Fortune 500s Aren't Switching to HTML Slide Editors. Here's Why Decky Was Built Around That.

Every few months a new AI presentation tool launches with the same pitch: leave PowerPoint behind, leave Google Slides behind, and build your decks in our shiny new HTML-based editor instead. The demos look great. The output is genuinely impressive. And then enterprise buyers politely pass.

We've spent the last two years selling into Fortune 500 companies, and the pattern is unmistakable. The biggest, most sophisticated presentation buyers in the world, the exact teams who would benefit most from AI, are not abandoning Google Slides or PowerPoint. Not this year. Not next year. Probably not ever.

Here's why, and here's why Decky was built with that reality baked into the foundation.

The Switching Costs Are Enormous

A presentation tool isn't a standalone app. Inside a Fortune 500, it's a piece of infrastructure that touches almost every department. Replacing it isn't a software decision, it's an organizational change project that no one has the appetite to lead.

Consider what a real switch actually requires:

• Tens of thousands of legacy decks stored in Drive, SharePoint, Box, deal rooms, and CRM attachments, all in .pptx or Google Slides format
• Master templates and brand systems built by design teams over years, with locked layouts, approved color tokens, and pixel-perfect grids
• IT and security review for any new platform, SOC 2, data residency, SSO, DLP integrations, vendor risk assessments that take 6–12 months
• Procurement that requires displacing an existing line item (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), not adding a new one
• Training for tens of thousands of employees who already know how to use Slides and PowerPoint
• Workflow re-plumbing for every downstream process: investor data rooms expect .pptx, AV teams at events expect .pptx, board portals expect PDF exported from PowerPoint, sales engineers paste decks into Zoom QBRs from Slides

The cost of all of that is measured in years and millions of dollars. The benefit of switching to a prettier editor? Marginal. The math doesn't work, and every CIO knows it.

HTML Editors Solve the Wrong Problem

The pitch behind HTML-based slide tools is that the underlying format is more flexible and more "modern." That's true in a vacuum. It's also irrelevant to the buyer.

A Fortune 500 doesn't have a format problem. They have a production problem. Their teams spend hours per deck on formatting, brand corrections, and rebuilding the same presentations repeatedly. A new file format doesn't fix that, it just trades one set of problems for a new one, plus all the switching costs above.

And HTML output creates fresh enterprise headaches:

• It can't be emailed as an attachment the way a .pptx can
• It can't be opened offline the way a downloaded deck can
• It can't be edited by a non-technical user the way a Slides file can, every tweak requires going back through the AI chat
• It doesn't survive the export round-trip. Convert HTML to .pptx and the layout breaks; convert it to PDF and you've lost editability entirely

For an individual user making a one-off pitch, HTML is fine. For a 50,000-person company that ships thousands of branded decks a week, it's a non-starter.

What Fortune 500s Actually Want

When we talk to large enterprise buyers, the request is consistent. They don't want a new presentation app. They want their existing presentations to be faster, more on-brand, and less labor-intensive to produce. Specifically:

1. Stay in Google Slides and PowerPoint. No new file format, no new platform, no migration.
2. Use our exact brand assets. Our master templates. Our fonts. Our color tokens. Our approved layouts.
3. Plug into our existing systems. CRM, data warehouse, internal knowledge bases, generate decks programmatically from the source of truth.
4. Govern it centrally. Brand teams want to lock structure. Sales leaders want to standardize personalization. IT wants SSO and audit logs.
5. Don't make us train anyone. End users should access it from inside the tools they already open every day.

Notice what's not on that list: a new editor.

How Decky Was Built Around This Reality

Decky was designed from the first line of code to live inside the Google Slides and PowerPoint world, not to replace it. Every product decision flows from that constraint.

Native Google Slides and PowerPoint output. Decky doesn't generate HTML and call it a deck. It produces real .pptx and Google Slides files, built from your actual master templates, that drop into every existing workflow without modification.

Asset-based onboarding instead of migration. Decky ingests the slides, templates, and brand kits a company already has. There's nothing to rebuild and nothing to move. Day-one output looks identical to what the brand team would produce by hand.

Two surfaces, both inside the user's existing workflow. The Decky Chrome extension lives in the sidebar of Google Slides, so end users never leave the tool they're already in. The Decky API and MCP let engineering teams generate decks programmatically from CRM, data systems, or AI agents, no UI required.

Templates that lock structure. For repeatable motions like sales proposals, QBRs, and investor updates, brand and revenue leaders can lock the layout and let Decky populate the content per audience. The output is always pixel-perfect to the approved template, every time.

Better than "File > Make a Copy." The traditional way to reuse a deck inside an enterprise is to duplicate the file and manually update it, slow, error-prone, and a constant source of brand drift. Decky replaces that workflow entirely, without asking anyone to learn a new tool.

The Bet

The companies trying to convince Fortune 500s to abandon Google Slides and PowerPoint are making a bet that the editor is the unit of value. We think they're wrong. The unit of value is the finished, on-brand deck, and the fastest path to that, for any company with more than a few hundred employees, is to make the tools they already use dramatically more powerful.

That's the bet behind Decky. It's why we don't ship an HTML editor. It's why we don't ask anyone to switch platforms. And it's why every deck we produce opens cleanly in the file format the rest of the business already speaks.

The Fortune 500 isn't going anywhere. Their presentation stack isn't either. The opportunity is to meet them where they are, and that's exactly what we built.