Hybrid AI and WYSIWYG Presentations
Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma, on building AI-powered slides
The real product advantage is not the AI wow moment, it is turning that first draft into something people can keep working on. WYSIWYG tools like PowerPoint, Mailchimp, and Canva won by letting non designers keep editing after the template appeared. Gamma is trying to do the same with a newer interface, where AI gets a user past the blank page, then a structured editor and targeted copilots handle the messy work of rewriting, reformatting, and republishing across slides, docs, and webpages.
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Chat works best for big changes, not tiny ones. In Gamma, users use the copilot to turn a paragraph into a timeline, swap layouts, or generate alternate visuals. But for make this bold or change this color, direct editing is faster. That makes copilot a complement to editing, not a replacement for it.
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The drawback of classic drag and drop WYSIWYG is fragility. A deck can look polished in one view, then break when content changes or when it is opened on mobile. Gamma's stacked card model trades pixel perfect control for automatic reflow, which is more useful for responsive presentations and simple webpages.
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This is why shallow AI products trained users to stop at the preview. Many AI for X tools generated something attractive, but gave people nowhere to go next. Gamma's growth since adding AI, from about $3.8M ARR at the end of 2023 to about $102M by October 2025, suggests there is strong demand for products that pair generation with real downstream editing depth.
The next iteration of design software is likely a hybrid, not pure chat and not pure WYSIWYG. The winning products will use prompts to handle structure, rewriting, and layout jumps, then keep a fast manual surface for precise edits. That points toward tools that feel less like slide makers and more like flexible publishing systems for every business artifact built from the same core editor.