Three weeks of living in AI slide tools — what each one is actually for
Gamma, Tome, Canva's AI, and a chatbot with markdown. I made every deck for my business in each of them. The tools are less interchangeable than their landing pages claim.
Every AI slide tool promises the same future: describe your deck, get a deck. After three weeks of making every real deck for my business in a different tool, I can tell you the promise is true in all of them and meaningless — because 'a deck' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The tools diverge completely once you look at who the deck is for.
Gamma remains the one I reach for when the audience is outside my company. The layouts have taste, the web-first format means the deck looks right on a phone (where half my clients open attachments), and the analytics — knowing a prospect spent six minutes on the pricing slide — is quietly the most useful sales tool I've picked up in years. Editing is fast. Export to PowerPoint works with minor breakage.
Tome tried to be a storytelling tool and I respect the ambition more than the results. Its narrative-first structure genuinely helped me stop making 'about us' decks and start making argument decks. But the formatting fights took longer than Gamma, the template variety is thinner, and for a deck that just needs to look professional, its opinions are sometimes more than I asked for.
Canva's AI features are the pragmatic middle. No magic — it's AI assistance inside a proper design tool, which means the output is a real designed document with your brand kit, and the ceiling is high because everything Canva does is one click away. The generation is weaker for long decks: past slide ten, the layouts get conservative. For the ten-slide-and-under world where most business decks actually live, it's plenty.
And the honest fourth option: ChatGPT wrote my two best decks this month as outlines, which I built manually in twenty minutes each. For internal meetings, the AI slide tools were overhead. The verdict, unsentimentally: client-facing and sales, Gamma. Narrative-heavy storytelling, Tome with patience. Branded short decks, Canva. Tuesday internal updates, nobody. The tools are good now. The skill worth learning is knowing which deck you're actually making.