Gamma

Gamma is that rare product that existed before large language models and then genuinely completed the AI-native transition. I've followed it since 2022, back when its story wasn't generative AI but dismantling the traditional slide deck — and having built slide products myself, I buy the thesis completely. A traditional slide is a pile of scattered, layered elements where moving anything is a chore; Gamma assembles from preset components like Lego, deleting the layout work entirely. It's the Notion of slides. And a deck isn't a file but a web page: share a link, expand a section mid-talk, play a video, jump wherever the room wants to go.

The moment the deck appears, the difference explains itself.

The user explosion, though, came with LLMs — for the most product-shaped reason, one the founder has told on a podcast. Gamma's concept broke people's habits, so new users couldn't feel its value inside five minutes. AI dissolved that education problem: type what you want to say, and it maps your content onto the right components, expands your points, and hands you a seven-or-eight-card draft deck in one shot. You're no longer building slides one by one; you're editing details in a draft — and the moment that deck appears, the difference from traditional slides explains itself.

The same models unlocked what a small team couldn't afford before: localization. A dozen-plus languages shipped fast and visibly accelerated its spread country by country, followed by steady polish of the AI features themselves — image generation included, with output that's increasingly usable as-is. I switched my own presentation software to Gamma years ago, betting on exactly this: a team with real product-led-growth craft and a knack for folding AI into product.

The fashionable take now is that ever-stronger image and code generation will eat products like Gamma. I don't buy it. Presentation content demands high determinism — every word gets polished by hand in the end — and Gamma's editor and detail control beat prompting a chat or patching a generated webpage by miles. Add collaboration, sharing, and the adjacent capabilities it keeps growing (webpage generation now too), and this is a moat, not a casualty.