Send your best vibes — I’m considering the purchase of a florist shop. I’ll be scoping out the best AI pitch deck generators to help me get started because outright buying a business is financially laughable for me. Let’s build a strong pitch deck to convince potential investors.
A successful pitch deck is brief and powerful. I’ll be sticking to the most impactful points and keeping my decks to 10 slides or fewer. You can generally figure on giving each slide two to three minutes for a 20-30 minute presentation. Keep in mind that you’re not just selling your business idea. You’re selling yourself at the helm of it.
Florist shops are not a new idea. They have been around in the form we recognize since the mid-1800s. So, I’ll need to tell a great story that helps people understand why there’s a need for this business, how it will be profitable, and why I’m worth investing in. Let’s go!
Table of Contents
- What is an AI pitch deck generator?
- How AI Can Help You Build Your Pitch Deck
- How I Tested the Best AI Pitch Deck Generators
- Best AI Pitch Deck Generators
- Building Great Decks
What is an AI pitch deck generator?
An AI pitch deck generator is a platform, software suite, app, or extension that helps you speed up the process of creating a pitch deck, which is essentially a slide presentation with a persuasive purpose.
The deck can then be used as a presentation for securing funding (in my case), business meetings in which you need to boost buy-in or any other situation in which you want to inform and convince.
How AI Can Help You Build Your Pitch Deck
Pitch decks typically include an overview of a product or service, display how that product or service solves a problem, and offer a value proposition. Here are some of the ways that AI can help you build a pitch deck:
- Condensing text for bullet points. AI generators may adjust text sizes so you don’t have to mess with it.
- Making images. They may pull from existing image libraries or generate entirely new images that fit the need.
- Managing design. AI pitch deck generators can make sure that all of your slides are complementary to one another without having to build slides one by one with similar elements.
- Creating content with tone of voice options. Some may offer you choices about the tone of the text it generates to get it closer to your brand voice.
- Saving you tons of time. These generators create decks that typically only need to be edited instead of having to build your decks from scratch.
How I Tested the Best AI Pitch Deck Generators
I’ll be creating a pitch deck for my floral business using AI — not because I can’t write convincingly or build attractive slides, but because time is always my limiting factor. Here’s what I’m looking for in an AI pitch deck:
- Take my basic ideas and flesh them out with content.
- Create a series of functional and attractive slides.
- Populate the slides with appropriate imagery, or make it easy for me to include my own images.
- It needs to be user-friendly — I don’t have time for learning curves or energy for frustration.
- Bonus if there are templates to choose from that fit my ideas for visual branding.
My hope is that AI can achieve about 80% of what I need and only need 20% massaging to make something I would not be embarrassed to present to a bank or private investor.
I’ll use the same idea and business name in each of the generators below to see which kicks out the best results. This will help me decide which is the best AI pitch deck generator for my purposes, and hopefully along the way you’ll find one that you think will work well for you too.
Best AI Pitch Deck Generators
1. Gamma
Setup is very easy. I entered my basic prompt and chose 10 cards (slides) to start with:
I ultimately decided to go with eight cards instead by simply deleting two cards from the outline list it generated. They let me choose between Google Search and AI image generation. I chose AI. It even lets me describe the images I want — soft botanical illustrations — and gives me a range of image models to choose from.
Free
- Stable Diffusion XL
- Playground 2.5
- Imagen Flash
Paid
- Imagine Pro
- Ideogram
- Dall-E 3
I chose Playground 2.5 just because it’s the preset. Now it’s time to pick a theme!
They have over 60 to choose from — all of which are free, which is refreshing. Usually the basic ones are free and the nice ones you have to pay for. I choose Oasis because it’s green with earthy tones, and here’s an example of what is generated:
I’m very happy with this. Everything looks great, and there’s a variety of ways the text is presented throughout the deck.
There’s one very standard caveat for AI imagery that holds true: The image looks nice, but then you look close. The AI image above is full of flowers that aren’t real flowers. If I was pitching to another florist, I’d just own it and enjoy making light of it. I think non-florist investors might notice it’s an AI image but not know the botanicals themselves are absurd.
Also, I’ll need to swap out a photo of myself.
You can see there’s a guy in a business suit on the left-side navigation — second slide — that’ll have to go. There’s a later image of men’s hands shaking with suit cuffs that I’ll replace, too.
I found it to be very intuitive to make changes to images, text content, and card design settings within the block editing interface. I was able to ask the AI to make several changes, including adding measurements to the image in the Competitive Advantage card:
Gamma does a great job of keeping information tight and tidy, but the AI imagery went a little too corporate and masculine for the task, which surprised me.
Overall, I’d feel great about using this pitch deck now that I’ve made some adjustments. Gamma met all of my criteria, doing almost all of the work and requiring only a bit of massaging. I barely touched the AI credits.
It was easy to download the pitch deck as a PDF, PowerPoint presentation, publish it to a site, or embed it into a site with code they provide. You can also share access to collaborate, and it tracks metrics on visitors and card engagement. High marks!
Pricing
What I like: The free version offers plenty of variety and customization. It’s easy, and having 60 themes to look over really helps you dial in on the aesthetic you’re going for.
Best for: Anyone, really. For beginners, there is enough organization and direction provided to walk you through the steps of forward progression without knowing what will come next as the AI builds the deck. For people who know a bit more about generative AI and what you can ask of it, it’s a more powerful tool.
Pro tip: If you want to edit your accent image, change the prompt to briefly describe what image you want, then click the Enhance Prompt button. You’ll see that it probably uses a lot more language than you thought you needed, which you can then adjust to get closer to your idea before you hit Generate.
2. Slidebean
Slidebean is definitely a bit … different … from Gamma. They have a beta version of their AI pitch deck generator that you can try out. It’s free to explore, but you have to upgrade to download or share what you make.
The AI pitch deck feature asked me for a website to pull from or to enter my business name and describe the business. I wonder if the option to “Use a Template” might be a better choice, but that’s not what we’re testing today. Here’s what the AI pitch deck generator kicked out:
It’s okay. The images don’t make sense, and you can change some colors. The orange bar above the word Cultivar can be adjusted into a rectangle or a longer underline bar. There are photo and icon libraries to address the images, but it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s a basic layout and some content — leaving me to do well over 20% to morph it into something I would feel good about presenting.
Here’s the lead slide after I spent some time with it, and it’s just sort of okay in terms of a deck intro:
To be clear, I can see the value in this. It just doesn’t carry the ball as far as I was hoping. It’s intuitive enough to poke around and figure things out — it’s very easy to drag and drop elements where you want them, and you can include emojis, which are useful if you are marketing on social media.
I think they may have restricted their free version a little too far or the beta just needs a lot more development. I’m not particularly enticed to pay for more of it. I did go back and check out the pitch deck templates to see if something beyond beta was better. I found one that was free to work with:
Again, it’s okay, but it’d be a job to make it what I had in mind. It’s better than the AI offering in terms of design, and I can see why this company would want to get in on the game of AI pitch deck generators.
Pricing:
What I like: It’s pretty intuitive — you click on any given block and then make changes on the right-side interface.
Best For: People who don’t need anything fancy or know or care much about design. Just change a picture and the words and you have yourself a functional pitch deck.
Pro tip: They have an animation library if you want to add some movement to your presentation. I searched for flowers, and there was an inappropriate GIF there — just keep in mind that some of it is NSFW.
3. Plus AI
Plus AI worked with Google Slides, and it now offers AI for PowerPoint, too. I’m going to use the Google Slide option and use the seven-day free trial. Oh, bummer. They make you sign up for a payment plan before you can try it, which means they will charge my card if I forget to cancel it. I feel that this is an outdated trick that takes advantage of people, making Gamma look better and better.
After drafting an email to have them cancel my subscription, I signed up with my credit card via my Google account. It’s an extension you have to install, so I made that happen. I just had to give it access to all my Google everything, a kidney, and my first born child. Then there’s additional set up to do. Yeesh.
The program opened an instruction page and Google Slides. The instructions directed me to click on Extensions, hover on Plus AI, and choose New presentation with Plus AI:
I was then prompted to log in to Plus AI with Google (again?). At long last, I got a dashboard from which I could do some pitch deck work!
I chose Use a Prompt, clicked Pitch Deck, specified eight slides in the dropdown, and gave a description of what I wanted the pitch deck to do along with information about myself and the business I wish to purchase:
I clicked “Generate,” and it gave me an outline where I could move, delete, or change the slides until I was happy with the presentation outline. Then I must choose a theme among just three options, but there is a note that you can customize it later. Okay. Here’s what it kicks out:
It’s clean and simple, and provides more technical language than I expected. The yellow tip boxes you see are helpful, and you can just select and delete them when you want. Some of the slides would definitely need to be edited for brevity and to bump up the font size. There are no libraries of images to choose from, nor is there the option to natively create AI-generated images.
Ah, okay, I can search Google for images and put them in but would need to add attribution for using someone else’s work. If I use the Plus AI Editor to add an image, it adds the attribution automatically. Ultimately, I grab a photo of my own to put in and leave the (too small) technical language so you can see the level it can create content at:
There is more functionality here than I found in Slidebean, but the Plus AI Editor UX is not as intuitive. I’m really having to go back and forth between the AI editor and the Google Slide native functions to figure out how to manipulate various elements. I think with some training on this, it would be a solid option for a more technical user that wants to make a more technical pitch deck. For me, it’s been a bit of a weird ride.
Pricing
What I like: They offer the writing tone adjustments I mentioned earlier, and there is an option to “Shakespearify” your content. While I imagine this is mainly useful for the Society for Creative Anachronism, I do love that the option exists. There are several other adjustments available to better fit your brand voice. Please enjoy this with me:
Best for: People who need technical language in their pitch decks and can invest some time into learning how to use the extension. The whole setup process lends itself to people who are used to doing more technical things as well.
Pro tip: The first time you get the chance to disable Plus Tips, don’t disable it. These yellow boxes offered valuable information about making your pitch deck better and honing your skills.
4. Beautiful.AI
I’m excited to try this one because when you get through the basic setup steps, you immediately get short and easy-to-follow video tutorials. This is a great way to quickly learn not just how to use the basics but to get an all-around understanding of what all Beautiful.AI can do — which is a lot. I used the same prompts as before and their AI generated this pitch deck:
Not a bad start! I changed the theme, shortened up some of the content, and up the font sizes. I cut slides that didn’t feel necessary and added photos. It’s all very easy and quick to complete given how nice it looks. I used the AI image generator to create the Competitive Advantage image of measuring a tulip.
The Beautiful.AI has this great feature called Smart Slides that can automatically arrange similar item types within your slide to be the same size and with the same placement — this way your slide content can always be balanced and well-arranged at the click of a button. It’s even easier than using snap-to lines to keep things lined up.
Smart Slides also lets you pick from a range of attractive charts and graphs where you only enter the information once, and then you can click through the options to see which fits best with your data to look the most impactful. I love user-friendly technology.
There are some other awesome features that I didn’t need that I feel are worth mentioning. On the right-hand side are collaboration tools for inviting team members to work on the presentation, assigning slides to individuals, and making comments throughout the deck. You can also record audio and video so that the presentation can be given asynchronously.
For businesses that need to keep their brand image tight as a tiger, you can save whole presentations and borrow the theme so that new presentations start with the proper branding. You’re even able to create your slides and then save them for later company use in other presentations.
Pricing: Beautiful.AI has a variety of price points. You can try the AI generator for free for 14 days but you have to cancel it or it’ll charge your card. Again, sigh.
You’ll see the standard pricing in the image below, but you’ll pay $50 per month for teams if you opt to pay monthly without the annual upfront payment. However, they do shave it down to $45 for a month of full access for ad hoc projects, and you can cancel that at any time.
What I like: The expansive abilities of this AIpitch deck generator are top-notch. It’s a great all-around presentation suite that works hard for you, yet is easy to use. There are tons of templates and functionality even if AI isn’t your favorite thing. Beautiful.AI has something for everyone and the ability to share it with everyone, too.
Best for: Companies that are big enough to need large presentations requiring more than one contributor to get the slides done. It’s great for keeping all presentations on-brand and retaining slides for future use. If I were the charts/graphs/presentations gal at that company, I’d angle for this.
Pro tip: Like I said, there’s something for everyone — if you’re not on board for AI image generation, Beautiful.AI keeps a huge library of images to pull from.
5. StoryDoc
StoryDoc is easy to get started with — I did the setup and opted for the AI pitch deck generator. I gave it my prompt, then it asked which style I liked best among several options, then asked me to choose a group of colors. Let’s see what it — oh.
This is why the setup was so easy. It interrupts your work to collect your data before you can get the result, which feels sketchy. They hook people with a free trial, let them take a few steps like they are on their way, but then bam if you want to see it, give up your data.
I don’t like these games. Give a free trial. If we want it, we’ll buy it. Collect some data at the beginning when we expect you to ask for it. Springing it like this is unnecessary and reflects poorly on your business because now I have to wonder what else you’ll spring on me.
Anywho, there’s a job to do. I gave my info, and here’s what it kicked out:
It’s nowhere near what I wanted, but it did flesh out my ideas in text, and I do quite like the wording on the second slide. You can’t tell from the image above, but the mountains on the top right are actually a video.
The name of the game for StoryDoc is being interactive. You’re able to incorporate buttons, and animate various features such as numbers counting and graphs elements growing to their final position.
I went to edit the video, and the AI prompt option was a Pro feature I couldn’t use, so I used their library of stock videos instead. I chose a nice one and took out some text to get this:
When you first open StoryDoc, it gives you 4 or 5 small tutorial steps, but it’s not enough to make sense of this interface. I poked around for a long time, just trying to find a way to change the layout of a slide.
It turns out it’s that little blue tab on the right with stars on it that makes you think it’s AI, which I didn’t click because I didn’t think changing the layout of a slide required AI. But I was finally able to change the layout of the second slide, which was horizontal and thin before, which was strange to me — why have various-sized slides? The screen it will be viewed on won’t be changing size.
I added a video and changed the spacing of the text, which was also not easy to do. I had to change the height of the blue space fillers to move the text up and down, which is weird. Another problem: I can’t zoom out, which means I can’t always see the entire slide at one time unless I back up to view the whole deck — but you can’t edit from there. Here’s where it went:
This program requires a longer learning curve than expected, and the free trial doesn’t let you use AI features. It doesn’t seem super user-friendly, but it clearly has a lot of functionality for people who can put in the time to make it work smoothly. I bet the AI features really would have made things a bit easier along the way, and making video a native feature is a genuinely good idea.
Pricing
What I like: Video. If you’re presenting at an art gallery or cinematic event, this is definitely a pitch deck generator for you because it has made video a native feature.
Best for: Highly visual audiences and presentations where you may need to take a little bit more time on each slide. The length of the video becomes a visual time marker, which may be helpful for the presenter as well.
Pro tip: There do appear to be training videos to help you get the hang of it, and if you can’t — they also give you the option to pay someone to do it for you.
Bonus: HubSpot AI Assistant
HubSpot has an AI Assistant to help with content creation and website building among many other useful features. I used a free HubSpot account to show you how the AI content generator helped me create a blog about writing this article.
It’s easy as pie to use AI with HubSpot. I signed up for a free account which set me up with a basic website to work on, and I navigated to a fresh entry for the blog. I wrote my prompt, highlighted the text I wanted to work on, and the AI star icon popped up:
There was a drop menu with options, and I chose to expand the text. A window pops up with AI-generated content for you to review. If you don’t like it, Generate it again. When you like the generated content enough to work with, hit the Insert button:
One of your choices in the drop menu is Change Tone. I love a good, strong wit — check out Curt del Principe’s writing for the Hustle lately — so I choose to wit-ify the content:
It doesn’t sound much like me, but it’s plenty for me to edit and get this blog post rolling. There are lots of ways you can use the HubSpot AI Assistants beyond just expanding blog content — such as the Social Caption Generator and SEO Recommendations.
Building Great Decks
I have my thoughts together, but please recognize that my needs may differ from yours. Based on the criteria I put forward at the start, here’s where I landed:
- Frankly, I was spoiled by the first demo. Gamma was the best ai pitch deck generator as far as I’m concerned, and I didn’t even use the paid version or many of the features.
- Beautiful.AI came in at number two because it’s fairly easy to use, I could see using it in the future, and would recommend it to others.
- Plus AI genuinely could be a good fit for more technical presentations, but I struggled through it a bit.
- StoryDoc obviously has the video and interactive advantage, but dang was that hard to use. I also didn’t like that data-capture stunt. I don’t see myself revisiting — which reminds me that I need to send some cancellation emails!
- And then there’s SlideBean. Oh, Slidebean. I wanted to like you, I really did:
I could have fought with StoryDoc, put in a bunch of time, and ended up making something cool. I feel like if I tried to fight with SlideBean, I may not have ended up being happy with the final results. I really hope they keep working on the AI pitch deck beta. If it had more functionality, I definitely would have put it higher.
So now the question remains — which do you think is the best ai pitch deck generator for your needs?