The AI Presentation Wars Just Got Interesting
I was having dinner with a client in New Orleans last month, the kind of place with a jazz trio in the corner doing far more with three instruments than most speakers manage with sixty slides. Somewhere between the gumbo and the second round of drinks, she asked me which AI presentation tool she should be using.
I used to have a one-word answer for that. Gamma.
Not anymore.
When Gamma Was the Belle of the Ball
I’ve built well over a thousand presentations in my career, for rooms as small as twenty people and stages as big as four thousand. The lesson never changes. Your slides aren’t there to say more. They’re there to get out of the way and let you say it.
When Gamma turned up, I was properly excited. Here, finally, was a tool that could knock out a half-decent deck in minutes rather than the usual half-day wrestling match with PowerPoint’s alignment guides. I recommended it to clients. I demonstrated it on stage. I built it into my AI masterclasses like it was doing me a personal favour.
Lately, though, something’s shifted. It wasn’t one big falling-out. It was death by a thousand small ones.
More Features, Less Magic
The decks started looking a bit… samey. Same pastel gradients. Same stock-photo people gesturing enthusiastically at whiteboards. Same “AI made this” fingerprint that anyone who’s seen more than three of them can spot from the back row.
Meanwhile, Gamma has been busy bolting on more of everything.
More AI. More image generation. More integrations. More collaboration tools nobody in the room asked for.
It’s turned into the Swiss Army knife problem. Twenty-three tools folded into one handle, and somewhere in all that engineering the actual knife stopped being sharp.
Then I Went Shopping
Curiosity got the better of me, as it usually does, so I spent a fortnight testing the competition properly rather than just reading the marketing emails.
Beautiful.ai was the one that made me sit up. The slides had something Gamma’s had quietly lost: restraint.
Proper spacing, clean typography, charts that looked like an actual designer had been in the room rather than a very confident algorithm. Instead of dazzling me with a hundred clever tricks, it just helped me build something I’d be happy walking out on stage with. Which, last I checked, is the entire job.
Canva, meanwhile, has grown up when nobody was watching. I spent years filing it under “where people make Instagram posts,” and I was wrong to. Magic Design has come on enormously, the Brand Kits keep everything consistent without you having to think about it, and if you’re already living in Canva for your marketing, there’s now a genuine case for building your decks there too.
Presentations.ai is the one nobody’s talking about, and I’m not sure why. Sharp AI, attractive layouts, and it actually understands business storytelling rather than just filling boxes with words. Quietly excellent. Put it on your shortlist.
Plus AI takes the opposite approach entirely; it doesn’t ask you to leave PowerPoint at all, it just gets smarter inside it. Which means you keep your animations, your master slides, your presenter notes, your corporate template, all of it. No mystery exports. No formatting meltdown five minutes before you’re due on stage, frantically dragging a text box back into position while the AV guy pretends not to notice.
My Workflow Now
These days I don’t marry one tool. I run the lot in relay.
Claude does the research. ChatGPT helps me shape and sharpen the ideas. Presentations.ai or Beautiful.ai builds the first draft. PowerPoint is where I finish it, because that’s where I get full control over the last ten percent that actually matters.
And crucially, at the end of it, it still looks like my presentation. Not the software’s.
| Frank’s Quick Tip
Before you rebuild your deck in yet another AI tool, ask whether the problem is the software or the story. Nine times out of ten, a beautifully generated slide still can’t rescue a message nobody had thought through properly. |
The Real Lesson Isn’t About Gamma
This isn’t really a Gamma pile-on, much as it might read like one. It’s about a pattern I’ve watched play out across thirty years of new technology landing on my desk.
Companies keep adding features because they can. Customers, on the other hand, generally want one thing done brilliantly, not eleven things done adequately. The businesses that last aren’t the ones with the longest feature list. They’re the ones that never forgot what they were actually good at.
My Current Favourites
- ai — for polished executive presentations
- ai — for fast, sharp first drafts
- Canva — for marketing and visual content
- PowerPoint with AI tools — when you need total creative control
This market moves fast enough that today’s leader could be next year’s cautionary tale, and frankly that’s the fun part. Our job as presenters was never to fall in love with the software. It’s to find whatever helps us tell a better story and leave the room saying “that was brilliant.”
Because in thirty years on stage, I’ve never once had an audience member walk out and say, “the speaker was forgettable, but did you see those gradients on slide fourteen?”
Want help building presentations that actually land? Email [email protected] or call +447711 672888
