For thirty years, making a presentation meant opening PowerPoint. That era is ending, not because slides are going away, but because the thing underneath them is changing. The rise of AI HTML presentations is quietly moving decks off proprietary files and onto the open web, and it is changing who can make a good presentation and how fast. This is the shift from PowerPoint to HTML, why it is happening now, and how tools like Bento fit into it.
Why PowerPoint is losing its grip
PowerPoint is not bad. It is just built for a world that is fading. Its format is a self contained binary file you email around, version by renaming, and open in one specific application. That made sense when work happened on a single desktop. Today work happens in a browser, shared by link, updated live, and increasingly generated with help from AI. A format designed for isolated files sits awkwardly in that world.
The friction shows up everywhere. Fonts shift when a file moves between machines. Collaboration means passing versions back and forth. And embedding anything dynamic, a live chart, an interactive element, a web component, ranges from clumsy to impossible. HTML was born for exactly these things.
The shift is from a file you own to a page you share, with AI generating clean HTML in between.
What HTML gives a presentation
When a slide is HTML, it inherits the whole web platform. That is a bigger deal than it sounds.
It opens anywhere. Any browser on any device renders it, with no application to install and no file to be the wrong version of.
It is shareable by link. A URL is the deck. Update it once and everyone sees the current version instantly.
It is truly dynamic. Live data, interactivity, animation, and embedded web content are native, not bolted on.
It is open and portable. No proprietary format locking your content inside one vendor's app.
This is why so many new presentation tools are web native under the hood, organizing content into flexible, page like sections rather than rigid fixed slides. The format matches how people actually work now.
Where AI enters the picture
Here is the part that makes the shift move fast. HTML is text, and text is exactly what modern AI is best at generating. Ask a model to produce a presentation and it can write clean, structured HTML slides directly, complete with layout, hierarchy, and styling. There is no proprietary format to reverse engineer, no binary to assemble. The AI works in the same medium the web already speaks.
That alignment is why AI presentation generation and HTML have converged. The market is splitting into two camps: tools that generate inside a traditional slide app, and agent native tools that generate HTML directly. The second camp is growing quickly because the output is open, editable, and lives natively on the web. Generate a deck, tweak the HTML, and it is done, no export step that mangles your fonts on the way out.
The honest problem: round two editing
It would be dishonest to pretend this is all solved. The dirty secret of AI presentation tools is that they are great at the first draft and often terrible at the second. AI drafts a deck fast, but the moment you want to nudge one element, restyle a section, or change a layout, many tools break or fight you. The real bottleneck for most teams is not round one drafting. It is round two editing.
This is exactly where an HTML foundation earns its keep, and where we focused building Bento. When the underlying format is clean, structured HTML, editing stays sane. You are changing readable markup, not fighting an opaque generated blob. The goal is a tool where AI does the heavy first draft and the human keeps full, easy control of every edit afterward, without the whole thing falling apart on the second change.
How Bento approaches AI HTML presentations
Bento is Thridy's take on this shift: generate presentations as clean HTML, keep them editable, and make good design the default rather than the exception. A few principles guide it.
AI drafts, humans direct
The AI produces a strong starting deck from your intent, then gets out of the way. Every slide remains fully editable, because the output was structured to be edited, not just generated once and frozen.
Design quality is built in
A deck is only useful if it looks credible. Consistent type, spacing, and a coherent visual language come standard, so a first draft already looks considered. Good visuals matter here too. The soft 3D icons from the Thridy gallery drop straight into HTML slides as simple image tags, adding warmth and clarity without a design tool, and you can browse them by use case in the category index.
Open by default
Because the deck is HTML, it opens in any browser, shares by link, and is never trapped in a format. What you make stays yours, in a medium the whole web understands.
Making the move
You do not have to abandon PowerPoint tomorrow. But it is worth understanding the direction of travel. The next generation of presentations will be generated with AI, rendered in the browser, shared by link, and edited as readable HTML. The teams that adopt this early get faster drafts, easier collaboration, and decks that do things a static slide never could.
The shift from PowerPoint to HTML is really a shift in mindset: from a file you own to a page you share, from a tool you fight to a draft you direct. AI is the accelerant, but the open web is the destination. If your presentations still live inside a binary file emailed around your team, the future is quietly waiting one browser tab away.
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