I put Claude in PowerPoint against Gamma. Here's who won.
Which created my company deck better and which tailored that deck towards a specific industry better?
I wanted to try out the new Claude plugin for PowerPoint but wanted to create a real life scenario and test it against Gamma. I created a pitch deck for my company with both and then tailored that deck towards a specific industry with both. Some clear results were discovered and the time saving was unbelievable.
For someone in marketing for 25+ years, I’m not great at starting a slide deck from scratch. The content isn’t what drags me down but rather the design and layout.
So the recent release of tools like Gamma and now Claude for PowerPoint is very similar to when Google Maps came out, and I didn’t get lost everywhere I went.
Claude just opened up their PowerPoint plugin to Pro users so I had to give it a try. I’m a BIG fan of Claude for Excel so was excited to give this a test drive.
I decided to set up a test of Claude in PPT vs Gamma. The test involved:
Which could make a better company deck from my website.
Which could tailor that deck towards a specific industry better.
Now, keep in mind, this isn’t necessarily an apples to apples comparison. These tools are much different and are better at different things. Those differences will be very clear in this test.
But let’s get started.
(the real magic of this demo comes towards the bottom where we tailor towards an actual industry)
Glad you’re here and thank you for reading Approachable AI by Pat Schaber! In case you missed some recent topics, here’s a recap:
Claude for PowerPoint
This will be my first time giving this a try. I’ve installed the Claude plug-in within PowerPoint. You can learn that process here.
For this test I created a very basic Master Slide template in PPT with a variety of slide layout variations.
A couple of features that I like in the Claude interface:
The fact that you have access to a lot of your connectors that you set up in Claude. What I like about this is that if I want to incorporate information from my HubSpot CRM (think sales data) or one of the other connectors, I can easily flip the switch on and make sure that it calls out to one of those applications.
The ability to switch between the different Claude models is also nice.
One thing that I wish was here was Claude Skills, but they are not included in this plugin.
Here is the Prompt I started with that I used in both PPT and Gamma. It’s an “okay” prompt. I wanted to keep it a little more general and see how each handled it.
I'd like you to take on the role of expert pitch deck creator. My business helps small to mid-size companies become more efficient and scalable in their go-to-market operations with the implementation of AI. I help sales, marketing, and client services teams eliminate manual work and take their employees to the next level.
Most growth teams are buried in execution. I provide the GTM leadership and AI design needed to modernize operations, turning a revenue team into a high-output unit that out-paces the competition.
I want you to review my website for messaging, positioning, and services that I offer:
https://www.patrickschaber.com/
I would like to follow this sales deck format that announces:
* a big change
* who will be able to take advantage of it
* what the promised land looks like
* and how my services can overcome the obstacles to get to the promised land
The outline is below.
#1. Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World
#2. Show There’ll Be Winners and Losers
#3. Tease the Promised Land
#4. Introduce Services as “Magic Gifts” for Overcoming Obstacles to the Promised Land
#5. Present Evidence that You Can Make the Story Come True
I want you to use the slide options in the master template for the design. Claude started out in a typical Claude way by asking questions to make sure that it was creating the right plan.
Here is my take on the first output with Claude in PPT:
I think it followed the instructions pretty well. It did the sales deck structure the way I asked, and I thought overall the content was pretty good for little to no direction.
It pretty much ignored my slide templates as you can see from the blue strip along the bottom and used none of my slide variations.
I think it struggled with the design aspect, given the fact that it’s within PowerPoint. But frankly, I wasn’t expecting it to be that great.
After some back and forth tweaking with Claude on each slide, it definitely was more presentable, for sure. Still sort of uninspiring for a modern PowerPoint deck, but definitely something to work with.
Here is a link to the full deck. I made no content changes. Only worked with it to get the design a little more presentable.
👉 Example Company Deck with Claude for PPT
Gamma
I’ve demoed Gamma here in this newsletter before, so I won’t spend too much time on the setup, but a few notes before I start.
I do have a style guide in here that is reflective of my brand, so I didn’t have to do any set up in that regard.
To keep it as close to apples to apples as I could, I did not use a specific template.
A few observations on the output:
The design and layout were far superior to Claude in PowerPoint. Below is an example. But this is to be expected. This is the main selling point to Gamma. It creates beautiful output.
It didn’t do a great job of following my directions. It sort of went rogue and went on a path of its own. It wasn’t a bad path; it just wasn’t the exact structure that I had outlined.
You can check out the full version at the link below. I made zero edits to content or design on this one.
👉 Example Company Deck with Gamma
Tailoring Decks Towards the Industrial Manufacturing Market
Recently I had prepared for a prospect discovery call with an industrial manufacturing firm. Prior to that call, I had ChatGPT do a deep research report on industrial manufacturing firms in the Twin Cities and how they relate to AI usage.
I wanted to do a real-life example here of how a sales or marketing team might take a company deck and use AI to tailor it towards a specific industry.
While I give the nod to PowerPoint with Claude for this part of the exercise, I think actually both Claude and Gamma did a really nice job with this.
Claude in PowerPoint was able to let me upload the full 20-page PDF that I had, and it fully analyzed it.
Gamma didn’t give me an option to upload a PDF, but I ended up copying and pasting in some information from the document to help it with the messaging and positioning.
I asked both to keep the design and layout pretty much the same, and they both did a really nice job with that.
I asked Gamma to update the imagery to reflect more of an industrial manufacturing environment, but it did not and just kept the images the same.
From a messaging and positioning standpoint, I thought Claude in Powerpoint did an incredible job of crunching that data quickly and transitioning my slide deck pretty much perfectly.
Gamma didn’t do a bad job either, but the information was a little more generic than I probably would have liked for a presentation that I was trying to tailor towards a given industry.
Example from PPT with Claude
Example from Gamma
But I want to highlight something here, which is the fact that there was a 20-page document of information related to a market that I didn’t have to read, pluck out the key points, and plug into a slide deck. I let AI take care of that for me, and then I could go back in and edit and revise. This probably saved me at least two to three hours of time!
If you’re in a Microsoft environment and are able to use Claude, it’s definitely worth plugging in. I can see it being even more useful for specific updates to a slide.
And you know I’m a fan of Gamma, and this exercise didn’t change that. It still makes you look super professional with little to no design skills of your own.
A similar workflow to this would have been to take the output from the PowerPoint in Claude slide deck and put that into Gamma and have Gamma create something much more dynamic!
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AI Tech I’m Currently Using
I get quite a few questions on Substack, LinkedIn, and through my website on what AI tools I use for what use cases. I’ll try to share a few in each newsletter so it will give you some ideas of tools you can try for specific purposes. Here are a few for this week:
Everyday LLM - ChatGPT and Claude: I cover a lot of this above so won’t dive in too far here.
Call and Meeting Transcriptions - Granola: I like Granola for a couple of reasons. It takes the transcription and rolls it up into very good notes and action items but doesn’t need to be added to a meeting as an attendee. Also, it syncs great with my Hubspot CRM which makes it very easy to send notes to the contact record.
Presentations / Branded Documents - Gamma.app: I use this 3-4 times a week for anything I do with client presentations or professional document creation. I cover why I’m a heavy Gamma user in this post:
Video Recording / Editing - Descript: I’m trying to work in time to my weekly routine for video creation. I feel it’s important to give people a more personal connection. Descript is a huge timesaver. Imagine being able to erase or add text from a script and have it be reflected in the actual video in seconds. Unbelievable.
Sales Prospecting - Apollo.io and Clay: I don’t do a ton of outbound prospecting for my business but I’ve been using the free versions of Apollo.io and Clay to find companies that I could get to know through LinkedIn that may be interested in my services. I’m only touching on a sliver of the capabilities of these tools.
I wonder how doing this within Claude using the Gamma connector would have compared to Gamma on its own and with Claude in powerpoint?
I haven't read it yet, but my money is on gamma.