It used to be that AI produced awful PowerPoint presentations, or “decks,” as they’re known in business jargon. They were simplistic and contained very little substance. The visuals looked as though they had been created by a primary school student. AI could produce text well, but asking it to turn those thoughts into a professional presentation was a mistake

Then I noticed a dramatic improvement in the decks my team members were creating. After talking to them, I realized they were using AI. AI’s presentation-building capabilities had improved substantially. Obviously, I was thrilled that my team was independently finding ways to use AI to better serve our clients.

So I gave it another try.

The results were impressive. The presentations were substantive, detailed, visually appealing, and insightful.

And I realized that this has some interesting repercussions for the world of work, particularly for business executives and consultants.

AI Doesn’t Have To Give You Walls Of Text

Until recently, most of us interacted with AI through text. We asked a question and received several paragraphs in response.

If you’re a visual person, you can now ask AI to create an entire presentation for you. It doesn’t need to be a client deliverable or something intended for a formal business meeting. You can ask it to create a presentation specifically for you, designed around how you prefer to consume information.

That represents a extraordinary change in how we can use AI.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion about it. AI can now organize that information into a visual narrative, surface the key messages, and present them in a concise and actionable format. Given AI’s tendency to be excessively verbose, presentations impose a useful discipline. The slides need to be shorter, clearer, and more selective about what matters.

AI Rewards Poor Planning

I’m someone who usually needs to understand a project before I can delegate parts of it. Unfortunately, that often means that by the time I understand the project well enough to delegate it, there isn’t enough time left to do so.

Deck building is something I’ve historically preferred to delegate. It is time-consuming and demands pedanticism. Adjusting formatting, aligning objects, refining language, and reshaping the story can consume hours.

But delegation requires foresight. If I leave something too late, I can’t reasonably ask someone else to drop everything and build a presentation for me. Now I can create a solid deck myself in minutes.

Executives Should Become Analyzers, Not Presentation Makers

An extraordinary amount of a businessperson’s time goes into creating presentations.

There are endless reviews, revisions, discussions, and attempts to refine the message. The objective is often to decide how key content should be communicated – rather than what is being communicated.

AI makes that process dramatically faster.

It enables executives to create presentations themselves without requiring several rounds of work with their teams. It also allows them to take information, including raw data, and turn it into something they can understand at a glance. That should change how executives spend their time.

Once AI can craft the message clearly and visually, more of an executive’s time can go into actual analysis. The valuable skill is now is deciding what information to analyze next, understanding what it means, and determining what action should follow.

I’m already seeing this shift in my own work.

This is being reinforced by AI’s ability to help us become better data scientists. AI has dramatically improved my ability to create Power BI dashboards. I’m already using it to build dashboards that help me monitor status, identify issues, and make decisions.

The capacity of an executive to analyze information is therefore being transformed by two related changes:

1. AI can create quality presentations much faster.
2. AI can help create new forms of ongoing data analysis.

Any business executive who currently spends a significant amount of time making PowerPoints needs to rapidly reconsider their skill set and what they do in a typical day.

Deck Building Is Becoming Less Valuable

These improvements have significant consequences for human teams. Deck building is a skill. Suddenly, that skill matters considerably less.

That is a tremendous benefit for people who need to communicate ideas but aren’t talented designers. It is a more worrying development for people whose primary professional value comes from building decks.

Those people will need to pivot.

I think back to my own time in consulting and the incredible amount of time that was spent iterating on presentations. Slides would go through review after review. Language would be adjusted. Shapes would be moved a few pixels. Entire workdays could disappear into changes that had a marginal effect on the quality of the final output.

To be clear, the presentations Copilot creates aren’t perfect. If I spent several hours building a deck myself, I could probably produce something better than AI, at least for now. But the additional hours would rarely justify the quality difference when AI can produce something useful in less than five minutes.

I can then spend a small amount of time correcting alignment, formatting, and other basic errors.

There will certainly be people who insist on spending many additional hours to obtain the final 10% of quality. In some limited situations, that might be justified. In many others, that perspective is skewed. People are wasting substantial resources because they remain attached to old ways of thinking and working.

Consulting Firms Can’t Keep Charging For The Old Process

For many consulting engagements, deck creation represents a substantial portion of the work. Enlightened clients will no longer want to pay for that in the same way.

If a consulting firm can substantially reduce the time required to build and revise a presentation, that efficiency should eventually be reflected in staffing and pricing. Firms that preserve large workforces and expensive engagement models simply because those structures worked in the past may be able to rely on momentum for a while, but eventually they will face consequences.

Similarly, executives purchasing consulting services should begin asking harder questions about engagements that primarily result in PowerPoint presentations.

• How much of the fee reflects genuine analysis?
• How much reflects presentation production?
• How much of that production work can now be completed by AI?

If AI has materially lowered the cost of producing the deliverable, clients should expect that reduction to be reflected in their bills.

For Now, AI Presentations Still Impress People

One consequence of the limited discussion around AI-generated presentations is that many people still don’t realize what AI can produce. When they see a good AI-generated deck, their minds are blown. They assume that someone spent hours creating it.

For the moment, this gives early users an advantage. People who know how to use these tools can produce work that appears unusually polished and sophisticated, often in a fraction of the time. That advantage will decline as awareness spreads.

People may eventually learn to identify AI-generated presentations. Some may dismiss them as “AI slop” and prioritize human-made decks simply because they are human-made. That would frequently be a waste of resources, but I wouldn’t put it past businesses to misallocate resources in that way.

Still, I think presentations will be harder to categorize than AI-generated text. PowerPoint contains more visual and artistic choices. A presentation created by Claude may look very different from one created by Copilot.

The Value Is Moving Up The Chain

What is changing is where the value lies. The value used to include the mechanical work of converting ideas into slides. Increasingly, AI can perform that work. The human contribution therefore needs to move up the chain.

The valuable questions are:

• Is the analysis correct?
• Are we telling the right story?
• What have we overlooked?
• What decision should we make?

AI can now turn our thoughts into slides. That means business executives need to spend less time arranging those thoughts attractively and more time ensuring that they are worth presenting in the first place.

Reddit thread: What was a really silly solution to a serious problem? : r/AskReddit

Theres a story you get told in engineering school of a company that had a problem of empty boxes without product coming off the line and being shipped to customers. Hundreds of thousands are spent to refine the old equipment but it didn’t solve it. Eventually a monitoring system was designed and implemented to weigh each box as it comes off the line and to flag and shut down the line each time an empty box made it through. This solved the issue as designed. Several months later the owner decides to check on the system and see how many empty boxes are being flagged and finds that in fact none are being flagged, however the problem with empty ones shipping hasn’t reoccurred either. He goes to to the plant floor to investigate and discovers that a low-level employee, tired of having to restart the line every time a box is flagged has simply placed a large fan next to the conveyor prior to the weigh station, this blows the empty boxes off the conveyor while the ones full of product are to heavy to be moved by the fan.

Astronauts used to have a real problem with peeing. The first American to fly in space, Alan Shepard, did so while lying in a puddle of his own urine, because he had to go shortly before launch and didn’t want to go through the process of getting out of the capsule when they’d already been delayed several times. Likewise, the iconic footprint on the Moon was made by a boot full of piss.
Between Shepard’s flight and Apollo 11, attempts had been made to fix the problem. The solution NASA landed on at first was effectively a condom with a tube attached, which would pipe the urine away and store it in the backpack of the spacesuit for later disposal. Except it kept falling off.
Firstly, uniquely to Apollo 11, the landing was just too good. The legs of the Lunar Module were designed to compress on landing to absorb the shock, but Armstrong put the Eagle down so perfectly that the legs didn’t compress at all, meaning that the astronauts had a much bigger jump from the last rung of the ladder to the lunar surface than they were supposed to. A bigger drop meant more force upon impact, and Aldrin’s device fell off.
But that wasn’t the only problem. If it was, then it could be solved by way of “Just don’t be as insanely good at flying this thing as Neil Armstrong,” which wouldn’t be particularly hard, there’s a damn good reason he was the first pick to land the LM. No, Aldrin wasn’t the only man to lose his pee-removal device, and the reason for that was… very silly.
See, the device came in three sizes, appropriately named “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large.” According to Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot on Apollo 11, every single astronaut in the program suspiciously needed a size Large.
NASA rectified this issue by changing the names of the sizes to “Extra Large,” “Immense,” and “Unbelievable,” at which point the men who’d volunteered to ride a giant bomb into the most hostile environment known to man finally felt secure enough in their masculinity to use the correct dick size, and the US space program became much less pee-scented.

Real story: a small colony of beavers in the Czech Republic built dams in protected wetlands that local authorities wanted to dam to protect wildlife.
What took several months of contracting imbroglio and would cost over a million dollars was outdone by beavers in two days.

“Made in India: A Titan Story” is a new series on Amazon about the rise of the legendary Indian watch brand, Titan.

The first episode, “The Watch Project” was enjoyable, but there was much shown about effective business entrepreneurship that didn’t resonate with my experience.

The episode opens with the protagonist arguing with his fellow managers that blue-collar workers should be treated better. While the respect he shows for the workers is endearing, what I found notable was that he didn’t treat his management colleagues with the same esteem.

The protagonist first asks management to allow the labourers to sleep in the managers’ onsite corporate apartments. When management disagrees, the protagonist takes them to a spare building and convinces the team to build apartments for the workers there, revealing he already had permission from senior leadership to do so.

We later learn that the protagonist went through the drama of asking the managers to surrender their own apartments first because “जब तक मैं उन्हें करेला नहीं दिखाता, तब तक वो भिंडी खाने के लिए थोड़ी मानते।“ (Translation: if I hadn’t shown them the bitter gourd first, they wouldn’t have agreed to eat the okra).

The film shows this as a singular moment of genius by the protagonist, where he outshines all those around him.

This goes against my own management instincts. Instead of using tricks to convince my team members to pursue a particular course of action I’d much rather have an open and transparent discussion with them outlining my vision and arguments and honestly engaging with their responses. My management colleagues deserve that respect.

Indeed, that’s the only way to ensure there’s alignment on a vision within an organization. Later, we learn that this is the protagonist’s last day on the project and my immediate thought was: what happens next? The singular genius is gone. And while the singular genius might have solved that one problem, he didn’t equip his team members with the skills to address future problems. Debate and discussion would have helped refine and strengthen the vision – and also meant that the managers would have a framework to use to solve future problems.

My ideal version of a corporate environment was reflected by the American series “The Newsroom”.

In it we see talented people argue about the right course of action to take in complicated environments. Sometimes the pathway articulated by the protagonist of The Newsroom wins out…and sometimes it doesn’t. The organization often fails either way. But an organization full of passionate capable individuals is far more exciting to build than an organization where people are in awe of, and follow the direction of, some singular genius.

I’m glad my organization is one where I can feel my own floor being raised, rather than one where I am the ceiling.

Later we see the showrunners echo an earlier message when the character of J.R.D Tata, played by the incredible Naseeruddin Shah, tells skeptics on his team that a wireless mobile phone is the future of telecommunications.

Watching it in 2026 we obviously know he’s correct, and the scene successfully (and accurately!) paints him as a visionary of his time.

What I think anyone considering entrepreneurship should know though is that, at least from my experience, for every instance where you end up being proven right, there are many more where you’ll be proven wrong. That doesn’t make you a business failure – there is a large body of corporate folk wisdom discussing how you typically learn more from your mistakes than from your successes.

It’s a particular shame because the first episode comes tantalizingly close to showing that there’s no dishonor in business failures. During the course of the episode the protagonist in unsuccessful in turning around the fortunes of a struggling printing press. But alas we’re told that the task was impossible and no one could succeed.

I’m very careful about dismissing things as impossible. I’m absolutely willing to believe that I, personally, am not capable enough for a particular task or challenge. But that doesn’t mean that the task was impossible in the first place. I like to think that someone more talented, skilled, or creative than I could have figured it out.

This article, for example, explains how Delta Airlines’ leadership team solved a seemingly impossible problem in the airline industry.

There are a lot of things I wasn’t able to figure out, that someone else ended up succeeding at. When that happens I find that person’s success intellectually stimulating. I’m excited to learn something new; that someone had a way of thinking that was more successful than mine. It’s an opportunity to grow.

To be clear none of this is a criticism of either the protagonist, Xerxes Desai, played by the very capable Jim Sarbh, or, of course, of J.R.D. Tata. I hate being so presumptuous but I like to believe they’d agree with large parts of what I’ve written.

I don’t think, for example, they could have built the legendary business icons that they did without able lieutenants who didn’t rely on a singular genius for success. I’m picking apart individual scenes which almost certainly never happened in real life. This is historical fiction, not a documentary. My article here is more an analysis of the stories we tell about what it takes to be successful in business.

Nor is this a criticism of the storytellers. It’s an excellent show and I’m looking forward to the next episode. They’ve opened my eyes to a business story that I knew very little about. The things I’ve written here probably wouldn’t be very cinematic if they were shown on screen. Amazon should know that this one individual, at least, re-activated his Prime account specifically so he could watch this show. I imagine the showrunners would be glad that their art provoked commentary and discussion.

I’m often proven wrong by my colleagues in my organization. I find that a lot more thrilling than the times that I’m proven right. It means I’ve helped build an organization that’s better than me. Isn’t that the dream?

In the past six years I’ve co-founded a couple companies in India. Collectively, as of this writing, they employ about 12 people. According to Copilot 50% of companies fail by year five, so while it’d probably be a bit much to call my entrepreneurial attempts “successful” they at the very least haven’t yet been “failures”.

I’m writing this blog to document my experiences and perspectives. Writing, I’ve found, helps me reflect, learn, and remember. I like to think of myself as a writer which, somewhat ironically, has meant that I haven’t published much because I keep wanting to further polish and perfect my words. But in the age of AI, it’s a lot easier to write and research and so it’s time to put up something like this.

You’ll often find me analyzing and criticizing business leaders who are global legends. It’s laughable to suggest that I am in any way comparable to them. To be clear, even in my idle imaginations I don’t think of them as peers. Rather I’ll write about them because they’ll often be the most salient business examples, and the ones that a broad readership would be familiar with.

The views I express are my own. My team would disagree with many of the things I write.

Anyone reading this blog will probably end up with a more positive image of me as a businessperson than what my reality is. I’ll be talking about ideals and theories, and the truth is I don’t always live up to them. I imagine that colleagues reading these posts, for example, will look at what I’ve written and think about times I unjustly didn’t follow my own rhetoric.

I’m going to get a lot of things wrong. As the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote of the Ashoka Chakra that adorns the logo of this blog, “The wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change”. One of the things that excites me about this blog is the opportunity to see the evolution of my own thinking and perspectives. My companies have pivoted at least four times in the past six years, and I expect more pivots to come.  

These are, after all, experiments.