How generative AI will help power your presentation in 2023

For decades, presentation decks have been, well, a pain. Whether using PowerPoint or Google Slides, they tended toward monotony and could be clunky to create and share.

Over the past couple of months, however, a variety of applications and platforms have begun to integrate generative AI options, including text and image-generating tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, to deck out your deck and make storytelling less of a slog.

Of course, with the recent news that Microsoft may add ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools to PowerPoint — and one can imagine that Google may follow with efforts in Slides — Big Tech won’t make it smooth sailing for startups in the space. But either way, there’s no doubt that the simple workplace presentation will never be the same.

Tome releases GPT-3-powered ‘generative storytelling’ features

The latest upgrade comes from San Francisco-based startup Tome, which in November added DALL-E to its beta release of flexible, interactive slide options.

Today, the company, which is helmed by Meta product veterans Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, released a new suite of “generative storytelling” features powered by GPT-3. They are built for what a press release called “intuitive collaboration with AI” — including text rewriting, length and tone adjustments, and generative prompt bar customization. For example, creators can now choose the most fitting tone of voice: inspirational, formal, informal, objective, persuasive or playful. Creators can also specify output type (presentation, story or outline), as well as image style (such as neo impressionist, pop art, fantasy, cyberpunk or anime).

“We built Tome to be a responsive, intelligent partner, not a static page,” said Peiris. “So for us, weaving generative AI into Tome was a no-brainer.”

Beautiful AI offers one-prompt presentation generation

Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based, enterprise business-focused Beautiful AI jumped in the mix earlier this month with DesignerBot.

The company says it can generate a fully realized presentation with one simple text prompt. That is, it can create 10 to 20 PowerPoint slides from that single prompt, including layout, text, photos and icons — it pulls in the best understanding of the results and decides whether each part is best displayed as bullet points, charts, images or a straight text slide.

The generative AI space is evolving so fast that the company has already developed a new product roadmap to meet the needs of its enterprise business customers, CEO Jason Lapp told VentureBeat.

“The biggest challenge we have to solve — and we’re going to solve it this year — is how do we take private, secured data at an enterprise level, and marry it with [these capabilities]? We’re actively looking at how can we build this in,” he said.

Canva targets business users with generative AI

Back in December, Canva, the popular Australian-based graphic design platform, announced new efforts to target enterprise business users with the release of Canva Docs, which incorporated the company’s recently-released text-to-image beta built on Stable Diffusion, as well as Magic Write, an AI-powered copywriting assistant built on OpenAI’s GPT-3. 

Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer of Canva, says that in 2015 the company started allowing users to create presentations in Canva, which “was a real pivotal moment,” he explained to VentureBeat last month. During COVID-19, he added, remote-working employees needed to communicate with colleagues differently and were looking for tools. 

“We saw a massive spike in presentations growth and now we’re sitting at about 40 million presentations that get created every single month in Canva,” he said. “So we started laying the foundation for a more team-based take on what Canva is.”