A Confession
I had drinks the other day with someone running an AI division. The moment PowerPoint came up, neither of us could stop talking.
“I want to end PowerPoint.”
We were both electrified. Two people on the front lines of the industry, carrying the exact same frustration.
Here is my confession. I make a lot of PowerPoint files. I use AI, build templates, and have an entire automated pipeline for generating them.
The person doing all of that is the one saying “end it.”
This is not a complaint. It is a structural argument.
The Multiplying Review Cycle
PowerPoint has become a device that manufactures busywork.
Draft a proposal. Get approval from a manager. Revise. Get re-approval. Send to the client. Receive feedback. Revise again. Resend.
A single slide passes through four to six review cycles on average.
Most of those cycles are about appearance. Are the fonts consistent? Are the margins uniform? Does the logo placement follow the brand guidelines?
Time disappears into visual inspection, not substance review. The existence of PowerPoint legitimizes “polishing the surface” as real work, and the review cycles multiply without limit. Every time someone opens the file, payroll bleeds.
Why PPTX Refuses to Die
Technically, PPTX is ancient. An XML-based binary package. No version control. No diffs. Fragile collaborative editing.
Yet it survives. The reason is cultural, not technical.
“Handing over a file” is deeply embedded in business customs — especially in Japan.
A proposal is “delivered.” A report is “submitted.” A plan is “sent.” Every verb assumes a physical handoff of a file object.
It can be attached to an email. It fits on a USB drive. It opens offline. It prints. PPTX satisfies all of these requirements perfectly.
This also explains why Google Slides never fully replaced it in enterprise settings. The culture of sharing URLs has not arrived everywhere. “Please open this link” does not always work in organizations where security policies block external URLs by default.
PPTX survives not because it is good. It survives because business processes were designed around it, and that design has permeated everything.
The Contradiction of AI-Generated PPTX
Lately, services that auto-generate presentations with AI have been multiplying. Enter text, get structure, design, and a finished PPTX file. Convenient.
But think about it for a moment.
That is just making the horse-drawn carriage faster.
PPTX as a format is what makes work complicated. The core of that complexity — “create a file, hand it over” — is now being accelerated by AI. The problem is not being solved. Its rotation speed is increasing.
If we are going to use the power of AI, it should not be to make PPTX faster. It should be to build systems where PPTX is no longer necessary.
I run an AI pipeline that generates PPTX files. I am aware of the contradiction. That is exactly why I can say it: there is no future on this trajectory.
HTML Is Already the Answer
Technically, the problem has been solved for years.
Write it in HTML.
Responsive. Version-controllable. Diffable. Shareable with a single URL. Opens in any browser. Supports interaction, animation, and dynamic data binding.
There is almost nothing PPTX can do that HTML cannot. There is a mountain of things HTML can do that PPTX cannot.
Even as a presentation tool, frameworks like reveal.js and Slidev have matured. Code-driven presentations offer vastly superior design reproducibility and version control.
Technically solved. Yet the industry does not move.
Say “I will send the proposal in HTML,” and the client’s IT department shuts it down. “Please submit it as PPTX.” The problem is not the technology. It is the receiving end.
The End Is Not Technical
What will end PowerPoint is not a new tool.
Google, Apple, Canva, Figma. Alternatives have arrived in waves. None of them ended PPTX. Changing the tool changes nothing as long as the workflow — “create a file, review it, hand it over” — stays the same.
What needs to end is not the software. It is the workflow.
There are other ways to communicate information. Show a dashboard. Let them touch a prototype. Co-edit a document. All of these are faster and cut review cycles.
But changing a workflow is not an engineering problem. It is a cultural one.
There is no point in blaming the person who says “please send it as PPTX.” That person belongs to an organization whose decision-making structure was designed with PPTX as an assumption. Changing the structure requires someone who understands it from the inside.
The person who makes the most PowerPoint should be the one to end PowerPoint.
That sounds contradictory. But someone who has never been inside the structure cannot see it.