Why AI Presentations Aren’t Working, and What Needs to Change

At Korl, we’ve been grappling with a persistent frustration: AI-generated presentations sound promising in theory but fall flat in practice. Especially for high-stakes customer interactions.

Just scroll through LinkedIn or Reddit and you’ll see the frustration:

“Are slide decks the one thing AI can't do? ...Help Wanted: Take talking points, slide outlines, combine with graphic descriptions and produce an ON BRAND slide deck.” –LinkedIn user

“Does anyone know of an AI tool that can actually create corporate style presentations? … None of them even come close to actual business standards.” –Reddit thread

The sentiment is loud and clear: today’s AI presentation tools aren’t built for real business needs.

The Two-Part Challenge Nobody's Nailing

Creating a business presentation that actually works means getting two things exactly right:

• The visuals: Polished, on-brand slides that reflect your company’s look and feel.
• The content: Personalized, relevant insights that speak to your audience’s priorities and drive decisions.

Most AI tools get only partway there. They make nice-looking slides, but they don’t look like your brand. And they certainly don’t craft a compelling, audience-specific narrative for you.

You’re often left cleaning up and rewriting so much that it feels easier to start from scratch.

Why Most AI Presentation Tools Fall Short

We’ve tested many AI presentation tools and found that they consistently suffer from the same fundamental limitations:

❌ Brand fidelity is superficial

Your brand is more than fonts and colors. It’s how you communicate value, the visuals you use, and the frameworks that guide your messaging.

❌ Content creation is still manual

These tools might arrange your bullet points, but they don’t tell you what to say to a specific customer about why your latest product update matters to their business goals.

❌ They're built for generic use cases

A mostly empty, high-level QBR template doesn't help when you're trying to show a customer how the features they requested six months ago will impact their Q4 priorities.

What AI-Powered Presentations Should Deliver

After hundreds of conversations with customer-facing teams, we’ve found that effective AI-generated presentations need to do two things well:

1. Deep Brand Alignment, Beyond Logos and Colors

Your slides need to reflect how your company actually talks and sells, including:

• High fidelity to your existing visuals, layouts, and styles
• Proven messaging frameworks
• Role-specific narratives (e.g. CFO vs. Head of Product)

2. Personalized Content Grounded In Your Data

Your AI should know:

• What this customer asked for
• What’s shipping soon that addresses it
• How their usage compares to peers
• Where growth opportunities lie based on their goals

Why We're Starting with Customer-Facing Use Cases

At Korl, we're tackling this challenge by focusing on the presentations that matter most for retention and growth: customer-facing roadmaps, QBRs, and renewal decks.

These aren't just any presentations. They're the ones that determine whether a customer expands, renews, or churns. Getting them right has a direct revenue impact.

We're building AI that understands both sides of the equation: your product capabilities and your customer's specific context. It's not enough to know what features you've shipped; you need to know why those features matter to each individual customer.

The Path Forward

We’re still in the early days of what AI can do for business communications. The hardest challenges – understanding context, synthesizing insights across systems, and generating content that drives action – are still ahead.

But that’s exactly what makes this problem worth solving.

When we get it right, we’re not just speeding up slide creation. We’re transforming customer conversations.

The companies who crack this first will have a major edge in retention and growth. That’s what we’re building toward at Korl.