Adobe previews AI generated PowerPoints from raw customer data with ‘Project Slide Wow’

Today at Adobe’s annual digital innovation conference Summit 2024 In Las Vegas, the company is unveiling Project Slide WOW, a generated AI-Drientation tool designed to simplify creating PowerPoint presentations directly from raw customer data.

As part of the “Adobe Sneaks” initiative, the innovation aims to address the shared challenges of marketers and analysts, turning complex data into compelling, easy-to-digest presentations.

From data to presentations – Automatic

Project Slide WOW integrates with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) to automatically generate PowerPoint slideshows with relevant data visualization and speaker notes. This allows marketers and business analysts to quickly build data-backed presentations without manually building content or designing slides.

“It is analyzing all the charts in the project, creating titles for them, organizing them into narratives, and creating presentation slides,” said Jane Hoffswell, a research scientist at Adobe. “It finds the best way to focus on the most important data.”

The tool’s excellent feature is its interactive AI proxy in PowerPoint. Users can ask follow-up questions, requesting other visualizations or dynamically generate new slides, making it an adaptive solution for data-driven storytelling.

One of the biggest advantages of Project Slide WOW is its ability to handle real-time data updates.

Instead of fast-outdated static presentations, users can refresh the slideshow to reflect the latest analytics, making it particularly valuable for businesses that rely on real-time data insights.

“We hope this technology keeps your data fresh and vibrant,” Hofswell told VentureBeat.

Technology under the hood

Unlike many AI-powered tools, Project Slide WOW does not rely on large language models (LLMS), such as OpenAI’s GPT or Adobe’s Firefly.

Instead, Adobe’s research team developed a proprietary algorithm ranking and scoring system to determine which insights are most important for a given dataset.

The system determines the priority of information according to the following methods.

• Data Structures in Adobe Customer Journey Analysis (CJA) – The insights that look higher in the CJA workflow get more emphasis.
• Relevance and frequency – Data points that appear multiple times in different analyses will be larger in slide generation.
• Narrative organization – This tool algorithm arranges insight into the logical storytelling structure to ensure smooth performance.

“Our ranking algorithm looks at the layout of the original customer journey analysis project – higher improvements may be more important,” Hofswell said. “We also prioritize values ​​that appear frequently in the data.”

Since the system is more rules-based and deterministic than relying on probabilistic AI models, it avoids common LLM problems such as hallucinatory data or unpredictable output. It also allows businesses to have greater transparency and control over how the presentation is structured.

What this means for businesses and decision makers

For CTOs, CIOs, team leaders and developer managers, Project Slide WOW represents a transformation in how teams use data visualization and presentations. This is the significance of enterprise-level decision-making:

• Data teams are more efficient – Analysts and marketers can quickly generate insights in presentation-ready formats, reducing manual labor involved from scratch.
• Scalability of large tissues – The ability to integrate directly into existing workflows, large enterprises can standardize the way customers can understand their cross-departmental insights.
• Data Integrity and Control – Unlike AI tools that create content based on unpredictable generative models, Project Slide WOW works in existing datasets in CJA. This ensures data accuracy and minimizes compliance risks.
• Enhanced cooperation among teams – By allowing dynamic updates to presentations, multiple teams (such as marketing, analytics, and product development) can work with the latest insights in real time without repeated work.
• Future integration potential – If Project Slide WOW becomes a full-fledged Adobe product, IT leaders may consider integrating it into their existing Microsoft 365 environment with planned PowerPoint add-ons.

Will it become a complete product?

Adobe Sneaks is the annual display of experimental innovation, with approximately 40% of featured projects ending up as Adobe products.

The fate of Project Slide WOW depends on user interest and engagement, as Adobe monitors social media conversations, customer feedback and direct queries to measure demand.

Adobe’s digital experience missionary and Adobe’s sneaky host Eric Matisoff stressed that the program is a testing place for cutting-edge ideas.

“We first searched for hundreds of technologies and ideas from the company … and then narrowed them down to seven of the most exciting, entertaining and forward-looking innovations,” Matisoff said.

Looking to the future

For businesses that rely on data-driven decision-making, Project Slide WOW can be an important step in simplifying the build demonstration process. If the tool gains traction, it may soon become available as an official Adobe product, which can certainly change how companies use customer data to inform their strategies.

Until then, CTOs, CIOs, team leaders and analysts should continue to focus on Adobe’s sneaky announcements to see if Project Slide WOW will go from experimental demonstrations to real-world enterprise solutions.