In investment banking, generating pitchbooks, CIMs, and other slide materials has traditionally been a manual, tedious process that eats a significant amount of junior analyst time. This time burned on tasks like hunting for data points, formatting charts and tables, aligning text boxes, pulling logos, and refreshing data leaves little time and resources for the strategic work that truly moves the needle.
Recently, a few financial research platforms have revolutionized this workflow — using agentic solutions to generate analyst-grade presentations in minutes by synthesizing proprietary data with bank-specific templates.
AlphaSense is one such solution that combines one of the industry’s largest premium and proprietary content sets with AI trained to think like an analyst. Output is 100% grounded in and traceable back to high-fidelity data and content from across broker research, expert calls, public and private financials, company documents, and your own internal documents.
Below, we cover the step-by-step process that top global firms are leveraging in AlphaSense to automate their slide generation and free up their analysts to spend more time on deal strategy, customization, and analysis that actually win mandates.
Building a Deck From Scratch
Step 1: Start from a prompt instead of a blank slide
Instead of opening PowerPoint first, start with Generative Search in AlphaSense. From just a single prompt, you can generate anything from a one-page company profile to a full 40-slide pitchbook — all you have to do is ask. Then, easily refine the output by providing instructions in natural language as you would with any AI chat interface.
Step 2: Ground the output in real source data
This draft is never created based on generic data. Generative Search pulls from AlphaSense's underlying content — analyst research, expert call transcripts, public and private financials, company filings, as well as your own internal materials, including structured sources like VDR workspaces — to create your slides. You can upload the internal documents you would otherwise parse manually.
Every insight in the deck is traceable back to the source so instead of re-verifying figures from scratch, review comes down to simply checking the citation.
Step 3: Apply your firm’s template
Your first draft is much more useful if it looks like yours right away, without additional manual formatting required. Upload your firm’s template to apply your preferred fonts, colors, logos, layout, and overall brand structure to the finished product.
Step 4: Automate pitch creation with a single click
Once you have created your specific prompt that you use to create your pitchbooks, you can use it to create additional pitches that are already templatized and ready to use — with just a single click. This automation saves you time and effort on repeat deliverables, such as re-spinning the same pitch book for a new target, or generating a fresh profile each time a new opportunity comes in, without rebuilding the prompt or the structure from scratch every time.
Iterating On an Existing Deck
Most of the time, you're not starting from scratch but rather updating a deck that already exists in your firm's format. This is where AlphaSense’s native PowerPoint add-in comes in.
Step 1: Work inside PowerPoint directly
AlphaSense for PowerPoint is a native AI add-in that allows you to access the full power of AlphaSense from within your working decks. Rather than pulling you out of PowerPoint to do research and then back again to format, it brings AlphaSense's full content library — 500M+ documents spanning broker research, earnings transcripts, filings, expert interviews, and your firm's own internal documents — directly to where you’re working.
Ask it to add a funding timeline, update the market overview with last quarter's earnings data, or generate a new competitive section based on recent filings or expert call transcripts. It indexes your existing slides and your slide master to understand the structure and context before it acts; so it’s not just creating on-brand slides, it’s creating on-brand slides that know the argument they’re supposed to be making.
Step 2: Place source-grounded content directly into slides
Insights, figures, and charts get placed directly onto slides, with your firm's approved template and formatting applied automatically — no set-up or instructions required. Our investment banking clients commonly use AlphaSense for PowerPoint to refresh decks with the latest competitive developments, quickly pull logos and management headshots with a single prompt, and populate market assessment slides with broker research and filings, among other use cases.
Step 3: Refresh data under time pressure
The PowerPoint add-in is designed to support you in any ad hoc updates, from the simplest to the most complex. Through the AlphaSense chat panel in PowerPoint, you can request slide edits, data refreshes, and formatting changes in natural language, including building and editing financial-quality tables and charts — column, bar, line, waterfall, combo, and more — with professional IB/PE-grade formatting.
That means that in those high-pressure moments — a comp set needs updating an hour before a client call, or last night's earnings print has to make it into this morning's board deck — an associate can pull those data points directly onto slides – auditible and in your format — without switching applications. Instead of re-exporting a chart from a separate tool or manually rebuilding a table, the update happens right in the deck, with all the proper formatting applied.
Step 4: Connect your valuation models and your deck
Most pitch books and board decks are only as current as the model sitting one tab over — a comps table, an LBO, a DCF — and every time that model changes, someone has to manually update the corresponding chart or table in the deck. AlphaSense for PowerPoint and Excel are designed to work across that boundary without breaking the connection between the two.
Build or refresh a comps table and trading multiples in Excel using AlphaSense's live data, then update the corresponding table from inside PowerPoint without re-exporting or re-pasting. Turn a valuation model into a football field chart without ever leaving Excel. And because both add-ins draw on the same underlying content and firm templates, a chart or table in your deck can stay linked to the model behind it — so when an assumption changes, the slide updates instead of falling out of sync.
For a deal team, that's the difference between a comps page that actually reflects this morning's numbers and one that only reflects whatever was true when someone last remembered to update it.
Step 4: Review before it goes out
Before a deck reaches a client, senior stakeholder, or boardroom, check your presentation for logical gaps, stale data, and inconsistencies. You can ask AlphaSense for PowerPoint to stress-test your assumptions, and it will draw on broker research, expert calls, public filing data, and more to flag where you’re aligned with the market — and where you might have gaps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it risky to trust AI with a client-facing pitch deck?
When creating a pitch deck, you need to be certain about every single figure and fact, and generative AI is notoriously prone to hallucination. How can you mitigate that risk?
The honest answer is that it depends on the kind of AI you're using. A connector-first tool — one that simply pulls from many connected sources — can retrieve partial context from each one, produce conflicting outputs, and still sound authoritative while doing it. More connections don't mean better judgment; they often just mean more noise to reconcile.
Decision-grade AI works differently. Rather than stitching together loosely connected endpoints, it operates as one integrated system: premium, vetted content; retrieval built for the specific domain; context that explains why a data point matters; and outputs that are traceable back to their source. That's the standard a pitch deck needs — not just AI that can find information, but one whose answers can be verified and defended.
In a grounded, decision-grade system like AlphaSense’s, everything in your generated deck traces back to a real source — analyst research, filings, or your own firm’s internal documents — rather than the model's general knowledge or the open web. Human review is still an essential step before anything goes client-facing, but it changes what that review looks like: instead of re-verifying every figure from scratch, you're simply checking the citation.
Can AI generate an entire pitch deck?
Absolutely! AlphaSense’s Generative Search can produce decks ranging from a single-slide company profile up to a full-length pitch book from a single prompt — which can then be refined conversationally. Before it’s finalized, the deck can also be run through a built-in review step that checks for logical gaps, stale data, and inconsistencies — the ideal first pass that allows your review to focus on the deeper judgment calls.
Does this work with my firm’s existing PowerPoint templates?
Yes. Both Generative Search and the native PowerPoint add-in support uploaded firm templates, so output comes out already in your firm’s format.
Can AlphaSense’s AI update slides with new financials?
Yes, decks can be refreshed with updated figures (for example, incorporating a new quarter’s earnings) through a follow-up prompt or directly inside PowerPoint, without needing to rebuild the deck from scratch every time or pull those figures yourself.
Can this be used for CIMs and board decks, not just pitch books?
Yes, and the same workflow applies. Whether you're generating a CIM, board or IC materials, or a comps package, the underlying approach is the same: ground the output in real source data and your firm's own documents, apply your firm's template, and iterate conversationally or directly inside PowerPoint. The specifics of what goes into each deliverable differ, but the mechanics — grounded generation, template matching, and review before it goes out — stay consistent across all of them.
Is my firm’s data secure when using AI to generate decks?
Yes. All AlphaSense tools are built for regulated environments where trust is paramount, and can’t be sacrificed for speed. For the PowerPoint and Excel add-ins specifically, your full workbook or deck file is never uploaded — reading, editing, and local indexing happen on your device. Only the specific data you ask the assistant to act on (not the file itself), along with your prompt, is sent to AlphaSense's cloud for AI reasoning and research retrieval, over an encrypted connection.
The backend is stateless: it doesn't persist your content after the session ends, and any generated assets like chart images are held in encrypted, access-controlled storage for a short window before automatic deletion.
More broadly, AlphaSense never trains its models on customer data, works only with LLM providers that enforce zero data retention, and maintains SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 certification. For more on AlphaSense’s security standards, click here.
Upgrade Your Deal Workflow with AlphaSense
A winning pitch starts with insights you can defend in the room, not just numbers that look right on the page. AlphaSense's decision-grade AI eliminates the guesswork of building a deal deliverable by quickly parsing through 500M+ premium documents — expert transcripts, broker research, financial filings, and more — to generate grounded, on-brand slides in minutes, not hours.
Learn how AlphaSense can help your team cut the manual work, and move from research to finished deliverable with confidence.
Let our decision-grade AI do the heavy lifting so your analysts can spend less time formatting and more time winning the mandate — start your free trial of AlphaSense today.
