The death of PowerPoint has been greatly exaggerated

Every year, someone announces that PowerPoint is dead. And every year, 500 million people open PowerPoint and make another terrible slide deck with too much text and clip art that should have been retired in 2003.

AI presentation tools promise to fix this. Give them a topic, and they'll generate a full slide deck with proper design, coherent structure, and visuals that don't make your audience question your taste. At least, that's the promise.

I tested five AI presentation tools with the exact same brief to see which ones deliver. The brief: "Create a 12-slide investor pitch deck for a B2B SaaS startup that provides AI-powered customer onboarding. Include problem, solution, market size, business model, traction, team, and financial projections."

Here's what happened. Gamma (the current champion)

Gamma produced the best overall result, and it wasn't particularly close. The deck came out with clean design, logical flow, and slides that actually looked like a professional made them. The layout choices were smart: not too much text per slide, good use of white space, and visual elements that supported the content rather than distracting from it.

The AI understood the pitch deck structure without me needing to spell it out. Problem slide first, solution second, market opportunity third. It even generated a reasonable competitive positioning slide with a 2x2 matrix, which impressed me because those are notoriously tricky to get right.

Where it fell short: The content was generic. "Our solution reduces onboarding time by 60%" appeared on one slide, and obviously that number was completely made up. You'll need to replace all the specifics, but the structure and design are solid enough that this is genuinely useful as a starting point.

Design quality: 8/10. Clean, modern, professional. You could present this to investors without embarrassment (after replacing the AI-generated numbers).

Customisation: Excellent. Every element is editable, you can swap colour schemes with one click, and the layout engine adapts when you add or remove content.

Pricing: Free tier gives you 10 AI-generated decks. Pro is $10/month. Reasonable. Beautiful.ai (the design purist)

Beautiful.ai takes a different approach. Instead of generating everything from scratch, it uses "smart templates" that enforce good design principles. You can't make an ugly slide even if you try, because the layout engine won't let you.

The AI generation produced a deck that was visually stunning but structurally odd. It prioritised aesthetics over logic, putting the team slide before the problem statement and burying the financial projections in a section that felt like an afterthought. The design was gorgeous, but the story didn't flow.

Where it excels: Pure visual quality. If you need slides that look like they were designed by an agency, Beautiful.ai gets closest. The animations and transitions are also the best in this group.

Where it struggles: It's opinionated about design to the point of being inflexible. If you want a specific layout that doesn't match one of its templates, you're fighting the tool rather than working with it.

Pricing: $12/month for Pro. No free tier for AI generation, which is annoying. Canva AI Presentations (the familiar option)

If you already use Canva, the AI presentation feature is built right in. Tell it what you want, and it generates a deck using Canva's template library. The results are... fine. They're fine. The design is competent, the structure is logical, and everything works.

The problem is that every Canva presentation looks like a Canva presentation. There's a particular aesthetic, round fonts, lots of gradients, stock illustrations with that very specific "flat design" style, that immediately screams "made in Canva." If that bothers you, you'll spend a lot of time customising. If it doesn't, Canva is perfectly adequate.

The AI content generation was the weakest of the group. Slides had more filler text, the structure was less refined, and it didn't understand the pitch deck format as well as Gamma or Tome. It generated a generic business presentation rather than a pitch-specific one.

Design quality: 6/10. Competent but recognisably Canva.

Customisation: Canva's editor is excellent, so you can customise everything. The issue is that you'll probably want to.

Pricing: Free with a Canva account. AI features are part of Canva Pro at $13/month. Tome (the storytelling approach)

Tome markets itself as a "storytelling tool" rather than a presentation tool, and that distinction actually matters. The AI-generated deck read more like a narrative than a slide show. Each slide built on the previous one, and there was a genuine flow to how it presented information.

For the pitch deck brief, Tome produced something that was engaging to read. The problem statement was compelling. The solution was presented as a natural response to the problem. The market opportunity slide told a story about why now is the right time.

The downside: Tome's presentations don't export well to PowerPoint. If your investor or client needs a .pptx file, you'll need to recreate the deck in another tool. This is a deal-breaker for a lot of use cases. Tome also has a very distinct visual style that doesn't suit every brand. It looks great for tech startups and creative agencies. It looks odd for financial services or healthcare.

Design quality: 7/10. Distinctive and engaging, but not universally appropriate.

Pricing: Free tier is gone. Plans start at $16/month. Expensive for what you get. SlidesAI (the Google Slides add-on)

SlidesAI works as a Google Slides extension. Give it text or bullet points, and it generates slides directly in Google Slides. The appeal is obvious: you stay in the Google ecosystem, you get real-time collaboration, and everything saves to Drive automatically.

The AI generation was the most basic of the group. It essentially took my brief, broke it into sections, and created one slide per section with a title and bullet points. The design was minimal bordering on sparse. It felt more like an outline than a presentation.

Where it works: If you start with detailed notes or a written document and want to turn it into slides quickly. It's a conversion tool more than a creation tool.

Where it doesn't: If you're starting from a high-level brief like I was. The AI doesn't add creative value to the content. It reformats what you give it.

Pricing: Free tier gives you 3 presentations per month. Pro is $10/month.

The uncomfortable truth about AI presentations

Here's what none of these tools' marketing pages will tell you: AI-generated presentations still look like AI-generated presentations. There's a sameness to them. The layouts are competent but predictable. The design choices are safe rather than inspired. The content is well-structured but generic.

For internal meetings, first drafts, and situations where "good enough" is genuinely good enough, these tools save massive amounts of time. I made five full pitch decks in about two hours total. Doing that manually would have taken a full day.

But for high-stakes presentations, investor pitches that need to be perfect, client proposals that need to reflect your brand, conference talks that need personality, you'll need to do significant manual work on top of whatever the AI generates. Think of these tools as producing a solid 60% that you then polish to 100%, rather than producing a finished product.

The verdict

For most people: Gamma. Best balance of AI quality, design, customisation, and price. Start here.

For design quality: Beautiful.ai. If the visual impression matters more than anything else, it produces the prettiest slides.

If you're already in Canva: Use the AI presentations feature. It's not the best, but it's free with your existing subscription and the editor is excellent for customisation.

For storytelling: Tome, if you don't need PowerPoint export and you're in a creative industry.

For Google Slides users: SlidesAI, but manage your expectations. It's a conversion tool, not a creative one.

For actual high-stakes presentations: Use any of these for a first draft, then spend time making it yours. The AI gets you to the starting line faster. The race is still yours to run.