The Review

What It Does

Generate well-designed presentations with AI.

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Why Ops Leaders Should Care

If you work at a deck-first company, this could be a lifesaver. While it’s probably not quite there yet for the most high-stakes external use cases (board meetings, investor presentations, etc.), it’s a great pick for All Hands presentations, department meetings, project status updates, or other internal use cases where speed and legibility are more important than tweaking the final 1% of the design.

Likewise, if your team handles a high volume of less customized customer presentations (initial sales meetings, customer success QBRs, etc.), this could be a useful way to shift their focus from perfecting presentations to driving business outcomes.

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Key Features (Pros & Cons)

Pros:

• Fast
• Rich, interactive content, including videos, embeds, forms, etc. - and can be consumed as a live presentation, a scrollable webpage, or exported into pdf, ppt, or google docs
• Collaborative: multiple people can work on a deck together in real time

Cons:

• Themes and formatting can seem a bit “samey” after a while - “Gamma starts off looking impressive, but quickly becomes underwhelming after a few hours of use. The AI-generated slides are extremely repetitive” (G2 review)
• Content quality can be lackluster for complex subjects - Reddit commenter said that it was “not consulting ready at all” (albeit this was 7 months ago)
• Users cannot freely reposition every element on the slide; there are some limits to the customization
• No offline mode - if the airplane wifi isn’t working, you won’t be able to work on your deck

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Live Experience

A slide generated by Gamma from content that I wrote

In addition to speaking to users of Gamma, reviewing online commentary about Gamma, and reviewing product features vs. competitors, I tried my hand at a few different use cases.

Investor update to presentation:

• I pasted in one of my recent investor updates - Gamma had decent judgement on vs. how to separate the content into individual slides
• The AI-generated images were not great - I would not use them
• The AI-generated graphics were okay, but really only served to display the content in a different format rather than adding a layer of meaning as great graphics can
• Each of the slides had a different format (under the same theme); the formats were somewhat visually engaging

Blog post to presentation:

• I took a blog post that I wrote and asked Gamma to create a presentation
• The design was clean and readable
• The AI-generated graphics were quite relevant in places but it missed obvious opportunities to amplify the text in the graphics (e.g. one of the key concepts was that of a ‘barbell’ and it did not carry that over to the graphics creation)
• The text was reflected accurately and the slides had good titles

Sales proposal email to presentation:

• I took an email to a potential customer outlining different options and asked Gamma to create a presentation based on it
• This was the best of the three presentations despite having the least text to work with (potentially because the concepts were quite simple, comparatively?)
• The formatting was effective and made the different packages easy to understand
• The AI-generated headlines were fairly strong and the copy was straightforward

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Other Options

Beautiful.ai, Decktopus, Plus.ai, Canva, Prezi

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Bottom Line

Out of the box, Gamma will create slick-looking presentations quickly, which can be useful for a number of use cases. However, for complex, conceptual, or client-ready presentations, you’ll still need to put a fair amount of work into tweaking the text, graphics, and layout to get to a good end-result (for now, at least).

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