Stop Opening Your Pitch Deck With We're AI Powered

If your pitch deck opens with “we’re AI powered”, I’d cut that slide, because it’s no longer differentiating and it’s usually hiding the fact that you haven’t found your actual moat.

Key takeaways

• AI as a feature is now assumed by investors, not seen as a differentiator
• Opening with AI usually signals the founder hasn’t identified their real defensibility
• Real moats are distribution, proprietary data, or workflow lock-in, not the model underneath
• Investors have seen hundreds of AI powered decks and have stopped being impressed by the phrase
• Cutting the AI slide forces a sharper answer to what actually makes the company hard to copy

I’ve raised funding for and exited two companies, Obby and Baluu, and I now spend a meaningful amount of my time through VAQA sitting across the table from founders preparing to raise, reviewing decks before they go anywhere near an investor. The “we’re AI powered” opener comes up constantly, and it’s almost always working against the founder rather than for them. This piece explains why I tell every founder I advise to remove it, and what I tell them to put there instead.

Why AI powered stopped being a pitch

Every reasonably serious SaaS company uses AI somewhere in its product today. That’s simply the state of the market: model capability is cheap and widely accessible, so building an AI feature is table stakes rather than a differentiator.

Investors, including generalist ones, know this. Opening a pitch with “we use AI” is roughly equivalent to opening with “we have a website”. It’s true, it’s necessary, and it tells the investor nothing about why your company will win.

What leading with AI actually signals

When I see a deck open with the AI powered slide, my first assumption isn’t that the founder is behind on trends. It’s that they haven’t yet done the harder work of identifying what actually makes their company defensible.

That distinction matters because AI capability itself is rarely defensible. The underlying models are available to every competitor through the same handful of providers, at similar prices, often with similar performance. If AI is your headline pitch, a well funded competitor can usually replicate the feature within a quarter, and investors know that as well as founders do.

What a real moat looks like instead

I push every founder I work with to answer one question before we touch the deck at all: what happens to this company if a competitor rebuilt the AI feature perfectly tomorrow. If the honest answer is “we’d be fine”, that’s the moat, and it deserves the opening slide.

In my experience, the answer usually falls into one of a small number of categories:

• Distribution: an existing customer base, channel, or partnership that’s genuinely hard to replicate quickly
• Proprietary data: information the company has access to that competitors structurally don’t
• Workflow lock-in: the product is embedded deeply enough in a customer’s process that switching cost is real
• Domain expertise: judgment or context built over years that a general purpose model can’t substitute for

None of those require mentioning AI at all in the first slide, and that’s exactly the point. They’re durable in a way that “we use a large language model” simply isn’t.

How I’d restructure the opening slides

I’d move the AI powered claim out of the opening entirely and treat it as an implementation detail, mentioned further into the deck when it’s genuinely relevant to how the product works. The opening slides should instead answer what the company does, who it’s for, and why it’s structurally hard to copy.

That reordering does more than improve the pitch. It forces the founder to actually articulate the defensibility argument, which is useful discipline whether or not the deck ever reaches an investor. A founder who can’t answer the moat question clearly hasn’t finished thinking about their company yet, and a fundraise is a bad place to discover that for the first time.

I’d rather a founder work through that gap with me in a strategy session than find it out in a partner meeting.

AI is the feature, not the pitch

I don’t think AI belongs on the opening slide of a pitch deck anymore, for the simple reason that it no longer tells an investor anything they haven’t already assumed. It’s expected, not exceptional.

The companies that raise well right now are the ones that can explain, clearly and specifically, why they’re hard to copy regardless of what any competitor’s AI feature looks like. That answer has to come from distribution, data, workflow, or expertise, not from the model sitting underneath the product.

Cut the AI powered slide, replace it with your actual moat, and you’ll usually find the rest of the deck gets stronger as a result, because you’ve been forced to answer the question investors were always going to ask anyway.

Through my Finance and Fundraising advisory work at VAQA, I help founders pressure test their pitch and their positioning before it goes anywhere near an investor. If you’re not sure your deck answers the moat question properly, get in touch and I’ll go through it with you, or read more about what I advise on and about Tom.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should AI be mentioned in a pitch deck at all?

Yes, but later in the deck as part of how the product works, not as the headline claim. Investors want to understand the mechanism eventually, just not as the reason they should believe the company will win.

What should replace the AI powered opening slide?

A clear statement of what the company does, who it serves, and the specific reason it’s hard to copy, whether that’s distribution, proprietary data, workflow lock-in, or deep domain expertise. That’s the claim investors actually need to evaluate.

Does this apply to early stage companies too, or just later rounds?

It applies at every stage, though the moat looks different depending on maturity. Even a pre revenue company should be able to articulate its intended defensibility rather than leaning on AI as the entire pitch.

How does VAQA help founders with fundraising decks specifically?

Under my Finance and Fundraising advisory pillar, I work directly with founders to pressure test their pitch, including the positioning and structural claims, before it reaches investors. That often means identifying and articulating a moat the founder hadn’t fully named yet.

Is it ever fine to describe a company as AI powered?

It’s fine as a factual description within the product section of a deck. It stops being fine when it’s used as the core investment thesis, because on its own it no longer distinguishes one company from another.

What’s the biggest mistake founders make when pitching AI companies right now?

Assuming the AI feature itself is the differentiator, rather than treating it as infrastructure and putting the real defensibility argument front and centre. Investors have seen enough AI powered decks now to see straight through that framing.

Tom Batting is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur, founder of Obby and Baluu, and founder of FirstMotion. He advises founders and leadership teams through VAQA.