The Future of Presentations and Websites is AI

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys, Darby here at AI University, joined today with Grant Lee from Gamma, one of the co-founders, and Gamma being a platinum sponsor of the event, is one of our sponsors that’s making this event possible to make it free. You can register right now for free, November 5th through 7th, just go ahead to Scale With AI Summit.com and register for free. We’ll also be releasing a number of workshops and events on top of our YouTube channel, so make sure you’re subscribed there as well.

I wanted to bring on Grant to just share a little bit about what Gamma’s all about, how they got started, and what you can expect from Gamma as part of the Scale With AI Summit. Grant, thanks so much for joining me.

Hey, thanks for having me, Darby. Absolutely, and I would love to just hear in your own words a little bit of background about yourself. How did Gamma get started, what was the initial idea behind it, and where are you guys at today? You’ve grown a lot over the last few years. I’d love to let people know a little bit about what you guys are about, I think it’s a powerful tool and really does some great things with it.

Yeah, thanks. So yeah, we started a little bit over three years ago. I started my career in investment banking and consulting, so I was living in slide decks. When we started Gamma, we really were thinking about how could we reimagine the way people present and share their ideas. The default is going into PowerPoint, Google Slides, using a slide deck as a way to encapsulate your thinking. I think while many of us are visual learners, very few of us, the vast majority of us, are not visual designers. We don’t have a design background, and things like formatting, aligning boxes, those are all things that are time consuming, can be very tedious, and at the end the output still may not be at the level we want.

We’ve been working hard to really simplify the creation flow within a tool like ours, so that anybody can create content hopefully much more effortlessly, if they do need to synthesize or come up with a way to convey their information in the form of a presentation, and we can do it in a way that’s really fast. We at Gamma have been working on a unique set of building blocks, different primitives that are different than slides themselves, and marrying that with AI, and AI creation throughout the entire workflow of using Gamma.

I love it, and one of the things I really love about Gamma is how you’re able to just use natural language prompting, and of course you can take that to certain levels based on your own experience with prompting, but also just a simple one or two liner can get you started with creating these presentations. Another thing I love about it is that you can create websites now with it, you can link up domains, you can send people to targeted pages, you can add Google Tag Manager so you can track the traffic coming to that page, and very effortlessly build upon ideas in what I think is a really simple, clean, and easy to use interface.

Now with what Gamma is doing in partnership with us at the Summit is helping people take these ideas that they’ve got, and not just AI innovation but implementation. So we’ve got a few core workshops, an hour each day of the Summit, the fifth, sixth, and seventh, where we’re tuning in live with you and the dream team, and we’re going to be answering questions, troubleshooting maybe areas that people are getting stuck with the tool, but also showing a lot of really cool ways that people are using Gamma in their day-to-day life to hopefully inspire others in how they could leverage this technology as well.

From your experience at Gamma, from the users that you work with, I’m curious if you can share a few of the more common use cases that you see on the day-to-day, as well as maybe what is your vision for how people are using this tool in the future.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think a lot of our early users view Gamma as a sort of set of building blocks that they can use to craft content, and oftentimes these are things that can get shared externally, so whether it’s customers, clients, prospects, partners, they can create a set of content, reuse it, remix it in different ways, and then take that form factor and do some cool things with it. You mentioned this website use case which is really user driven. We had a lot of users early on that would create things that were more presentational in use case, but then would ask us, hey, is there a way to actually publish this to a custom domain, or can I actually share this like a website? And so we started leaning into ways to actually just acknowledge how users want to use Gamma in the first place, and can we make it a much more malleable medium, so that you don’t have to at the outset know exactly all the different things you want to create, but over time you can add to it, you can remix that content in interesting ways.

Definitely what we would love to cover with the audience over that series of trainings is to be able to go deeper on what are the different types of use cases when it comes to creating a website. There’s many different types of websites. There’s the notion of something that could be almost like a very simplistic landing page, where you’re using it as a way of introducing who you are, what your brand or company might represent, using that as a lead magnet, even potentially with some content. There’s ways of creating a customer hub, or a place where your prospects or clients can go to have an update on how projects are going, or how different initiatives are tracking relative to the overall timeline or milestones you have in mind. So there’s all these different things even within a website, multiple different types of use cases.

We’re also starting to expand into other formats, so being able to support things that are more graphic design in nature, social media pages, things that could be shared, saved, distributed in many different ways on different platforms. So how can you take existing content and Gamma mold it into serving those use cases, I think we’ll be able to cover some of that too, and go into the nuances of when you might make different design decisions depending on the format or output.

Yeah, that’s all great, and I think something I’m really looking forward to is just where does the community create and go with this. One thing I’ve been really impressed with, just being involved with Gamma for the past few months, learning a little bit more about what you guys are building, is how responsive you are in your own creator community in Slack, how much feedback you take into consideration and put into action often very quickly, like the QR code feature that I found a ton of use from.

Just for a little context, I was doing a mastermind presentation at an event a few weeks ago, and we were updating our slides, and we needed to have people be able to interact with an app that we built during the presentation, and this was a last minute decision. I said, wait, I think Gamma lets me make QR codes, I don’t remember where I saw that. So an hour or a couple hours before the presentation, went in and updated the website, added QR codes, made it right inside of Gamma, which before I would have had to go to another app, make the code, and then paste it into the deck, which it could still be done, but it just made that whole process much faster and more smooth. It was a hit, because people could pull up their phones, scan the website, go straight to the app we were showing, or scan the QR code, and it was all just generally a smooth experience. That’s just one small feature that I posted in the group about, and it’s like, oh, that’s cool, of so many different features and things that can get built in. But ultimately I just liked how easy it made it for me to not have to get out of my creative flow if I needed to update the slide and then get something out there into action in a very short amount of time.

So I’m curious, like where, with how fast AI moves and everything like that, I’m not asking for a specific roadmap, but where do you see your vision of Gamma evolving over the course of the next say six to twelve months?

Yeah, I think it’s going to continue to be, to your point, leaning into where the community finds the most value in the product. So a lot of these use cases, where every part of the journey of creating something, sharing something, getting feedback on your content, like all that entire sort of flywheel for an individual user, are all areas we can dramatically improve on in the product. So when it comes to creation, it’s cool to be able to generate a presentation from an online prompt, but what are other ways that you might be able to overcome the sort of cold start problem of creating content? You might be ingesting existing pieces of content, PDFs, existing PowerPoints, existing even like pointing to a website, and be able to actually ingest all that. We already do some of that today, but we want to make that even better, even more powerful, so that perhaps you can even stack multiple types of data sources, create your own set of a knowledge base for you to tap into to create content off of. So there’ll be a lot more of the sort of importing and synthesizing of information.

Certainly when it comes to being able to even do more robust research, or be able to search the web for types of content and provide sources and citations, there’ll be a lot of that we can do there, to ensure that anytime you are generating content, it’s trustworthy, credible things you can reference and source. When it comes to a more advanced analysis, being able to actually work better with data, whether you’re uploading an Excel file or a CSV file or a spreadsheet, be able to do that and transform that into content you can leverage, I think there’ll be some really interesting things we can do there.

And then, serving as you think about sharing, a lot of it is about the formats and the form factor, and the distribution, how are you actually going to share it. So we want to be able to support many different types of formats. Today we can export to PDFs, in the future hopefully be able to support other forms of exporting, whether it’s video files, audio files, and allow that to be distributed in meaningful and interesting ways that we don’t yet support today. So that would be another piece of it. And we’re already a collaborative app, but I think being able to support even more rich workflows when it comes to collaboration, both internal within your workspace or external with clients and customers, I think there’s a lot more we can do there. So it’s really every part of the product, all the surfaces we cover today, each one of those probably there’s an opportunity to make it 10x better, and that’s going to be our aspiration, is to actually go after that.

That’s great, and something to look forward to and keep a beat on. One of the reasons why I first reached out to you to connect was that using an app and bringing an app in as a sponsor was something we actively used, something we’ve been talking about for probably eighteen months or so, as one of the core tools that we would demonstrate in our mastermind calls and use for our own presentations. I just like seeing the team behind the tool that is so active and engaged with its customer base, you’re active and engaged with the creators, and you’re open to the feedback and also how you adapt with the change.

If anyone here wants to follow you, I know you’re very active on LinkedIn, I enjoy your content as well, and your insights in running a startup and building a startup, but anyone that’s interested in connecting with you in or outside of the Summit, where’s the best place to lean in and say hey to you?

Yeah, I think LinkedIn and X Twitter are both great places, you’ll find me at Grant Lee on both. So yeah, please reach out, would love to connect.

Definitely. I think with a lot of our early users, even outside of Gamma, I love just being able to help support, and when it comes to things like building their own digital presence through tools like ours or other tools, I think we’re just at the earliest innings of doing some cool things. I think AI is obviously advancing so quickly, I’m very bullish, obviously, on the space, unbiased, but also I’m genuinely here to try to support others, and so if there’s a chance to connect, would love to.

Awesome, hopefully you make some new connections through this video but also through the Summit that again we’re hosting live November 5th through 7th, 2024, so just about a week from now, we’re kicking off at the time of this recording. But we’ll also be reproducing that content, the workshops, all the events, the speakers, back to our YouTube channel, so those of you tuning in here right now, make sure you are subscribed to us on AI University so you get notified as these videos drop. Also make sure you go ahead and register at Scale With AI Summit.com so you get access to not just the videos but also the bonus resources and the extra things we’re going to be doing for those registering for the Summit, because it’s going to be a great event, and we make those great events by curating speakers and sponsors like Gamma, like yourself, and a load of other speakers that are going to be bringing a ton of value into the Summit, where AI innovation is meeting implementation, and we’re going to be demonstrating a number of ways that we’re using Gamma to help with implementing and bringing those ideas into action.

Grant, thank you so much for your time here, I’m looking forward to your sessions at the Summit, and with everyone else, keep scaling AI on, we’ll see you in the next video.