I've been mum about this, but the straw that broke the camel's back arrived in my inbox multiple times today: AI-generated decks. They're technically designed and formatted (notice I didn't say well) but empty of care and thought. Every slide looks finished, but it's not... the title is the best part.
I've passed on every single one. The idea wasn't necessarily bad. What killed it was that nothing on the page proved anyone had made the effort to show their nuanced thinking. Sentences smoothed into false confidence, with an outlandish stat sitting three slides from a conclusion it doesn't support. Then walls of text that don't skim on a phone, which is how most of these get read the first time. Dare I say that in many of them there was no mention of even the team!
Using AI to build a deck is not the problem. All founders should. What's missing is a cogent narrative that demonstrates your insights and makes the reader want to take the meeting. I find that gap in 99 out of 100 decks that come through now.
A deck is my first real evidence of how a founder thinks under constraint, and how well they can tell a story about a business that does not yet exist. That work belongs to the founder before it belongs to me. It is also part of the job. Keeping money in the bank depends on telling a story someone wants to fund, and no tool does that on your behalf.
I'll keep passing on the ones that forego this.