OpenAI buys NextSlide to put AI slide decks directly inside ChatGPT

The line between chatbot and office suite just got thinner. OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built tools for turning prompts, notes, and documents into editable presentations, and its founder Ahmed Beshry is now on the product team working on ChatGPT itself. Neither side disclosed the price tag, but Beshry confirmed the deal closed earlier this year — his second exit after selling Caper AI to Instacart for $350 million in 2021.

The timing here isn’t random. NextSlide had already shipped a PowerPoint plugin in May and a ChatGPT add-in for Excel back in March. By summer 2025, OpenAI was testing agents that could generate presentations and spreadsheets natively inside ChatGPT, outputting Microsoft-compatible files without touching Microsoft’s apps. This acquisition looks less like a talent grab and more like buying the missing piece of a feature that was already under construction.

OpenAI has been on a quiet shopping spree for small, specialized teams. NextSlide joins Sky, Roi, Context.ai, Crossing Minds, and the analytics firm Statsig — which cost a reported $1.1 billion. Then there’s Ona, the German startup formerly known as Gitpod, whose team is now working on Codex. The pattern is clear: instead of building everything from scratch, OpenAI is absorbing teams that already solved narrow, high-value problems.

What’s genuinely interesting here is the distribution play. If ChatGPT can spit out a polished deck from a meeting transcript without the user ever launching PowerPoint, that changes where work happens. Microsoft has been OpenAI’s biggest backer and its most awkward frenemy. Native presentation and spreadsheet generation inside ChatGPT inches the product closer to being a workspace, not just a chat window. Whether that strains the relationship in Redmond or simply makes Copilot’s value proposition murkier is the question nobody’s answering yet.