MLC Assets Portal: Conversation with Maurizio La Cava

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      Maurizio La Cava is Co-Founder and CEO of MLC Presentation Design Consulting, the leading presentation design agency in Italy. He is the author of Lean Presentation Design, Presenting Data, Startup Pitch Presentation, and AI Fluency, and teaches pitch and presentation strategy at Politecnico di Milano. He developed the Lean Presentation Design methodology, combining lean thinking, cognitive science and storytelling to help corporate teams communicate with clarity and impact. Before founding MLC, he worked at Accenture and Ferrero International.

In this conversation, Maurizio discusses his new MLC Assets Portal.

The MLC Assets Portal home page: one entry point for presentation-ready visual assets.

Geetesh: Maurizio, can you share the story behind creating the MLC Presentation Assets Portal? What inspired you to build a unified, free resource for presenters, and what gap did you feel it could meaningfully fill?

Maurizio: I built the MLC Assets Portal because I kept watching the same problem repeat itself in corporate work and in my own training sessions. Presenters spend a disproportionate amount of time jumping between several different stock libraries, each with its own licensing rules, search logic and quality bar, just to find one usable image for a slide. That friction pulls attention away from the part of the work that actually matters, which is the argument the slide is meant to support.

I wanted a single place where reliable free image sources could be searched together, filtered for business use, and downloaded without the usual detour through unrelated content. The gap I felt it could fill was not about volume of images. It was about giving corporate teams back the time and mental energy that visual research quietly drains from every deck.

A single search returns presentation-ready results across multiple free asset sources.

Geetesh: For someone discovering this resource for the first time, how do you recommend they use the image library and related tools? Are there specific workflows, search approaches or PowerPoint integrations that help presenters work faster and maintain visual consistency?

Maurizio: My suggestion for a first visit is to start from the business concept rather than the visual. Search for the idea the slide needs to communicate, such as leadership, growth or negotiation, instead of a literal keyword, and let the portal surface options across photos, illustrations, vectors and templates from that single search.

Once you find a style that fits the deck, stay within it for the rest of the presentation. Consistency across a deck comes far more from discipline in selection than from the size of the library itself.

The part I would point a new visitor to first are the PowerPoint templates, because those are the one category we design ourselves. They are proprietary MLC layouts, fully editable, built around the slide jobs business people actually have to solve: a funnel, a timeline, a SWOT, an organisation chart. You are not adapting a generic stock file, you are starting from a layout that was designed by presentation people for that exact purpose.

Proprietary MLC PowerPoint templates, editable and organized by the slide job they solve.

The illustration library, built around business concepts rather than generic keywords.

The second habit worth building from the very first visit is to set up your own Brand Kit. You save your primary and secondary brand colors once, and from that moment every icon and illustration in the portal is recolored to your identity automatically. You can upload your approved logo versions, so the whole team works from the same files and invite colleagues so that everyone produces slides with the same visual language.

Our own Brand Kit: brand colors applied across the portal; plus, the approved logo versions the whole team works from.

Everything you save then travels with you in the Favorites sidebar, which stays one click away while you browse. Your logos and your saved assets are visible next to whatever you are searching for, so you never leave the page to go and find the file you already have.

Saved logos and assets stay one click away in the favorites sidebar while you keep searching.

Once that is in place, saving the portal in your bookmarks turns it into a single point of access to every asset you need, your own brand material included, always available immediately. That is the moment the resource stops being a stock library and starts behaving like your team’s visual workspace.

Geetesh: A more challenging question. Generative AI can now produce an entire deck, images included, from a single prompt. In that context, why would a presenter still open an asset library at all? How do you position the MLC Assets Portal against a tool that simply generates the visual on demand?

Maurizio: It is a fair question, and I would rather answer it directly than defensively, because a large part of my work is teaching corporate teams how to use AI properly and I wrote a book about it. Generative models have genuinely changed the production side of slide making, and anyone claiming otherwise is not paying attention. What they have not changed is the part of the job that decides whether a deck works, which is the judgment about what a specific slide has to prove in front of a specific audience.

When I look at how corporate teams struggle with generated visuals, the same problems come back.

1. Consistency is the first one: a prompt gives you one image, and forty prompts across a forty-slide deck give you forty images that share no visual logic, which is precisely the friction the portal exists to remove.
2. Editability is the second, and in my experience, it is the one people underestimate. A generated funnel is a picture of a funnel, while a template funnel is a structure your team can open, restructure, extend and still keep on brand six months later.
3. Cost is the third and the most practical of them, because generating one usable graphic often means several minutes, several attempts and a striking quantity of tokens for a result that a curated library returns in seconds, and once you multiply that across a team producing decks every day the arithmetic stops adding up.

So, I position the portal as the layer that makes AI usable inside a corporate environment. You save your brand colors and your approved logo versions once, you start from layouts designed around the slide jobs businesspeople really have, and anything you generate elsewhere lands in a system that already knows what your company is supposed to look like.

The workflow I recommend puts the two things in sequence. You use the portal to find quickly the assets that define the graphic baseline of the deck, meaning the style, the palette and the level of abstraction you want to hold across the slides. Then, when a slide needs something that does not exist yet, you pass those selected assets to the model as a visual reference and ask it to produce the custom variation your case requires. Working this way the model has a direction to follow instead of an empty prompt, so what comes back belongs to the same visual family as everything else on the deck. The portal sets the baseline in seconds, and AI extends it exactly where the detail matters, which is why the two reinforce each other in practice.

The portal supplies the graphic baseline, AI expands it.

Speed of assembly was never the real constraint in corporate communication. The constraint has always been deciding what the deck should say and proving it credibly, and generation does not take that work away from the person who has to stand up and present.

There is also a more useful version of this question, which is where AI belongs inside a resource like this one. My answer is behind the scenes, in search and curation rather than in the artwork itself, and that is exactly where I am investing.

Geetesh: Based on your own experience and the feedback you have received from users, what future enhancements or new capabilities do you envision for this resource? How do you see it evolving to support the changing needs of presentation creators?

Maurizio: The feedback I hear most often points in one direction: presenters do not want more assets; they want faster judgment about which asset is right for their specific slide.

The most interesting development I am working on right now is a self-learning engine that lets the portal evolve according to the aggregate searches of the people who use it. When many users look for a concept and the results are not satisfying, the system detects that gap automatically and triggers an agent whose job is to enrich the asset database exactly where the shortfall was found.

The consequence is a resource that improves the more it is used. Every search that comes up short stops being a dead end and becomes an instruction for what to add next, so the library grows around the real needs of the people building presentations rather than around my assumptions about them.

Alongside that, I see real value in expanding the template and illustration side, since corporate audiences increasingly expect a diagram or a structured visual rather than a decorative photo. The direction I care about most is not adding volume for its own sake, but making sure every addition earns its place by solving a real moment of friction in the presentation building process.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.