Here is a number worth sitting with. On average, employees spend almost a full working day every week inside PowerPoint. In leadership teams, nearly 29% spend five hours or more per week just making slides. And roughly 40% of that time goes into formatting — nudging boxes, aligning arrows, recolouring a chart to match the deck.

Nobody hired those people to align arrows.

If you run a company and you want to reduce time spent on presentations, the instinct is to make slides faster: buy an AI slide generator, build a nicer template, run a design training. That helps at the edges. But it treats the symptom. The real move is to remove the reasons slides get made in the first place.

You don’t have a PowerPoint problem

You have a communication-by-slide habit. PowerPoint is the default container people reach for, not the thing they actually need. Once you see that, the fix gets clearer.

A slide deck inside a company usually does one of three jobs:

Status and reporting — “here’s how the quarter is going,” “here’s where the project stands.”
Decisions and approvals — “here are the options, pick one,” “approve this budget.”
External pitch and sales — a proposal, an investor update, a client presentation.

Each job has a better container than a deck. Let’s go job by job.

Job 1: Status and reporting → dashboards, not decks

This is where the most time leaks, and it’s the easiest to kill. A weekly or monthly status deck is a human manually copying numbers that already live in a system — your CRM, your accounting tool, your project tracker — into slides, then formatting them.

Replace it with a live dashboard. The numbers pull themselves. Nobody rebuilds anything. When someone asks “how are we doing,” you send a link, not a 14-slide PDF made at 11pm.

Where a narrative is genuinely needed, use a one-page written update — the Amazon-style memo. A short document forces clearer thinking than bullet fragments on slides, and it takes a fraction of the time to produce because there is no layout to fight.

Job 2: Decisions → a memo and async comments

The “decision deck” is often theatre. Someone builds 20 slides to walk a room through options, the room half-reads them, and the decision gets made in the last five minutes anyway.

Swap the deck for a one- to two-page decision memo: the problem, the options, a recommendation, the trade-offs. Circulate it before the meeting. People comment asynchronously. By the time you meet — if you even need to — half the questions are already answered.

You are not losing rigour. You are removing the packaging step that added no rigour to begin with.

Job 3: External pitch → one master template, AI for the 20%

Genuinely external presentations — a real sales pitch, an investor deck — are the one place where polish earns its keep. This is maybe 20% of the slides your company makes. Here you do want a deck.

So make it cheap to produce. Build one locked master template with your brand baked in, so nobody starts from a blank slide or reinvents the colour palette. For first drafts, an AI presentation tool that turns a document or outline into slides gets you 80% there in minutes; a human then edits for the specific client. That’s automation applied where it actually pays off, instead of sprinkled everywhere.

The 40% you get straight back

Notice what happens across all three jobs: the formatting work — the 40% time-sink — mostly disappears. Dashboards format themselves. Memos have no layout. Only the external 20% touches slide design at all, and there a template does the heavy lifting.

You are not asking anyone to work harder. You are removing a category of work.

“But leadership wants slides. And clients expect decks.”

Two honest objections.

On leadership: most executives don’t want slides, they want to know what’s going on with minimum effort. A clean dashboard and a tight memo deliver that faster than a deck. Pilot it with one team’s weekly update and let the time saved make the argument.

On clients: some genuinely expect a deck, and that’s fine — that’s the external 20% you kept. The mistake is treating every internal update as if a client were watching.

How to start this week

Don’t reorganise the whole company. Run one experiment:

Pick the most repetitive recurring deck you have — usually a weekly or monthly status report.
Rebuild it once as a live dashboard or a one-page memo.
Kill the old deck. Measure the hours the team gets back over a month.

One workflow, one clear before-and-after. That number is what earns you the right to do the next one.

A “zero-PPT company” isn’t a company that banned PowerPoint. It’s one that stopped using slides as the default answer to every communication need — and got a day a week back per person in the process.

At Prodify, we help Indian SMBs find where hours quietly leak into repetitive work like this and build the workflows that replace it. If your team is drowning in decks, that’s usually a five-minute conversation and a very fixable problem.