to do first. That’s not what I expected AI to be good at.

Geetesh: Both you and Taylor Croonquist run Nuts & Bolts Speed Training together, and you’re both speaking at this year’s Summit. How does that shared background shape how you two prepare for a conference like this?

Camille: Taylor and I don’t do a ton of joint conference prep. We build our sessions separately.

What we do is share. He’ll send me something new he’s found in PowerPoint, I’ll send him something in AI, and we go back and forth on it. That part is fun, and we inspire each other. We’re also each other’s sounding board. He’ll tell me when a session idea isn’t landing yet, and he’s usually right. The sessions come out better for it. The work itself just happens apart.

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