OpenAI Acquires NextSlide to Expand AI-Powered Presentation Tools Inside ChatGPT

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

NextSlide recently announced that it's joining OpenAI, with the presentation startup's team members now working on ChatGPT. The NextSlide website currently displays a note from founder Ahmed Beshry describing the startup's product as one "that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation." The ultimate goal, Beshry said, was "to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly." So by joining OpenAI, the team will "continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work." The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a note on LinkedIn, Beshry said the announcement is coming "a few months late," as the acquisition took place "earlier this year." Beshry was previously a co-founder at Caper AI, a smart cart/cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021.

OpenAI buys NextSlide as it builds an office suite inside ChatGPT

NextSlide was about a year old and is now inside ChatGPT. The product it replaces is PowerPoint, which belongs to OpenAI's largest investor. OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that turned prompts, notes, documents, and research into finished editable presentations. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the team has moved onto ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the deal in a note on the company's website, which now carries nothing else. "The NextSlide team is now at OpenAI, helping build ChatGPT," he wrote. A very short round trip NextSlide was founded in mid-2025, making it roughly a year old at exit. That is a compressed path even by current standards, and it says more about OpenAI's appetite than about the product. It is Beshry's second exit. He co-founded Caper AI, the smart-cart and cashierless checkout company, which Instacart acquired in October 2021 with carts already running in Kroger, Wakefern, and Sobeys stores. The shopping list This is not an isolated purchase. OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for io, Jony Ive's hardware startup, and $1.1 billion for analytics firm Statsig, while quietly absorbing smaller teams including personal finance apps Hiro and Roi. The pattern is consistent: a small team, a working product, and a destination inside ChatGPT rather than a brand that survives. Most of these are recruitment exercises with a product attached. What it is actually building Presentations are not a random gap to fill. Documents, canvas, file handling, and now decks are the components of an office suite, and OpenAI has been assembling them steadily. ChatGPT Work is the clearest statement of intent, an agent that takes action across a user's apps and files and stays with a project for hours rather than answering a single question. The traction is real. OpenAI's agents have passed 10 million users as the company pushes to turn a consumer habit into software that finance, sales, and operations teams pay to keep running. The awkward part The product NextSlide was built to replace is PowerPoint. Microsoft is OpenAI's largest backer and has built OpenAI's technology into Office, Windows, and Bing, which makes every step into productivity software a step onto its investor's lawn. Regulators have already noticed the entanglement. The EU joined the UK in scrutinising the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship, and a partner that competes with you in your core market is a harder thing to explain than a partner that merely funds you. Everyone is building the same thing Google is running the identical play from the other direction. Gemini Spark launched at I/O as an always-on assistant taking instructions through Gmail, tying Google's existing products together rather than acquiring new ones. That is the structural difference. Google already owns the productivity surfaces and is adding intelligence, while OpenAI owns the intelligence and is buying the surfaces. Which approach wins depends on whether people would rather have AI added to the tools they already use, or replace those tools with something built around AI from the start. NextSlide is a small bet on the second answer.

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that developed tools for turning prompts, notes, documents and research into editable presentations. The company's team is now working on ChatGPT. NextSlide founder Ahmed Beshry said the startup aimed to make visual communication more accessible by helping users turn ideas and source material into polished presentations. He said the team will continue that work at OpenAI by building AI products focused on creation and communication. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Beshry said on LinkedIn that the announcement came several months after the deal itself, which was completed earlier in 2026. Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, a startup that developed smart shopping carts and cashierless checkout technology. Instacart acquired Caper AI in 2021.

OpenAI Acquires Presentation Startup, NextSlide Founder Confirms

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup focused on AI-powered presentation creation, with the company's team joining OpenAI to work on ChatGPT. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. NextSlide founder Ahmed Beshry described the startup's product as a tool that transforms prompts, notes, documents, or research into editable slide decks, according to the company's website. In a LinkedIn post, Beshry said the public announcement came "a few months late," noting that the transaction had actually taken place "earlier this year," according to TechCrunch. Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, a smart-cart and cashierless checkout startup that was acquired by Instacart in 2021. This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

OpenAI Picks Up AI Presentation Creator NextSlide | PYMNTS.com

The deal happened earlier this year but was announced Friday (Aug. 7) by Ahmed Beshry, NextSlide's founder, on his LinkedIn page. NextSlide's website also includes a message from Beshy on the deal, though no financial information has been released. "We started NextSlide a little over a year ago with a simple belief: bringing an idea to life shouldn't depend on your ability to design slides," the message reads. "We built a product that could turn prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation -- making it easier for anyone to share what they know. Our goal was never simply to generate slides faster. We wanted to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly." Beshry added that he and his team are now "at OpenAI, helping build ChatGPT" and pursuing a mission of "building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work." The acquisition news comes at a time of high AI adoption among white collar professionals, according to the May edition of "The Enterprise AI Benchmark Report" from PYMNTS Intelligence. It found that banks, insurers and other financial companies have reached high AI adoption in 27 of 75 tasks examined, meaning that at least half of surveyed firms use AI for that activity. "The results suggest that financial firms are scaling AI fastest where the rules are clear, the data can be checked, and the outcomes can be measured," PYMNTS wrote last week. The research shows that spending is set to keep rising, with 85% of financial services firms planning to increase their AI budgets in the next 12 months. Productivity and competitive positioning were each mentioned by 65% of firms as reasons for additional investment, while 55% cited risk reduction and compliance. It's an encouraging outlook, PYMNTS wrote, though the next stage will hinge on a better foundation, as 30% of financial services leaders named fragmented or poor-quality data as their largest obstacle to broader deployment. "Most respondents also said they expect AI to support human judgment rather than replace it," the report added. "That creates a practical path forward. Improve the information feeding existing systems, expand proven uses and keep people responsible for the decisions that carry the greatest consequences." For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

OpenAI acquires NextSlide, presentation firm's team joins ChatGPT

* Read the blog post here. OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that developed AI tools to convert prompts, notes, and documents into editable slide presentations. The NextSlide team has joined the ChatGPT project. Neither company has disclosed the acquisition's financial terms. NextSlide Founder Ahmed Beshry stated on LinkedIn that the announcement was made several months after the deal closed earlier this year. According to his LinkedIn profile, Beshry founded NextSlide in April 2025 and led the company for eleven months before joining OpenAI in March 2026. Neither company has disclosed the team size, headquarters location, or whether NextSlide secured external funding. OpenAI and NextSlide have not addressed the reason for the delayed announcement. NextSlide is no longer available as a standalone product. The website now displays only Beshry's farewell message, and the tool has been discontinued for all users. What did NextSlide do? NextSlide allowed users to input a prompt, notes, documents, or research and receive a presentation deck ready for editing and delivery. The product targeted individuals without design expertise by transforming written content into polished, editable presentations. In his note, Beshry stated that the company's goal is to make visual communication more accessible, not just to accelerate slide creation. Fits a familiar OpenAI pattern: Analysts characterize the transaction as a typical OpenAI acqui-hire, with a small team and product integrated into an existing product line rather than maintained as a separate brand. The deal occurs during a broader OpenAI reorganization, according to one report. Fidji Simo, then CEO of Applications, told staff at a March 2026 all-hands meeting that the company was "orienting aggressively" toward high-productivity use cases. Open questions: No timeline has been provided for when NextSlide's capabilities will be integrated into ChatGPT. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed, the announcement is retroactive by several months, and there is no public roadmap or information regarding the status of current NextSlide customers. Some view the deal as part of a broader effort to position ChatGPT as a primary workspace rather than a transitional tool. However, OpenAI hasn't confirmed this interpretation yet. Wider consolidation in the AI presentation space: NextSlide's acquisition by OpenAI reflects ongoing consolidation in the AI slide-generation sector, though not all companies are following this path. Gamma, its main competitor, raised $68 million in Series B funding at a $2.1 billion valuation in November 2025 and remains independent. Instead of selling, Gamma continues to grow. Some analysts consider it as the leading specialist for prompt-to-deck workflows, particularly in areas where ChatGPT has yet to match its polish, brand control, and export reliability. In contrast, other companies have exited the market: Tome, an early competitor, discontinued its consumer presentation product in March 2025, and its team joined Lightfield, a B2B sales-intelligence startup. NextSlide's deal is part of a series of 17 OpenAI acquisitions over three years, including six in the first quarter of 2026. This strategy has allowed OpenAI to expand its presence in presentation software and other categories through acqui-hires rather than relying solely on internal development. The move also lands amid a shifting OpenAI-Microsoft relationship, the two companies whose fortunes have been most entangled in enterprise AI. Microsoft has reportedly replaced OpenAI's and Anthropic's models in flagship apps such as Word and Excel with its own in-house models. Bill Gates' company has instructed its sales team to directly critique both companies' AI products to customers. Despite this growing competition, OpenAI has expanded its presence within Microsoft's software. In May 2026, OpenAI launched a beta ChatGPT add-in for PowerPoint, embedding its chatbot as a sidebar that builds and edits slides for both free and paid users. The add-in allows users to start from notes, documents, spreadsheets, prompts, or existing decks. Using that the users ask ChatGPT to create slides, rewrite content, improve structure, or polish drafts without leaving PowerPoint. OpenAI made this feature broadly available to free-tier users as well as paid Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. This contrasts with Microsoft's Copilot, which fewer than 4.5% of its 450 million Microsoft 365 customers currently pay for. As a result, OpenAI is both competing with Microsoft for the AI productivity layer and operating within Microsoft's own product as a plug-in.