Announcing o11's backing from Y Combinator.
Beyond ChatGPT: Why Generic LLMs Fail at PowerPoint
Everyone has tried to use ChatGPT to “write a presentation.”
You give it a prompt, and it gives you a list of 10 slides with text. Then you have to:
- Open PowerPoint.
- Select a template.
- Copy the title from ChatGPT.
- Paste it in PowerPoint.
- Copy the bullets… and so on.
This is what we call the “Read-Only Gap.” Generic LLMs are trapped in a chat box. They can describe a slide, but they cannot inhabit the slide.
The Three Failures of Generic AI for Slides
1. The Layout Failure
A slide isn’t just text. It’s spatial logic. ChatGPT doesn’t know that your company’s logo must be 0.5 inches from the top right, or that your charts should use a specific hex code for the primary series.
2. The Data Failure
Calculations in a chat box are dangerous. For a financial deck, you need accuracy. Generic LLMs hallucinate numbers; o11 pull numbers directly from your Excel source cells.
3. The Object Model Failure
PowerPoint is an complex “Object Model.” To truly automate it, a tool needs to be able to manipulate Shapes, Z-order, Masters, and Themes. o11 is built as a COM native add-in, meaning it has the “hands” to actually build the objects, not just describe them.
The o11 Difference
o11 isn’t a wrapper around an LLM chat. It is a specialized Slide Engine. It uses AI to understand your intent, but it uses its native integration to execute the task perfectly.
