Gamma Replaces Slides with Responsive Cards
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
This reveals that Gamma was designed to replace the page shaped logic of slides, not just polish it. The product moved away from fixed 16 by 9 canvases toward cards that can expand, collapse, embed live apps, video, and web content, so the job shifts from arranging boxes to packaging an idea for reading, presenting, and sharing in one format. That is why Gamma looks closer to a hybrid of slides, docs, and microsites than to a prettier PowerPoint.
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The core product bet was that hybrid work changed the medium itself. Grant Lee framed old slideware as built for printing and projection, while Gamma targeted async reading, device level interaction, searchability, and reuse, which are needs that standard decks handle poorly.
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That put Gamma in a different lane from Pitch and Beautiful.ai. Those tools largely improved the traditional deck workflow with better templates, collaboration, or auto formatting, while Gamma and later Tome tried to create a new artifact with responsive layouts and interactive content.
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AI later became the distribution engine for this deeper product thesis. It solved the blank page problem and got users to a first draft fast, but the lasting differentiation was still the card based medium itself. By 2025, that combination had helped Gamma scale far ahead of earlier AI slide startups.
The next step is a broader communication layer that eats into slides, lightweight websites, and some document use cases at once. If Gamma keeps turning prompts, docs, and existing decks into responsive publishable artifacts, the winner in this market will be the tool that owns creation and sharing across formats, not the one with the nicest slide editor.