FTT: I Still Hate PowerPoint. I Think I'm Going to Love Gamma

Yes, this is a review.

Eating Crow (Sort Of)

On Friday, I published a piece about why I hate PowerPoint and demonstrated how Claude AI can quickly turn outlines into functional slideshows. I stand by that approach during the development phase—when you're iterating on structure, having an interactive model that responds to prompts beats wrestling with slide templates every time.

But I'm eating a little crow today after actually trying Gamma.

Turns out, purpose-built AI designed around turning ideas into presentations might actually be how most people solve their presentation problems going forward. Who knew?

The Gamma Reality Check

I took the demo slideshow I'd created for one of my clients—the same one I'd used to demonstrate the Claude approach—and literally copy-pasted the text outline into Gamma without any modifications. That's it. No formatting, no style guidance, no design direction.

Gamma picked out the style, illustrations, and format entirely by itself. In literally no time, with zero effort on my part beyond the paste operation, it turned that raw outline into a genuinely stunning presentation.

Here's the actual result

Were I to give that presentation again, I'd likely use this version. The visual design, the flow, the polish—it's exactly what you'd want for a client-facing deck without the usual hours of formatting hell. Pretty impressive considering it had nothing to work with but plain text bullets.

The Refined Workflow

Does this mean always use Gamma? Not quite. Here's what I think the optimal workflow actually looks like:

Phase 1: Structural Development Use Claude (or similar) for rapid iteration on content and structure. The back-and-forth of refining bullets, reordering sections, and testing different angles works best when you can prompt your way through changes instantly.

Phase 2: Final Polish Once your structure is solid, tools like Gamma shine. Copy-paste your refined outline—no formatting required—and let it handle everything: visual design, illustrations, layout, typography. The fact that it made intelligent design decisions from nothing but raw text bullets is genuinely impressive.

The limitation remains: Gamma isn't as interactive for mid-stream edits. If you want to rearrange bullets or restructure sections, you're better off going back to the prompt-driven approach, then re-generating the polished version.

Another Gamma slide. Folks, I just pasted in the text content. That’s it.

What This Really Means

This experience reinforces something bigger: AI prompting over traditional tooling is clearly where UX is heading.

Instead of:

• Opening PowerPoint

• Choosing a template

• Fighting with slide layouts

• Manually formatting elements

• Spending hours on visual consistency

We get:

• Copy-paste your outline

• Let AI make all design decisions

• Get a polished result instantly

• Focus purely on content quality

The fact that Gamma produced a client-ready presentation from nothing but raw text bullets—no style guidance, no formatting hints, no design direction—demonstrates how far this approach has already come.

Gamma represents the first wave of this shift, and while I don't know if it's the best solution, it's pretty impressive. More importantly, it validates the fundamental premise: when AI can understand intent and execute design decisions, the traditional software interaction model starts looking absurd.

Yes, Claude’s slideshow generator could build simple graphs. But nothing like this.

The Honest Assessment

My Friday point about Claude for slideshow development? Still valid for the messy, iterative work of getting your ideas straight. But Gamma has shown me that the final presentation layer is ripe for this kind of AI-first approach.

The real insight isn't that one tool beats another—it's that we're seeing the emergence of a genuinely better workflow. Prompt-driven content development feeding into AI-powered design execution.

That's not just an incremental improvement over PowerPoint. That's a completely different category of solution.

Bottom Line

I still hate PowerPoint. But I'm starting to love what comes after it.

The future of presentations isn't about better slide software—it's about describing what you want and having AI figure out how to make it compelling. Gamma gets us closer to that reality than anything I've used before.

Now I just need to figure out how to expense a Gamma subscription as "competitive research."