From Slides to Web-Native Cards
Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma, on building AI-powered slides
This reveals that Gamma was not trying to win by making prettier PowerPoint, it was trying to replace the basic unit of the deck itself. Gamma and Tome both moved away from fixed 16 by 9 pages toward responsive web-native blocks that can stretch, collapse, and hold live embeds, which makes the product behave more like an interactive document or mini site than a file built for printing or projecting.
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Gamma’s core unit is the card, not the slide. A card can be any height, hide detail until clicked open, and hold text, images, video, screen recordings, websites, or tools like Airtable. That makes it better for async reading and reuse inside teams, where people consume material on their own screens instead of in one live room.
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Tome pursued a closely related format shift with responsive tiles that resize across devices and support live embeds from Figma, Google Sheets, Typeform, and Miro. The overlap is structural, both products treat presentations as interactive web content, even if Tome leaned more toward storytelling and later sales use cases.
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That format decision changes the business question. Once the output is a web-native artifact instead of a standard deck file, the company can expand into proposals, reports, microsites, and personalized sales materials. It also creates friction with the PowerPoint and PDF world, where export and compatibility still matter for many external workflows.
The category is heading toward a split. Fixed slide tools will absorb basic AI generation, while web-native players will push further into interactive business content that blends docs, decks, and lightweight sites. Gamma’s advantage will come from making that new format easy enough for non-designers that it becomes the default way to package ideas, not just a novel way to make slides.