Wave of tools replacing slides
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
The real shift is from generic slide software to purpose built communication tools for specific workflows. Slides became a catch all because every team already had PowerPoint or Google Slides, but hybrid work exposed how bad decks are for searchable knowledge, async onboarding, buyer follow up, and interactive collaboration. That creates room for products that look more like documents, databases, client portals, or lightweight websites, depending on the job being done.
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Notion won by replacing scattered docs and folders with a block based workspace and clear hierarchy, so teams could keep evergreen onboarding and knowledge in one searchable place. Airtable won by turning messy spreadsheets into structured systems of record with workflows and automation. Both displaced bundled tools by serving jobs that Docs and Sheets handled poorly.
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The next wave after slides is likely more vertical. Journey and Dock package videos, PDFs, demos, calendars, and live embeds into buyer facing workspaces for sales and onboarding, while Gamma turns decks into responsive cards that can be read, presented, and published online. In each case, the product is replacing a hacked together deck plus email thread plus extra links.
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This is also why simple AI slide generation is not the whole story. AI helps people get past the blank page, but the durable advantage comes from the underlying medium. Gamma explicitly tries to move toward microsites and hybrid docs, because standard slide generation is likely to be copied by Microsoft and Google.
Going forward, the market should split into two layers. Bundled suites will absorb basic deck creation, while startups win by owning higher value workflows like async knowledge sharing, sales rooms, onboarding hubs, and web native documents. The winners will not just make prettier slides. They will become the default place where that specific kind of work lives.