Hi Hanif! AI is becoming a major topic in learning and development. From your perspective, how is AI changing the way organisations develop e-learning content?
The demand for digital learning continues to grow. At the same time, learners now expect online courses to be more visual, engaging, and easy to follow.
For e-learning developers, this creates a familiar challenge. Visual assets are important, but creating them can take time. Teams often need to search for images, create graphics, adjust branding, export files, and insert them manually into PowerPoint storyboards.
To support this process, Content Tree developed Storyboard AI Assistant, an internal platform designed to improve the e-learning production workflow. The platform includes two key capabilities:
- Narration Agent, which supports content and narration development.
- Illustration Agent, which supports visual content creation.
Can you explain what the Storyboard AI Assistant Illustration Agent does and how it helps your team generate visual assets for e-learning?
The Storyboard AI Assistant Illustration Agent helps our team generate, retrieve, and insert visual assets directly into PowerPoint.
What the Illustration Agent Does
With the Storyboard AI Assistant Illustration Agent, our team can create AI-generated images, icons, and graphic elements using the Recraft API.
From a development point of view, the tool connects three parts of the workflow:
- A prompt interface where the user describes the visual asset.
- An API process that sends the request and receives the generated output.
- A PowerPoint integration layer that inserts the selected asset into the active slide.
This means our team does not need to generate an image in one platform, download it, locate the file, and then manually insert it into PowerPoint. The process is handled inside one working environment.
How do users tell the Storyboard AI Assistant Illustration Agent what kind of image they want to create?
Generating Visuals from Prompts
The Illustration Agent allows users to describe the image they want to generate using prompt. The prompt can be based on the slide topic, learning objective, scenario, or visual style.
For example, in a module about online banking, the user may generate visuals such as:
- A mobile banking transaction
- A secure digital payment process
- A customer using an e-wallet
- A QR payment illustration
- A banking security concept
The prompt can also be written in different supported languages. This is useful for regional e-learning projects where developers may work in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, or other supported languages.
Once the prompt is submitted, the system sends the request through the API and returns the generated visual options for review.
Output Options: PNG and SVG
The Illustration Agent supports two output formats: Raster PNG and Vector SVG.
PNG is suitable for detailed illustrations, slide visuals, and image-based graphics. It is commonly used when the asset is meant to appear as a standard image in PowerPoint.
SVG is suitable for icons, flat illustrations, and scalable graphic elements. Because SVG is vector-based, it can be resized without losing quality.
This gives the development team more flexibility. A detailed illustration can be generated as PNG, while a reusable icon or graphic element can be generated as SVG.
Retrieving Assets from Canva
The Illustration Agent also includes a Canva Assets function.
This allows the program to connect to the user’s Canva account through a browser login. Once connected, the user can retrieve existing assets from Canva, such as icons, illustrations, graphics, or brand design elements.
This is useful when a project already has approved assets stored in Canva. Instead of downloading files manually from Canva and importing them into PowerPoint, the user can access them through Storyboard AI Assistant and insert them into the selected slide.
You mentioned that the Storyboard AI Assistant Illustration Agent works directly with PowerPoint. Why was that an important feature to include?
Direct Insertion into PowerPoint
The direct PowerPoint insertion is one of the most practical features of the Illustration Agent because many e-learning storyboards are prepared and reviewed in PowerPoint.
The Illustration Agent is designed to work with this existing workflow. When a PowerPoint file is open, the program can detect the active presentation and selected slide.
If more than one PowerPoint file is open, the user can choose which file to work on. This helps ensure that the asset is inserted into the correct presentation.
In this setup, the PowerPoint storyboard is shown on the left, while Storyboard AI Assistant is shown on the right. Anything generated through the AI function, or retrieved from Canva, can be inserted directly into the active PowerPoint slide.
This reduces repeated manual steps such as downloading, saving, locating, copying, and pasting assets between different applications.
Why This Helps E-Learning Teams
In e-learning production, small manual tasks can take up a lot of time when repeated across many slides and modules.
The Illustration Agent helps simplify the workflow:
This makes visual development faster and more consistent. It also allows developers and designers to focus more on learning quality instead of repetitive production steps.
AI still does not replace human judgement. The team still decides whether the visual supports the learning objective, matches the audience, and fits the overall design direction. The Illustration Agent simply makes the production process more efficient.
As we wrap up, what do you think is the biggest value the Illustration Agent brings to e-learning development teams?
Storyboard AI Assistant is part of Content Tree’s ongoing effort to improve e-learning development workflows.
By combining AI image generation, Recraft API integration, PNG and SVG output, Canva asset retrieval, multilingual prompting, and direct PowerPoint insertion, the Illustration Agent helps make visual content creation faster and more practical.
For e-learning teams, the value is simple: move from idea to visual asset more quickly, and place that asset directly where it is needed — inside the PowerPoint storyboard.