My summary of Tome before using it — I recently heard Reid Hoffman talk on a podcast about his investment in Tome, a company that helps people create professional presentations.
How does Tome explain itself in the first minute? “Make deals, not decks” is the main line on the Tome website, explaining how “Tome is the leading AI-native research and presentation platform for sales and marketing teams.”
Tome offers a large set of out of the box templates that can be used to kickstart a presentation. These templates cover a wide range of use cases, from sales pitch to press kit.
We all know how much time is spent on creating slide decks, preparing for the next big presentation or sales opportunity. Tome aims to solve this problem, focusing on the needs of “high performance GTM teams.” The themes of the templates offers seem to go beyond covering sales and marketing topics, with templates for a job offer package and team meetings as good examples.
How does Tome work? Onboarding onto Tome feels pretty standard: I create my profile, and provide some professional data to help Tome personalise my experience.
I decide to start with Tome’s basic package since I first want to understand how Tome works. I’m particularly interested in how I can use Tome’s AI to generate a presentation with the messages and content that I want to present. I select ‘Product requirements document’ as my first use case.
When I select the use case, a few options appear. Unfortunately, the first option — “Generate your Product requirements document with AI” — is only available on Tome’s paid option, Tome Pro.
Being able to generate a presentation with AI is what I’m most interested in, so I watch an explanatory video to get a better sense of how this works:
Tome will generate a first version of the presentation quickly, based on the template for a specific use case. You can then provide prompts on how you’d like to change the presentation layout, for instance. Tome will share alternative layout solutions to choose from.
Common to many AI applications Tome offers rewrite functionality as well as as the ability to add extra content on the fly. This additional content can be a new page or a video.
For my personal use case of creating a PRD, I’ll need to create this document manually because I don’t have a paid Tome subscription. Tome offers a standardised template for this.
Main learning point: Tome could solve a real problem for people: creating compelling slides at speed. I need to consider taking Tome’s paid package to assess first hand whether Tome can indeed help create convincing and accurate stories using AI.
