Overview
You go in to talk about frontier AI. Their eyes light up. Weeks later, the order form arrives, and it says: “PowerPoint generation.”
This month, it happened again. Three times in a row now.
Three times isn’t coincidence. It’s structure. And the root of that structure ran deeper than I expected.
PPTX Is Japan’s Corporate API
Why does everything land on PowerPoint?
Inside Japanese companies, approvals, reports, sharing, decisions — all of it runs on slides. PPTX isn’t a document format. It’s the protocol the organization’s decisions actually move through.
So the first step of any AI adoption falls right into it. Plugging AI into the place where value already flows is rational. The client asking for it isn’t wrong.
What’s wrong is the shape of the river itself.
Office Workers Have Creativity Too
Let me say it plainly.
Office workers are creative. They’re human. Everyone carries at least some capacity to create.
Microsoft has been killing it for thirty years. That’s what I think.
Bullet-point templates. Fixed layouts. A cage called the slide master. Thirty years of pouring thought into a format whose ceiling was decided by someone else, somewhere outside you.
This isn’t a new complaint. Edward Tufte wrote the same thing in 2003, in “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”: bullet points fragment the chain of logic. The investigation into the Columbia shuttle disaster found that critical risk information had gotten buried inside nested bullet points on a slide. Amazon banned slide decks from its meetings and replaced them with six-page narrative memos.
Format shapes thought. That was already written down, back in 2003.
Confession
Here’s what I have to admit.
The pipeline that generates that same PowerPoint with AI — I’m the one who built it.
Design in HTML, convert with AI, invent post-processing that doesn’t lose to PowerPoint’s spec. Rounded corners get ignored. Backgrounds vanish. Fonts betray you. I fought each of those, one by one, and I think I got fairly good at it.
Then one night it hit me.
I was just speeding up the mass production of a dead format.
Creativity that’s already been killed doesn’t come back through automation. Efficiency is a subtraction game — however well you play it, the floor is zero. The ceiling on value was fixed before you even started.
The Work I Can’t Forget
But there’s a piece of work I can’t forget.
For a luxury watch brand’s campaign, I used AI to build an experience where a person steps into the brand’s world as themselves. The look on the CEO’s face the moment he saw footage repainted with his own likeness. Efficiency could never have reached that place.
That’s when I knew.
AI’s real power points toward entertainment. Delighting people. Surprising them. That’s what expands human creativity through AI.
Creativity is an addition game. Something that didn’t exist comes into being. There’s no ceiling.
An Answer to Thirty Years
AI can speed up the mass production of PowerPoint. It can also bring back the creativity that got killed. Which one it becomes is a choice the builder makes.
So the requests that say “PowerPoint” in the order form will keep coming. I’ll take them. The system will run them.
But as a maker, I’ve made my answer. Delight. Surprise. That’s the only direction human creativity actually expands in.
Thirty years of what got killed — I’m going to take it back.