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At the beginning of every year, I find myself doing the same quiet inventory that many of us do. What do I want to be better at? What do I want to stop doing? What’s the thing I’ve tolerated for far too long simply because “that’s how it’s done”? We tend to run this audit both personally and professionally, deciding what’s worth carrying forward and investing in -- and what, to borrow a phrase from one of my SoulCycle instructors, may simply “no longer be serving me.”
On the personal side, one goal has been pretty clear and deeply motivating: to get into the best shape of my life. Anyone who knows me knows where to find me: at the gym, on a SoulCycle bike, or logging miles on a treadmill or around the Haverford College nature trail. It’s a goal that’s tangible, measurable, and already paying dividends. My Garmin watch offers buzzing reinforcement every time I cross a new milestone, and the feedback loop is immediate and energizing.
Professionally, one aspiration for 2026 is less obvious -- but just as consequential. I want to dramatically reduce, if not fundamentally curtail, my own reliance, and our industry’s reliance, on PowerPoint as the primary way we communicate insight to clients. This isn’t a rejection of clarity or structure; it’s a question of whether our default insights reporting tool is still the right one. I’m genuinely curious to hear whether others feel the same; or whether they see this very differently.
I’ve been around long enough to remember life before PowerPoint. Before Word. Before Excel. It was a world of paper and acetates, overhead projectors, and reports you could physically hold; where the medium never pretended to be the message.
When I entered this industry in the early 1990s, we typed reports, bound them, and shipped them. We mailed paper questionnaires, often on colored stock, waited for them to come back, and then entered the data by hand. We relied on calculators and early statistical software running on IBM desktops (tools like FoxPro and SPSS) long before analytics felt seamless or invisible.
Then the Microsoft suite arrived, and it was revolutionary. PowerPoint, in particular, made things easier: faster to produce, easier to update, simpler to distribute. Certainly more lively and entertaining than a typed report delivered as a bound booklet. For a while, clients wanted everything: the Word report (for circulation and detail) and the PowerPoint deck (the high-level, for presentations).
But somewhere along the way, the PPT deck became the main and only product.
Recently, a dear client and close friend and I agreed out loud what I suspect many in biopharma already feel: PowerPoint simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
We’ve all been there. The researcher is telling a nuanced, thoughtful story, building insight sentence by sentence. The room is engaged. But the slides tell a thinner version of the same story: static, compressed, and a step removed from the thinking that’s unfolding in real time.
And then there’s the issue of decks having to travel. PowerPoint no longer exists just to support a live presentation; it’s expected to move on its own through organizations -- sliding from inbox to inbox, hallway to hallway. Marketing teams see it live, often with preview screenings before it ever reaches prime time. Leadership encounters it later. Someone three levels up skims it on a flight, without the benefit of context, commentary, or a guide to what actually matters.
PowerPoint was never designed to do all of that. Yet we keep asking it to.
At ThinkGen, we’ve started asking a simple question: if PowerPoint weren’t the default, what might take its place?
One area we’re actively exploring is digital avatars. The idea isn’t novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s about creating a modality that can present insights verbally, almost like a human, either alongside the researcher or independently. An avatar could serve as a durable archive, allowing someone to “experience” the results weeks or months later, with far more richness than a static slide deck ever allows.
We’ve also had success with podcasts and animated cartoons. These formats bring findings to life and meet people where they already consume information. The challenge, of course, is cost. Clients can't always pay for these enhancements, even when they meaningfully improve comprehension and retention.
And beyond that? AR. VR. Interactive environments we haven’t fully imagined yet. The point isn’t that we’ve found the answer; it’s that we’ve stopped assuming the answer is always a PPT deck.
Let me be clear: do I expect PowerPoint to be extinct in the pharma/biotech insights industry by January 2027? Of course not. It will still be part of the mix.
But will I be disappointed if we -- as organizations, as consultants, as an industry -- haven’t meaningfully explored what's beyond PowerPoint by then? Without question. Better ways of presenting insight don’t just make our work more engaging; they make it harder to ignore. And in an environment where attention is scarce, that may be what ultimately protects our seat at the table.
We live in a world where the bottleneck is no longer data collection or analysis. It’s meaning. It’s attention. It’s memory.
I’m genuinely curious: how are others thinking about this? What experiments are working? Where are you pushing beyond slides -- and where are you stuck?
If PowerPoint is still the default because it’s easy and familiar, that’s worth examining. If it’s still the best tool, that’s worth defending. Either way, the conversation feels overdue.
And I’d love to have it -- with anyone else who suspects there may be a better way to tell our stories.
