RIP AI Slides 2022-2026
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Gamma defined the text-to-slides market, but the standalone AI slides category is now collapsing into a feature across different tools & suites, from Claude, ChatGPT, Figma and Canva to Microsoft 365. The survivors are going horizontal into websites, docs, and social assets, betting that slides are just one output in a generalized AI design workflow. For more, check out our full report and dataset on Gamma.


Key points via Sacra AI:
- In the first wave of AI slides, Tome (founded in 2020) and Gamma (founded in 2020, pivoted to AI in 2023) took the clunky PowerPoint what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) slide design process and reimagined it as text-to-slides, designed & completed entirely from prompting & chatting with a large language model (LLM). Tome was first to market and hit 10 million users after focusing on user growth and raising $81M, but shifted to enterprise and then CRM after hitting just $3.5M ARR, while Gamma raised $19M, stayed profitable and stuck with slides en route to hitting $102M in ARR in October 2025, up from $30.5M at the end of 2024.
- Microsoft (300M+ PowerPoint MAUs) and Canva (265M MAUs) bundled AI copilots for slides into their productivity & creative suites, with the advantage of bringing AI to where users already work, with existing context-rich, brand-aware, permissioned workspaces and avoiding the export/import round trip of standalone AI slide tools. While Microsoft & Canva built slides as fixed 16:9 rectangles, Gamma designed them as responsive websites that could either be viewed in landscape (16:9 slides) or portrait (9:16 documents), enabling Gamma to position on much richer & modern AI design with dynamic AI-generated layouts versus the static & dated look of template-driven, static, fixed-position slides.
- Anthropic launched native PowerPoint generation into Claude (October 2025), then launched Cowork as a local agent that can build decks from data & files on your local device (January 2026), and then launched Claude Design as a visual canvas where you can create a design system for your deck, edit in a WYSIWYG interface, and export to Figma/Canva for further editing. AI slide generation sits downstream of code generation & front-end UI capabilities—to create slides, LLMs generate React, HTML/CSS, SVG, or structured PowerPoint code to lay out text, charts, and visual blocks—advantaging Anthropic as the foundation lab which has lead on coding & design (Claude Code at $2.5B annualized revenue in February 2026, up from $1.25B at the end of 2025).
- After first becoming the basis for breakout standalone products (Gamma, Tome), AI slides are collapsing into a feature across every AI surface, with foundation model labs (Claude, ChatGPT), vibe coding products (Replit), design tools (Figma, Canva), and productivity suites (Microsoft 365) all now generating slides natively. Adding slides & presentations as a feature drives enterprise expansion in both usage and seats, laterally into sales & marketing and up the org chart into management, with AI tools in particular focusing on shifting from high-churn, one-off creation use cases (14% median one month retention rate for generative AI apps) to colonizing the org with high-retention and high-margin collaboration workflows.
- Gamma ($102M ARR in October 2025), Genspark ($250M annualized revenue in March 2026), and Manus ($127M annualized revenue in 2025) are all responding by expanding horizontally into websites, social media assets & docs, and by going deeper vertically into research workflows that feed context into asset generation. AI slides as a standalone category is dead: slides are now just one output format available in a generalized AI design & content workflow with LLM capabilities on writing code, generating images and completing text having collapsed the distinctions between presentations, documents, social media assets, microsites, prototypes, dashboards and lightweight internal tools.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Gamma (dataset)
- Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma, on building AI-powered slides
- Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
- Gamma vs Anthropic
- Gamma vs Canva
- Eric Simons, CEO of Bolt, on consumer vs. B2B vibe coding
- Canva at $4B ARR growing 43% YoY
- Product manager at Canva on Canva's shift upmarket
- Why Sora failed
- Vibe coding index
- Replit at $253M ARR growing 2,352% YoY
- Filip Kozera, CEO of Wordware, on the rise of vibe doing
- Canva at $4B ARR growing 43% YoY
