Create Impactful Presentations with AI Now

Full video transcript

Welcome back everybody to the next session of the scale with AI summit. Kicking off with Gamma and their dream team going to come share some of the latest and the greatest ways to use Gamma to create powerful presentations, websites, and social media content. Gamma, of course, is one of our platinum sponsors here at Scale with AI Summit. And you can learn more when you head on over to gamma.app and sign up for yourself, get you a sweet deal on your first month if you use the code AISummit at checkout at gamma.app, get a full month of pro for free and so you can try it out, give it a go.

Gamma is super powerful for websites and obviously presentations and so much more. Really looking forward to this summit series with Gamma. We have Dejo here. We’ve got Allison. Great to see you Allison.

Great to see Dejo. Me and Dejo are really excited to be here. Dejo will be handling chats, so please ask any questions that you have and he will answer, and then Darby and Dejo feel free to interrupt me with any pertinent questions that may come up as I go along. Yeah, we’re excited to be back.

We had a lot of fun last time and ready to show you guys what Gamma can do. Yeah, I’m excited. So everybody here, make sure you’re asking your questions in the comments. And other than that, the stage is yours. Allison, you’re ready to take it away.

All right, let’s do this. So I want to start off with just a brief introduction to Gamma and what we do. I think Darby’s introduction is great, but we’ve been really refining our messaging and our vision, and we’re really excited to share that with you guys. Gamma — we’re best known for AI presentations, but our mission is really to help people bring their ideas to life. Everyone has great ideas, but not everyone has the technical or design knowledge to communicate those in a way that is visually appealing to the masses, or your target audience, or whoever you may be trying to reach.

And so our goal is to help you bridge that gap as painlessly as possible. We are really a communication platform more than specifically just an AI platform or presentation platform. We are building something bigger here and we really want creation to feel painless, fast, easy. We want you to lean into your imagination and your strengths and let us take care of all the boring, tedious stuff so that you can share what you are making with the world faster.

We’ve been around since 2020. We first launched our private beta in 2021. We launched our AI features in 2023 and we’ve just been growing since then. We were really excited and honored to be at the previous Scale with AI Summit and now we’re back. So I’ll just walk you through briefly what I’m planning to show you over the next couple days, because I’ll be back with you tomorrow.

Today we’re just going to get a little overview of Gamma. I’m going to start by sharing some examples of real Gammas that community members have made. We’ll walk through how to make a presentation in Gamma, including some more advanced methods, and I’ll also show you how you can export and share your work. Then we’ll go over how to use themes to create beautiful and branded content that is reusable.

I’ll teach you how to use AI images, and then I’ll show you some tips and tricks that I personally use to make my Gammas look great. At the end, with whatever time we have remaining, you guys can just choose whatever I demo and we’ll make it an interactive thing. Tomorrow we’re going to go beyond the basics. Here’s a little sneak peek — really excited to show you guys social media carousels. That’s one of our newer features and they’re really cool. But for today, let me get into some of the examples of real Gammas that people have made, starting with the Scale with AI Summit website.

This was so cool to see. This is one of the earliest websites that we really saw live made with Gamma and we were blown away — this is like the vision, this is what we’re trying to do here. Another one is a ping pong social club website that we found in Portugal.

We were like, this is adorable, so cute, so cool, what a fun initiative. The next one is a document made by one of our ambassadors — that’s our power user community — and he made a really cool doc about AI sprints without designers. You can find him on LinkedIn.

His name is Ken Pulverman. Several years ago, Allison made a presentation to present to the team in a ritual called Gamarama, where everyone makes a presentation on something they’re interested in — a visual example of what Gamma is capable of if you spend extra time to refine your visuals and content and really tell a story. And then the last really cool thing is an AI voice agent update series that a16z has been doing.

They put this out a couple of times using Gamma and it’s a cool newsletter update on where AI voice agents are at — you can find it by googling “a16z AI voice.” But let’s get into the fun stuff. First, Allison shows how to use Gamma’s standard generate flow.

When you sign up, you’ll get put straight into it. If not, you can get into it by hitting the purple “create new” button on your dashboard, then click on generate — the easiest way to start. There are a couple of artifacts up top: the first is presentation, which is the focus today, with websites and social introduced later. Documents are similar but less visual.

For the demo, Allison makes a pitch deck for a startup that helps pet owners communicate with their pets. When you send the prompt through, the first thing Gamma does is create an outline so you and Gamma are on the same page — you can edit it, reorder cards, and add new cards like a conclusion slide.

Once you’re happy with the outline, you move to the theme-picking step, since themes control your visuals in Gamma. You can hit shuffle to see a random selection of preloaded standard themes, or create a custom theme (covered later). You can also control the amount of text in the presentation and the style and subjects of the AI images, including which AI image model to use — Allison’s current favorite is Recraft for vector illustrations.

Once satisfied, hitting generate produces a presentation in about 20 seconds, streaming in live. The result is a pitch deck with cute illustrations and even an auto-generated chart. Allison frames this output as a customized template and first draft — not necessarily the final thing to show people, but it removes the tedious “pixel futzing” of a traditional tool like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Where repositioning an image in PowerPoint is a painful drag-and-drop process, in Gamma it’s as simple as clicking a layout option to switch the image from left to right, top, or background.

The card editing menu also includes options for full-bleed width (the default for presentations, especially useful for websites), content alignment (top, middle, bottom), card width, and backdrops. A viewer asked how to use a company-branded template to create a presentation — Allison notes she’ll cover that shortly — and also shows AI editing via the sparkles icon, which offers pre-suggested edits for a single card, with whole-deck AI editing available as a Pro feature.

For more advanced flows, if you already have a PowerPoint or slide deck, you can import it — Gamma supports uploading a PPT, Word doc, or PDF, plus Drive imports and import from a URL, which pulls the page’s content into a presentation.

The other creation flow is “paste in text,” which Allison says a lot of power users rely on heavily because it takes existing notes and turns them into a Gamma without being restricted to the default outline flow. A common pattern: ask ChatGPT to help refine an outline, then paste it into Gamma. Gamma’s cards have a minimum height, not a maximum, so they expand as you write. After pasting a long outline (16 slides in the demo), you can ask Gamma to split it card by card, and it inserts breaks where it thinks they belong.

Text options at this stage let you ask Gamma to fill in more detail and generate, condense existing text, or preserve it exactly (useful for translating between languages, since the flow is agnostic to the original content). You can choose brief, medium, or detailed text length, and set tone and audience — including unconventional options like “talk like a pirate.” Additional instructions can be added for custom prompting; one real example Allison cites is users who speak Japanese needing more formal conjugation than Gamma defaults to, which they specify in the instructions field.

A viewer asked about the Pro plan’s 60-card limit and what to do with longer decks. Allison confirms 60 is the current limit and that the workaround is to import content in 60-card chunks and combine the decks afterward, which she demonstrates later using the film strip.

Another viewer asked whether Gamma can generate a theme using specific company colors — Allison confirms yes and moves into customizing themes and adding brand colors. Before that, she shows how to view the original source prompt behind any generated outline via the three-dot menu, useful if you want to see or tweak what a deck was generated from.

On theming: in a traditional slide tool, changing visuals after the fact is a lot of work, so you typically have to know how things will look before you start. In Gamma, it’s the opposite — you can decide the look and feel at the end, and switching themes transforms only the visuals, not the content, adapting charts and colors to match.

To add company colors, there are several paths: create a new theme, customize an existing theme close to what you want (tweak colors and fonts, then save), import your own template via Theme > Import, or use the full theme builder. In the theme builder, the primary accent color controls buttons, links, some block colors, and the in-app color palette. You can separately control heading and body text color, and Gamma offers a default contrast/accessibility adjustment for colors (recommended to keep on, but it can be turned off). Card background color is also customizable.

Font pairings are curated by default, but custom fonts can be uploaded from the dashboard and then applied in the theme builder; built-in fonts are all Google fonts, so they export cleanly to slides and PDFs. The design section of the theme builder covers overall style (rounded with drop shadows, flat, glassy, etc.), and previewing the theme live on a real page lets you adjust accent image shape, card border thickness and roundness, block colors, outlines, and button/CTA styling. Uploading a logo places it in the bottom-left corner of shared links and the top-right corner during presentation mode. Once named and saved, a custom theme is available across the whole workspace for any team member to use.

Themes also support accent images — a reusable library of decorative or ornamental images attached to a theme and available anywhere it’s used — and an AI image style prompt (e.g., “soft lighting, playful”) that gets applied by default to every AI image generated within that theme, keeping visuals consistent. A viewer asked which LLM Gamma uses to generate text; Allison says she doesn’t know precisely but that Gamma uses a mix of models from Anthropic and OpenAI, with fallbacks, without wanting to overstate specifics she wasn’t certain of.

Moving to AI images: Gamma offers multiple image sources beyond AI generation, including royalty-free stock via Unsplash, GIFs via Giphy integration, and vector-style pictographic illustrations that are searchable by keyword. For AI images specifically, Gamma auto-writes a prompt based on the card’s text by default, and an “enhance prompt” button expands a sparse prompt (like “dog”) into something more detailed for the image model. Generating from the image drawer (versus generating a whole deck) produces three image options at once. A range of style presets are available (anime, line art, pixel art, claymation, and more), and different AI image models perform differently across styles, so experimentation is encouraged — Pro and Plus plans include unlimited generation credits.

Every image generated is saved and browsable: a “this Gamma” tab shows images made in the current presentation, an “AI images” tab shows everything made across the current workspace, and the same library is accessible from the dashboard, sorted by date and scoped per workspace. Images can be dragged directly into any image slot for reuse.

A viewer asked how to refine a specific image or replicate a style Gamma already created. Allison explains that repeating a preset style (e.g., clicking “fantasy art” again) will produce something similar, and the custom prompt field can be edited directly — for example, adding “oranges, reds, warm tones” to shift a color palette — with that custom prompt then carrying over as the default for the next image generated. Custom style prompts can’t yet be saved as presets, but they can be copied and reused, or added permanently to a theme’s AI image style keywords. Gamma doesn’t yet offer AI image editing (Allison says it’s in progress); the recommended approach is to keep tweaking prompt wording — adding or removing descriptive terms — and regenerate, since Pro and Plus plans make regenerating cheap. For replicating an image style found elsewhere, Allison suggests dropping the reference image into a tool like Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to describe a prompt that would recreate a similar image. A follow-up question asked about favoriting or organizing images — there’s currently no favoriting feature; all images are lumped together in one library, and deleting unwanted ones is the only cleanup option for now, though favoriting is a planned addition.

Allison then moves into editing tips and tricks. Combining Gammas and pasting cards between them is done most easily through the film strip: select multiple cards by clicking one and shift-clicking others, then copy (Cmd+C or right-click copy), open a new Gamma (typing “gamma.new” in the URL bar creates one), and paste. If a card is already selected when pasting, the new cards paste in as nested cards and need to be un-nested; making sure no card is selected before pasting avoids this. Pasted cards adopt the destination deck’s theme rather than bringing their original theme along — this is the recommended method for combining decks that exceed the 60-card limit. The film strip can also switch to a list view showing just card titles, useful for managing the overall flow of a presentation, and cards (single or multiple) can be dragged to reorder.

The insert bar holds all of Gamma’s available blocks: card templates, smart layouts, basic blocks (heading, list, callout, code), a math block using LaTeX syntax, image options, media and interactive embeds, charts and diagrams, forms, and buttons — all searchable. For faster editing, a slash-menu (similar to Notion) lets you type “/” and search for a block by name, such as “/button.” Markdown-style formatting is supported for text — using “#” for heading levels or “!” for larger display text meant for web use cases, though Allison also uses it in presentations for short text. Text can be recolored using theme colors via a built-in color picker, alongside classic text formatting options.

Gamma also supports nested disclosure elements — toggles that can’t exist in a traditional slide format but work naturally in Gamma’s web-based medium — letting a presenter optionally expand extra detail live or leave it collapsed for later reading. Toggles can be created via the plus button, the slash menu, or by highlighting text and wrapping it. Block quotes and info boxes are available for calling out specific content, alongside nested cards.

Other presentation features: card notes (Gamma’s version of speaker notes, which can be AI-drafted) and a presenter view that displays those notes in a separate window while presenting. Keyboard navigation in present mode uses arrow keys, and spotlight mode (toggled via a button or the “S” key) blurs out content that hasn’t been revealed yet, keeping audience focus on the current point as the presenter advances through the material.

The last editing feature demoed is smart layouts, described as Gamma’s answer to the pain of laying out content and then having to redo that layout by hand in traditional design tools. Layouts are linked to content type — for example, an “icons + text” layout can be switched to a “steps” layout, and Gamma re-renders the content into the new format automatically rather than requiring manual resizing and repositioning.

With time remaining, Allison takes more questions. One viewer asks how best to embed a presentation in a blog article, which leads into a rundown of sharing and exporting: the Share button offers adding collaborators by email, setting workspace permissions, generating a shareable link, and optionally password-protecting the Gamma. Export formats include PDF, PPT, Google Slides, and images (also used for the social carousel feature covered on day two), plus direct posting to LinkedIn. Exports can cover any specific range of cards rather than the whole deck, and exporting to PowerPoint or Google Slides keeps the content editable in those tools. For blog embedding specifically, the Embed tab provides an iframe embed snippet that can be pasted into any platform supporting iframe embeds. Gamma also offers analytics showing unique viewer counts and, for viewers with Gamma accounts, which cards they viewed.

Darby asks Allison to cover embedding Typeform or Jotform-style forms for in-presentation surveys. Allison confirms any such embeddable form can be added to a Gamma card — the key step is setting the link display to “embed” (which happens automatically for recognized form links, but can be set manually otherwise) so the audience can interact with the form directly inside the presentation rather than being sent to a new tab. For non-form links, such as an outbound website link, the display can instead be set to a button or text link, or configured to open in a new tab.

With time up, Allison wraps by thanking attendees and previewing that day two will cover websites and social carousels. Darby closes by reminding viewers to use the code AISummit at gamma.app for a full month of Gamma Pro.