OpenAI Acquires NextSlide – Another Piece in the B2B Race Against Anthropic
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OpenAI has acquired presentation startup NextSlide. The deal only became public this week, through a note on the startup’s website and a LinkedIn post by founder Ahmed Beshry – the transaction itself was completed earlier in 2026. The announcement was coming a few months late, Beshry wrote. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The entire NextSlide team is now working on ChatGPT at OpenAI, according to the note. How many people that involves has not been made public. The product no longer exists as a standalone offering: the NextSlide website currently displays only the founder’s farewell note.
From raw notes to finished decks
NextSlide was founded in mid-2025 around a narrowly defined use case: turning prompts, notes, documents or research into a “polished, editable presentation”. The goal had never been simply to generate slides faster, Beshry writes in his note, but to make visual communication more accessible – enabling people without design experience to present their material.
For Beshry it is the second exit. He was previously a co-founder of Caper AI, a smart cart and cashier-less checkout startup acquired by Instacart in 2021 for a reported 350 million dollars.
Structurally, the deal follows the acqui-hire pattern OpenAI has used repeatedly: a small team, a working product, and a destination inside an existing product line rather than a brand that survives the transaction.
Feeding the productivity bet
The acquisition lands in the middle of a strategic overhaul at OpenAI. Fidji Simo, then CEO of Applications, told staff at a March 2026 all-hands that the company was “orienting aggressively” toward high-productivity use cases and could not afford to be distracted by side projects. The backdrop is a possible IPO that, according to CNBC, could happen as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. For 2030, OpenAI has told investors it is projecting total revenue of more than 280 billion dollars, split roughly evenly between consumer and enterprise business.
That direction became most visible in July 2026, when OpenAI introduced the GPT-5.6 model family alongside an agent called ChatGPT Work, built to handle multi-step office tasks such as drafting documents, spreadsheets and – notably – presentations. Both releases were framed by the company as a direct response to Anthropic. Simo herself stepped down from her full-time role in July for health reasons and moved into a part-time advisory position.
In this logic, presentations are not a side feature but one of the most frequently requested work outputs in companies – and a format in which the value of an AI subscription can be demonstrated to business customers immediately.
Anthropic set the pace in enterprise
The pressure is coming from a direction that was long uncritical for OpenAI. Data from spend management provider Ramp, which tracks actual card transactions across tens of thousands of US businesses, showed a reversal in March 2026: among companies buying AI services for the first time, a clear majority chose Anthropic. The share of businesses paying for Anthropic rose from around four percent to nearly a quarter within a year, while OpenAI recorded its steepest single-month decline on record. Surveys by Menlo Ventures have likewise placed Anthropic ahead on enterprise workloads for some time, particularly in coding.
On total revenue, OpenAI remains well in front, carried by roughly 900 million weekly ChatGPT users. But the shift affects precisely the segment that promises predictable, high-value contracts.
Anthropic, for its part, has pushed into the office suite over the same period: since February 2026 even free users can have Claude generate Excel, PowerPoint, Word and PDF files directly in the chat, and since spring there have been Claude add-ins for Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook that carry conversation context between applications. OpenAI counters with its own sidebar add-in for PowerPoint.
What remains open
OpenAI has not communicated any concrete product plans tied to NextSlide. Whether and in what form the startup’s slide capabilities will surface in ChatGPT is therefore as open as the question of what the deal cost. Only the direction is clear: ChatGPT is meant to become less of a chatbot and more of a tool that delivers finished work.
