AI Presentations: What We Learned From Tome
Tome could build a whole presentation from one prompt and reached a million users in 134 days. In 2025 it shut down. We look at what AI presentation tools do well and how to use them without losing your work.
In June 2023 we needed a presentation in a hurry, so we let AI do most of the work. Everyone at Cow-Shed was impressed by how quickly Tome produced a well-structured deck with sensible text and images. Two years later Tome had shut down its presentation product and deleted the decks people hadn't exported. Both halves of that story are worth knowing if you use AI tools at work.
What Tome did
Tome was an AI storytelling tool. You typed a prompt, such as "How AI is used in Formula One racing", and it wrote an outline, then filled each slide with text and AI-generated images in seconds. It used OpenAI's models, GPT for the writing and DALL-E for the pictures. You could ask it to change the tone or length, edit the images and add video. Our own test became the starting point for our article on AI in Formula One racing.
Very fast growth
Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, both former product managers at Meta, launched Tome as a free beta in September 2022. It passed one million users in 134 days, which made it one of the fastest-growing productivity tools ever. In February 2023 it raised $43 million in a Series B round that valued it at $300 million.
Peiris said at the time that people used Tome in ways the founders never expected. They had pictured product managers and designers. Instead they saw parents making bedtime stories, doctors writing guides for patients and families using it as a shared photo album.
Why it shut down
Lots of users did not turn into a business. Tome cut staff in 2023 and 2024, moved its focus to sales teams, and closed its presentation product on 30 April 2025. Users who had not exported their decks lost them. The founders went on to build Lightfield, an AI-based CRM for sales.
In our view the lesson is not that AI presentations were a fad. Making slides with AI is now a normal feature inside tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides and Canva, and in specialist tools such as Gamma. A standalone product doing one thing that the big platforms can add as a feature is in a hard position.
How to use AI for presentations today
- Use it for the first draft. AI is very good at turning a topic or a page of notes into a structure. Spend your time on the argument, not the layout.
- Check every fact. AI-written slides look finished before they are right. We wrote about this problem in workslop: when AI output looks finished and isn't.
- Give it good material. Better prompts and better source notes give better decks. Our guide to prompt engineering explains how.
- Keep your own copy. Export to PowerPoint or PDF regularly. If a tool closes, as Tome did, your work should not go with it.
- Think about data. Don't paste confidential client information into a tool unless you know how it is stored and used.
For a wider look at how we use AI for creative work, read how Cow-Shed built a full brand using AI.
Sources
Tome launch, user and funding figures as reported in 2023. On the shutdown and the move to Lightfield: Deckary, "Tome review 2026: what happened"; Comparedge, Tome pricing (July 2026); Yespress, Tome profile.
