Your pitch deck needs to be machine-readable

A while ago, I built a tool that uses AI to give feedback on hundreds of pitch decks. Every morning, I skim through the pitch deck reviews my little bot makes without really looking at the decks. Every now and again, it’s stratospherically effusive in its praise, and I brace myself: What if the deck isn’t that good?

To my relief, it usually gets it right.

Similarly, sometimes it completely slaughters a deck. That’s when I get worried about the bot missing something that’s actually good, but the vast majority of the time, it gets it right. The feedback can be harsh, but fair.

Last week, I had to send an apology to a founder because their deck was absolutely massacred by the bot but it was utterly off base. I was confused at first, but after a while, I realized that the founders chose to turn the text into images to be more design-forward with the titles, and the bot failed to correctly identify the slides. Consequently, the bot gave feedback on the team slide as if it were the competitor slide.

All this is to say that in these days of AI being used for almost everything, founders should try to ensure their decks are accessible to a less-obvious audience: AI bots.