A company that helps people build presentations, Gamma, has just acquired a smaller startup called Lica. While it might sound like just another tech business deal, it highlights a quiet race to figure out how AI can do more than just write text—it is about teaching AI to understand the rules of good design.
Gamma has bought Lica, a two-year-old company that built software to turn screenshots and videos into polished project presentations. The two companies already shared some of the same financial backers, which paved the way for the deal. Lica's founders will now head up a new research division inside Gamma. The goal is to move beyond the standard slides people currently make and develop more interactive, visual ways for AI to help us communicate ideas.
The shift from text to visual intelligence
Most of the AI tools we use today are built on large language models, which are digital systems trained on massive amounts of text to predict the next word in a sentence. However, designing a presentation requires a different kind of logic. It is not just about words; it is about layout, color, and flow. To make this work, researchers are now working on custom models that act more like a digital designer. These systems are being trained on design patterns and communication styles rather than just plain prose. By studying how humans arrange visuals to make a point, these models learn to create outputs that feel less like a generic template and more like a human-crafted document. The goal is to let a user input a goal, and have the AI handle the complex decisions about how that information should look for a specific audience.
This acquisition is part of a larger trend where AI tools are being consolidated into broader platforms. It is becoming clear that users do not just want a chatbot that writes a bulleted list—they want tools that handle the entire creative process, from organizing thoughts to formatting them for a presentation. As these tools become more capable of handling visual work, the barrier for creating high-quality, professional-looking content will continue to drop. We are moving toward a future where the AI does not just write the content, but also acts as the art director. The challenge, however, remains the same: how to keep the human intent at the center of the design while the software does the heavy lifting.
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