Pitch decks are crucial and high-stakes events for any startup founder. A well-crafted presentation can differentiate between closing an important deal and leaving with nothing.
Pitch decks are a time-consuming process (owing to their importance) that involves extensive market research, creative prowess, and endless revisions. However, advancements in AI have disrupted the process, making it more streamlined and efficient.
According to a survey, AI-generated pitch decks outperformed human-created decks in securing funding and impressing investors.
The article highlights how AI has contributed to creating impactful investor pitch decks, saving time and enhancing outputs.
What are Pitch Decks?
Pitch decks are not just any PowerPoint presentations – they are your company’s journey, value proposition, and vision – all amalgamated into a few slides. Entrepreneurs use the slides to convey their business ideas or details about the company to potential partners, investors, or stakeholders.
Pitch decks will walk the investors through everything the startup entails, including aspects like –
- A clearly articulated problem and its solution
- The product/service
- Business model and strategy
- Competitor analysis and the market landscape
- The team members behind the initiative
- Vision and mission
- The projected financials and the funding requirements
This information requires thorough inputs from marketers, founders, designers, and financial analysts, setting the stage to leverage AI. Pitch decks should be succinct, clear, and compelling to successfully communicate a captivating narrative that reflects the brand’s distinct value proposition quickly.
How AI Revolutionizes Pitch Decks Creation?
AI tools can help automate and optimize many aspects of pitch deck creation, simplifying the work for presenters. For instance –
(i). Automation in Slide Generation
AI tools, with the help of simple text prompts or summaries, can generate extensive slide content and layout. You can put in a prompt telling what your business does, and AI-powered platforms will generate draft content and suggest slide structure.
(ii). Competitive Analysis and Market Research
A thorough understanding of the competitors and the market is critical for the success of any business. AI tools help automate and elevate the process by pulling in relevant statistics, data, trends, and competitor analysis, making your slide deck persuasive and fact-driven.
(iii). Consistency in Designing and Branding
Designing seems daunting, as it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. A clean and persuasive slide deck requires layout optimization, color and font consistency, design principles, etc., to be usable, polished, and visually appealing.
Similarly, following brand guidelines across all platforms is crucial to creating a consistent look with a unified story. Incoherency in how a brand is presented can lead to unprofessional work, which can mean a loss of trust for clients.
AI adds efficiency and unburdens presenters with the help of pre-trained models, taking care of the design and branding aesthetics.
(iv). Content Optimization
With the help of Generative AI, you can create relevant and persuasive narratives, refine the messaging, and make it more appropriate and suitable for the audience. You can also test different headlines, content forms, or call-to-action (CTA) to determine the content for the deck that garners better responses.
(v). Financial Modeling and Forecasting
Numbers and financials are another critical aspect of pitch decks, as they help investors evaluate investments’ risks.
AI tools facilitate the process by auto-generating aspects like forecasts, bars/charts, break-even analysis, etc., that can be effortlessly embedded into the deck. It does so through simple assumptions and inputs from founders, quickly delivering the desired numbers.
Benefits of Using AI in Creating Investor Pitch Decks
1. Speed
Founders are busy handling the startup’s nitty-gritty. Creating a well-crafted pitch deck requires a lot of effort, sometimes even weeks, which overwhelms them even more.
AI makes this easy by completing the same work in less than an hour, which used to take days. It uses intelligent algorithms to easily and precisely organize content into a well-structured slide.
2. Affordable
Presentations require prowess to get each part right, such as design, content creation, articulation, etc. If you are not experienced, the next alternative would be to hire copywriters, designers, and analysts to create a perfect deck. AI simplifies this by cutting the cost of hiring separate individuals for the slide deck.
3. Consistent
AI ensures brand and design consistency across all slides without any chance of human error. All the slides are coherent, in alignment with your narrative and brand goals.
4. Iterable
It allows founders to test and develop iterative versions, improving the acceptability of their product or service. The iterative process before finalizing will ensure a better reception from the audience later.
5. Accessible
AI-powered platforms create investor-grade material with grace and ease in no time. It makes creating slide decks much smoother and easier for non-technical founders, who had difficulty accessing the relevant data or design.
6. Simplifies Structuring
With its advanced algorithms, AI doesn’t just add text to the slides. It analyzes content and generates visually optimized slides that enhance audience engagement.
AI tools enable seamless organization and integration of ideas into a clear and structured format, streamlining the workflow and saving critical time.
7. Lasting Impression
AI helps deliver compelling presentations with apt visuals and content that clearly articulate the idea and message. The high-quality templates showcase the essential and critical information while highlighting the unique value proposition.
The professional slides enable you to simplify complex information into engaging graphics that captivate investors and leave a lasting impression.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Create an AI-Powered Pitch Deck
a). Gather the Business Inputs
Collect essential information about your business, like financials, mission, vision, product/service, team members, customer persona, traction metrics, etc.
b). Take the Help of an AI-Powered Presentation Generator
Use AI presentation builder tools like SketchBubble AI, Canva AI, Gamma, Tome, etc., to create slide decks that are polished and professional. Put in a text prompt or generate slides from input from business summaries.
The brief text prompt – around 120 characters – details the purpose of the presentation. Based on the input, select a template that best aligns with the message and style of your presentation.
c). Use a Generative AI Tool to Refine the Work
Generative AI assistants like ChatGPT or Jasper can edit, rewrite, and refine content to make it more persuasive, aligned, and relevant.
d). Make Your Slides More Credible and Enriched with Market Data
AI research tools will help you incorporate statistics, trends, and reports in your slides to make them credible and informative. Customize your slide deck by choosing a typeface, color palette, and visuals that align with your brand.
e). Use AI Models for Visually Presenting Your Financial Information
Tools like Causal or Finmark will help you create and export relevant visuals. Simply input assumptions into the tools, and you’re good to go.
f). Refine and Polish the Design and Download
Edit and refine your design to make it more relevant, concise, and appropriate for investors. Check for visual hierarchy and layout, ensure your slides incorporate brand themes for a consistent and unified look, include relevant and applicable data and information, and export the deck for investor use.
Best Practices to Follow
While AI can considerably simplify work for presenters, human intervention is still required to get the best output, leveraging both types of intelligence.
- Take the help of AI, but remember not to skip strategizing. Your business story should make sense and be crafted to resonate with people. A human touch is required to deliver stories that emotionally connect with people.
- AI tools are generic and lack customization where needed. While AI can create professional, polished decks, investors would value authenticity and genuineness.
- Remember to review and validate the outputs generated by AI tools. While AI tools can seamlessly model projections, human intervention is still required to validate their correctness.
Summing It Up
Creating pitch decks used to be a tedious chore, but the advent of AI disrupted the process. AI made it agile and intuitive, letting founders focus more on the business than on designing and formatting.
While AI can’t replace the founders’ vision and hustle, it can elevate the efficiency of a presentation by polishing elements like storytelling and design.
However, with evolving technology, we might soon encounter dynamic pitch decks that can be updated based on real-time performances and feedback, and even tailored to individual investor’s needs.
