Can Gamma AI replace PowerPoint? I tried it so you don’t have to

What Gamma gets right, where it still stumbles, and how I’d actually use it as a consultant

Aug 20, 2025

I’ve spent over 7 years at one of the Big Four’s in consulting and I’ve probably created over 7000 slides. That’s probably still a conservative estimate.

So when

Charu

wrote a note about Gamma AI—this tool that claims to create beautiful, branded slides from a simple prompt—I was both intrigued and a little skeptical. Could it actually save time? Or would it turn out like every other tool that works great for tech bros but breaks the second you try to make a client deck?

To be clear: this was just a quick two-hour test, so think of this as first impressions, not the final word.

Still, I decided to try it out — so you don’t have to (or so you’ll want to, depending on how this goes).

What is Gamma AI

“Gamma is your free-to-use AI design partner for creating effortless presentations, websites, and more. No coding or design skills required.”

In other words, Gamma AI is an AI-powered presentation tool that lets you skip the formatting headache and focus on what you’re actually trying to say. Instead of dragging text boxes around in PowerPoint, you write a prompt—and Gamma builds a full, clean-looking deck for you.

The slides are interactive, scrollable, and web-native, so they feel more like a microsite than a static PDF. You can present live, share a link, or export if you need to.

While I’ve mostly explored it for consulting use cases (think: client readouts, internal updates, and proposal decks), Gamma also doubles as a website builder. Same prompt-based flow, same slick design, just a different format.

It’s not replacing the big tools just yet, but it is promising for moments when you want something fast, smart, and way better looking than a last-minute slide hack. Or, in my case, when you just want some inspiration for new layouts.

You can check Gamma AI out here, with a free plan that gives you 400 credits. I used the free version, but there’s also a Plus plan at $8 and a Pro plan at $18 if you need more power or API access.

Why I would pay for this

My firm is working on its own AI-powered slide generator, but until that’s up and running, tools like this are worth exploring—if I were actually allowed to use them for client work (which, to be clear, I absolutely am not). And here’s why:

It is easy to use. Instead of typical slides like PowerPoint, Gamma uses a modular “card” layout. Each card acts like a content block, and everything is scrollable. Cards are similar to slides, pages, or sections, but with zero limitations. They can grow or shrink to fit your content, which takes some getting used to. Overall, I found it very intuitive to work with. Although I only tried it out for 1-2 hours, I can see myself becoming adept at all features within a few days.
The Generate function works really well. Even with a simple prompt, it delivers something that’s great as a starting point. It does save you a lot of time!
You can create your own custom theme. Helpful for companies. Of course, I cannot upload my firm’s theme, but I added my color scheme from Colleague, Interrupted. It worked nicely, except that it made all the graphs some ugly brown color to have enough contrast - but that’s hardly Gamma’s fault.
Oh, the templates. One of the main things I miss in my consulting life is having enough inspiration on slide designs. At some point, our own consulting scrapbook becomes too familiar. It’s nice to have a set of templates at your disposal. Also, there is a section with ‘inspiration’.
PS - design tools like Canva also offer these templates.
You can embed music and video - and this looks more professional than in PowerPoint. Embedding Spotify is not even possible in PowerPoint.
You can generate images — with custom style instructions

Why I would not recommend it:

Almost all of the templates and inspirational Gammas are, in my opinion, mostly suitable for startups, creators/creatives, or design firms. If I were to use these in my Consulting company, I would receive various frowns. Don’t get me wrong - they look great - but they focus more on looks than on content. As a storyboarder, I truly miss the Title - Subtitle style that Consultants use to summarize the key message. I can create it myself, but it’s not in the inspirational Gamma’s.
Users who need advanced data visualisation or complex animations will struggle. Have a look at the use case below to understand why.
Teams that rely heavily on exporting PowerPoint files for offline use will have an issue. I tried exporting a Gamma to PowerPoint, but as soon as there is a card bigger than 16:9, the content will fall off the page. Also, there is no slide master behind it, just blank pages. Sad.

Use case - Velwyn & Co

To test Gamma AI properly, I didn’t want to just play around—I wanted to simulate an actual client scenario. So I asked ChatGPT to invent a fictional brand (hello, Velwyn & Co.) and draft a high-level strategy for their North American expansion. Once we had the executive summary mapped out across three slides, I dropped the descriptions straight into Gamma. The tool handled the rest. Here’s the prompt screen and the output:

Good start, but I don’t like the first slide (or should I say card). So I tried the option ‘visualize this text’. This is what it came up with:

Hmm, not quite it. I then had a look at the other ‘Edit with AI’ functions for this block. I can Rephrase (more engaging, expand or condense), Visualize (key points, images, or as a timeline), or reformat (split into columns, format as table, or summarize as toggles). Let’s try the timeline!

Better! I also tried the ‘Visualize key points’ feature. Not bad, but I couldn’t select both text blocks at the same time. So if I wanted to visualize the key points of the entire slide, I am not sure what the best way would be.

I did also see that I could edit the entire card, but this provided mainly other options for improving writing, fixing spelling & grammar, translating, making longer/shorter, simplifying language, and being more specific. But I’m sure with more experience, I could figure it out.

To push the test further, I also wanted to see how Gamma handles detailed, data-heavy content. I asked ChatGPT to generate a fourth slide with growth projections—complete with specific numbers and four different charts: revenue, customer acquisition, channel mix, and brand awareness. I then fed that prompt straight into Gamma to see how it would visualize it.

Impressive, but also: meh. First of all, it took me a few regenerations to get to this version. Still, there are a few things I don’t like here, such as:

No clear subtitle/key message — it is there, but it’s too small
Gamma automatically makes it a bigger card instead of sticking to 16:9. Although that can be good for some purposes, it is not helpful here because the reader will get overwhelmed. I tried to find an easy way to split the graphs across two cards, but I came up empty.
No value labels in the pie charts. I can add them, but they are barely readable. When exported to a PDF, this is barely readable.
The values on the Y-axis of the projected revenue growth chart cannot be shortened with fewer zeros (as far as I could find).

Now, if I wasn’t limited by Substack’s maximum newsletter length I would show you the edits I would do to ‘fix’ this, but unfortunately we need to leave it here. At this point, I have around 300 out of 400 credits left. Not bad for a free plan, but if you want to make a serious deck you would need the Plus plan.

Finally, I tried exporting to PDF to share with my very fancy fictional client. This looked pretty good, also for the bigger card format. See below for yourself (please ignore the lack of the image on the last page, that was my fault, I accidentally clicked on something like a boomer).

Expanding Velwyn And Co To North America A Strategic Growth Initiative

467KB ∙ PDF file

Download

My verdict

Gamma AI will not replace PowerPoint for me. Not now, and maybe not ever. Not because it’s not good, but because PowerPoint is too deeply embedded in how we work. My firm and our clients are slow to change, we’re already developing our own internal AI slide generator for PowerPoint, and let’s be honest: Gamma isn’t built for heavy data visualization. Not yet.

That said… I’ll definitely keep using it. Specifically: I’ll use Gamma to experiment with visual storytelling, explore new layout ideas, and generate polished elements I can pull into my actual decks. The fact that I can export to PowerPoint is a win—and not having to manually align boxes? That alone is worth celebrating.

After thousands of slides, I’m always looking for ways to make the process faster, smarter, and just a little less soul-sucking. Gamma does that, for certain parts of the job. Well done!

So no, it's not a full replacement. But it is a seriously useful addition.

Of course, this is just my take after a couple of hours playing around. If you want a follow-up review once I’ve actually tried building a real client-style deck end to end, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to do a round two.

And I’m curious, what is your take on this? Have you already used Gamma AI? Let me know!

Colleague, Interrupted