What happened
OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a presentation startup, according to TechCrunch's Anthony Ha. NextSlide recently announced that it is joining OpenAI, with the startup's team members now working on ChatGPT. The company was founded by Ahmed Beshry, and its website describes a product that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement was coming "a few months late," as the acquisition actually took place earlier this year. This is not Beshry's first exit: he was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart and cashier-less checkout startup that was acquired by Instacart in 2021. The move reads as an acqui-hire, with the NextSlide team continuing what Beshry described as their mission of "building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work."
Why it matters
Presentations are one of the most common—and most tedious—tasks in business life. Formatting slides, choosing layouts, and turning rough notes into something that looks presentable eats up hours that small teams rarely have to spare. Folding NextSlide's team into ChatGPT points to a future where slide creation becomes a normal part of the same chat window people already use for writing and research.
For small teams, that could remove a real bottleneck. A two-person consultancy or a solo founder pitching investors does not usually have a dedicated designer. If ChatGPT can take a document and produce an editable deck, the barrier to a professional-looking presentation drops considerably. Beshry framed the goal as making visual communication more accessible and helping more people express their ideas clearly.
A practical example
Imagine a small marketing agency preparing a client pitch. Today, someone copies figures from a report, opens slide software, picks a template, and manually arranges each slide. With prompt-based slide building, the same person might write:
"Turn this quarterly report into a 10-slide client update. Slide 1: title and date. Slides 2–4: three key wins with one metric each. Slides 5–7: campaign performance. Slide 8: next quarter's plan. Slide 9: budget summary. Slide 10: contact details. Keep the tone confident and concise."
The tool then produces an editable draft in minutes, which the team refines rather than builds from scratch. That shift—from creating to editing—is where the time savings live for small teams juggling many roles at once.
What next
Because the announcement arrived months after the deal closed, expect presentation features to appear inside ChatGPT rather than as a separate product. Watch for how editable the output is, whether it respects brand colours and fonts, and how it handles data and charts. Established players in the presentation space will likely respond with their own AI additions. For small teams, the sensible move now is to experiment early and build simple workflows around prompt-based decks.
Working with Brain.mt
Brain.mt can help you using AI for your business. Whether you want to speed up presentations, tidy up reports, or build practical AI workflows for a small team, contact me for more information. I also offer dedicated workshops and training about this subject, tailored to how your team actually works.
