What's an AI Pitch Deck?

So last week, I made a big announcement. My company was rolling out pitch decks enhanced with AI technology through a program called Maranty Labs. And the response was overwhelming. Lots of positive feedback, a bunch of new clients, and a whole lot of support and enthusiasm.

But as I started talking with some of our new and prospective clients, a common question came up. “Wow that sounds cool! But, uh, what exactly is an AI pitch deck?”

I think when a lot of people hear the phrase “AI pitch deck”, they envision me pressing a button and bing-bang-boom, a robot spits out a pitch deck faster than your microwave can reheat last night’s leftovers. I wish it was that easy. Actually, no I don’t. That’d be super fucking weird. And honestly, if that type of technology existed, I’m sure a bunch of evil corporations would be salivating at the thought of how they could use it to replace working artists like me and you. Fuck. That. Noise. My goal with this project is a truly ethical application of AI, which not only protects human jobs and the creative autonomy of artists, but bolsters both. Here’s what it looks like, and here’s what I mean when I talk about building you a “PITCH DECK ENHANCED WITH AI TECHNOLOGY.”

When I build a pitch deck, we’Il start with a kickoff call where you tell me all about you project and I ask you a whole bunch of questions. Everything from “Who’s the target audience?” to “What color do you see when you think of this project?” We go deep and occasionally, weird.

From there, you sends me all the text that you want in your deck, and I go to work building an overall aesthetic and finding the right images that can help bring your vision to life. These reference images might come from films, TV, stock sites, anywhere I can think to look. But finding them can be a lot of work. This process is largely reliant on (and limited to) the catalog of films and television series that resides in my brain. This is one instance when my autism and severe ADHD actually makes life a bit easier for me. But, that means that I’m physically scrubbing through a lot of movies and a lot of TV shows in order to find the right images to put into your pitch deck. For a typical project, I usually pull between 300-700 images before I even start building the deck.

Now unfortunately, no matter how good the images I pull are, there’s still a decent chance that they might not properly capture the vision that you have for your creation. Maybe you’ve envisioned a type of character that we’ve never seen before, or you’re flipping a genre on its head- whatever the reason, it might be really difficult to communicate that vision strictly through reference images. Because we’re limited by what already exists in the canon of film and television.

This is where AI can help us.

Through the use of AI, we’re able to generate realistic, eye-catching, cinematic images that are much more closely aligned to the true vision of a creator. For example, I’m currently developing a sitcom about a group of college students living together at a seaside party school in Southern California. When I first started developing the project a couple years ago, I found that the imagery I could use was pretty limiting. An image from Neighbors might work here, maybe this scene from Blue Crush, and this character image from Euphoria. The uniqueness of the concept was actually a hurdle when it came to presenting it visually. But with the use of AI, I’ve actually been able to create the world that I see in my head and present it on the page for potential buyers to see.

In this way, we’re able to use AI to present a more complete vision of the world that we want to see onscreen. This is using AI ethically, as a tool, to help a creator better express themselves. It’s not taking away someone’s job and giving it to a machine. It’s simply replacing the time that I, as the designer, would’ve spent scouring the internet for reference images and instead replacing it with time spent creating the world that you as the creator have actually envisioned. And if successful, it’ll actually lead to the creation of a number of human jobs, as you'll be able to sell your series and then hire a production team of potentially hundreds to bring it to life.

So when you see me talking about AI pitch decks, this is what I’m talking about. Pitch decks that are still built from scratch by an experienced designer, but that are no longer limited by the images that exist in the real world. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting the image that’s in the pitch deck to match the image that’s in your head as closely as possible. It’s a tall task, but I believe that with this new technology, we just got a hell of a lot closer to making it a reality.