Presentation tools becoming workflow platforms
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
The real limit of a design first tool is not creativity, it is workflow coverage. A tool built for designers can go deep on layout, templates, and visual polish, but the broader presentation market depends on messy everyday jobs like pulling in Sheets data, finding old decks by content, converting docs into presentations, and sharing output in formats every stakeholder can open. That is why horizontal tools spread further inside companies.
-
Gamma was built around this exact gap. Its card based format was meant to handle text, images, video, websites, Loom recordings, and Airtable embeds in one place, because product managers, operators, and go to market teams often need one document that can be read, presented, searched, and reused across audiences.
-
Design tools optimize for a different center of gravity. In practice, Canva and Figma users care about assets, templates, and visual controls, while presentation users often care about file level search, collaboration around specific business content, and compatibility with office workflows. Those are different product instincts, not just missing features.
-
The market has since split along this line. Tome and Pitch both added live embeds, CRM links, analytics, and personalization for sales use cases, while Gamma expanded from presentations into docs and microsites. The winners are moving closer to workflow software that happens to output presentations.
Presentation software is heading toward role aware systems that connect to the surrounding stack, not isolated canvas tools. The companies that win more budget will be the ones that can ingest source material, plug into CRM and data tools, and publish in whatever format the next meeting, deal, or update requires.