As someone who makes a LOT of slides (I worked in consulting for many years, most recently as a manager at McKinsey), I literally tried every single AI slide maker on the market and this is actually game-changing software for me and many of my peers.

To the best of my knowledge, Brightdeck is the only software on the market that allows you to use AI to make non-trivial edits to existing PowerPoints. In my case an edit could be changing the format of an existing slide, incorporating a "sticky noted" comment on a slide , or taking raw notes I have on a slide from my deck's storyline (aka. ghost deck) and creating a slide from that which doesn't look out of place from the rest of the deck. In fact, I think they might also be the only software that allows you to use AI to add similar-format slides to existing PowerPoints while keeping the same layout/colors scheme...etc.

I have tried a few other tools and want to share my observations:

Gamma: Very easy to use and beautifully crafted. However, doesn't work with my use cases at all. If you try to upload an existing PowerPoint into Gamma, it destroys all your formatting and basically turns your deck into some simplified Notion file. However, if you don't care about preserving formatting, they're actually a nice option.

Genspark: I don't actually know how this company got to $200M ARR. Probably not from slides. At one point they (or their affiliate) pitched my team very heavily.

Claude: Claude Design can't make edits, their PPT plugin messes up even pretty simple edits if you're using it on an existing deck. If you're giving it a fresh prompt + fresh deck it actually works decently well (but it's super slow, like 20 minutes to generate 5 slides).

ChatGPT: ChatGPT.com can't edit decks (I believe; haven’t tried in a while), and the decks they generate from scratch are pretty basic. Worse than Claude. Their plugin for PowerPoint can only edit text--it can't change design/formatting.

Figma Slides: You can't edit decks. New decks from scratch are kind of nifty and have cool design elements though.

So...my conclusion is that so far Brightdeck is the only AI I can use to edit client decks. And the only thing I can use if I want to add new slides to a client deck. Congrats to the team on officially launching on HN. I'll keep paying for it and telling my friends as long as you don't take this comment as an indication to raise the price on me :)

Disclaimer: I found the product early through a mutual acquaintance and became an early user. Although I wasn't asked to write this, you should take this with a grain of salt, since I have quite a positive outlook on the company, their pace of releasing new features, listening to feedback...etc. I've been looking for this exact product for a while now.