Slidely AI Puts a Consulting-Grade AI Designer Directly Inside PowerPoint
Slidely AI, a Y Combinator Summer 2022 company, takes a different approach to the presentation problem: it lives inside PowerPoint and behaves like a consultant who actually reads the deck. PowerPoint is one of the most unfairly maligned pieces of software in the modern enterprise. Whatever knowledge workers say about it, they still live in it, producing roughly 30 million decks every day. Yet most of the AI tools that have appeared in the last two years to “fix” presentations do so by leaving PowerPoint entirely, generating HTML slides in a browser, exporting kludgy .pptx files with broken layouts, or ignoring the company template that marketing spent six months finalizing.
Founded in 2024 by Apoorve Singhal and Nikhil Shah, Slidely AI’s tagline, “AI for professional PowerPoint presentations, available in PowerPoint,” captures the wedge. The product creates new slides or upgrades existing ones with AI that runs natively inside PowerPoint and stays true to each company’s branding, templates, and standards. Because it understands real .pptx files at the shape-and-layout level, it can rewrite, redesign, and tighten existing decks rather than simply generating new ones from a blank page. That is a meaningful unlock for the huge population of working professionals whose “presentation problem” is not the empty slide but the 80-slide client deck that needs to be presentable by morning.
Four properties of the product stand out. First, it works directly in PowerPoint with native .pptx support, no HTML-to-PPT hacks, no export round trips, no silently broken layouts. Second, it improves decks users already have rather than forcing them to start over. Third, Slidely AI’s output is what the company calls “agentic, consulting-grade,” the system places each individual shape on a slide to express complex data rather than dropping a user’s content into a simple template. Fourth, and arguably most important for enterprise adoption, it learns from a team’s past decks to follow its colors, fonts, layouts, and slide patterns so every output looks like it came from the company rather than a generic AI tool.
Singhal, the CEO, is an unusually technical founder for a productivity startup. During his sophomore year at IIT Kharagpur studying CS and AI, he wrote code for a self-driving car that beat teams of PhDs in competition, and he has research experience working with senior scientists from Stanford, Adobe, and Brown. While at IIT, he built consumer products including BookMySlot and Auto-OTP that collectively served more than 10,000 users. Shah brings complementary product and engineering experience. The duo leads a lean five-person team.
The category tailwinds are real. Enterprises are slowly but visibly ready to pay for AI tools that plug into the software their employees already use rather than asking them to adopt yet another dashboard. Presentations are a rare category where the ceiling on willingness to pay is high, consultants, bankers, marketers, and executives all live and die by deck quality, and the incumbent, Microsoft Copilot, leaves plenty of room for a specialized challenger that can deliver visibly better output on the one problem that matters most.
Slidely AI is one of a handful of AI-native document tools making a credible bet that workplace productivity in 2026 will look less like starting with a blank page and more like directing a capable agent inside the software you have used for twenty years. The early signs suggest that bet is paying off.