Can AI Be a True Creative Partner? [Newsletter #73]

Hello, AI enthusiasts from around the world.

Welcome to this week’s newsletter for the AI and the Future of Work podcast.

Tradition doesn’t always mean perfection, especially in software. Still, breaking with tradition can be one of the hardest things to do.

So, what’s the key to success?

This week’s conversation explores how taking a completely different approach can lead to breakthroughs, even when others call your idea “the worst they’ve ever heard.”

Let’s dive into this week’s highlights! 🚀

🎙️ New Podcast Episode with Grant Lee, Gamma CEO

Some people shudder when they hear the words "Power" and "Point." Still, there’s no denying the dominance of this long-standing presentation tool.

After four decades of market dominance, countless founders have tried to challenge it. Yet few have achieved real product-market fit.

That’s what one founder set out to change. During the pandemic, Gamma founder and CEO Grant Lee decided to take on PowerPoint. To make it work, he risked everything.

His office was a tiny corner next to the kitchen in his London apartment, where he pitched to U.S. investors late at night. Speaking softly so he wouldn’t wake his kids, he endured rejection after rejection. One investor even called his idea “one of the worst he’d ever heard.”

But Grant believed in Gamma and refused to quit. Since its launch in 2022, Gamma has grown to over 70 million users, with 30 million gammas created each month, and has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

These milestones were achieved profitably, with a team of just 50 people (that’s about $2 million in ARR per employee) and a Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation, led by Sarah Wang at Andreessen Horowitz.

Grant sat down with PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin to explain that for Gamma, or anyone hoping to compete with PowerPoint, success requires a completely different mindset.

Most presentation tools start with design. Gamma flips that logic. It’s a “design-last” philosophy, an approach that helps users focus first on writing or reworking their thoughts, PDFs, Word docs, and even ChatGPT outlines before the software takes care of the visual polish. That’s where AI becomes the quiet partner behind every great presentation.

This week’s conversation explores these ideas and more:

• Why Grant and his co-founders decided to reinvent slides from the ground up instead of improving on PowerPoint.

• How Grant defines product-market fit and why every feature must solve a real user problem rather than imitate the competition.

• How AI serves as a design partner, not a replacement for human creativity, and why keeping a human in the loop is key to success with AI.

• The importance of building user trust in generative AI through transparency, feedback loops, and community engagement.

• How luck influences success, and how you can expand your “luck surface area” by compounding what you learn and surrounding yourself with ambitious peers.

This week’s episode of AI and the Future of Work, featuring Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma.

🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how Grant turned rejection into growth and how he’s reimagining the future of presentations with the help of AI.

📖 AI Fun Fact Article

Americans have strong and often conflicting feelings about AI. Many believe it’s essential to know whether content is made by humans or machines, yet they don’t trust their own ability to tell the difference.

A lot of people worry that AI will weaken creativity and human connection instead of enhancing them. Most also oppose AI taking part in deeply personal matters like religion or matchmaking. Still, they support its use in areas that rely on complex data analysis, such as developing new medicines.

These insights come from The Pew Research Center’s new report, How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society. It highlights how our collective view of AI is anything but simple. Instead, it’s evolving—just like the technology itself.

PeopleReign CEO Dan Turchin highlights that those of us in the tech community often get too comfortable navel-gazing. For example, 32% of Americans age 65 or older say they’ve never heard of or had any contact with AI.

AI, of course, is ubiquitous.

As it becomes more deeply embedded in our daily lives and is used to make critical decisions (like who gets hired or fired, who is approved for medical treatment, and who gets convicted or released) we must do a better job of applying the three core principles of responsible AI: its use must be transparent; its results must be consistent and predictable; and when inputs don’t map to reasonable outputs, it must be configurable.

As a nation, we’re cynical about AI for no reason. For any of the fantastic technology we’re building to be adopted, it must first be trusted. Nothing short of full explainability and accountability will earn that trust in what is quickly becoming the post-truth era.

🎶 Worth a read

The Human-First Guide to Responsible AI

Until Next Time: Stay Curious🤔

👋 That's a Wrap for This Week!

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