It was 10 PM on a Thursday. I had a client presentation the next morning, and I was still copying numbers from Excel into PowerPoint - cell by cell, chart by chart - praying nothing would change overnight...
That experience, which I lived repeatedly across my years in banking, is where Octigen begins...
A Constant Fight For Slides
Business reporting and slide making process are one of those problems that's invisible until you're inside of it. From the outside, producing a quarterly fund report or a sales deck looks like a minor administrative task. From the inside, it's a full-day (sometimes multi-day) project involving a half-dozen spreadsheets, a fragile template that breaks if you sneeze at it, and a review process that can restart the whole thing from scratch.
The average office worker spends 7 hours a week in PowerPoint - nearly a full workday - and 37% of that time goes to formatting alone.[1] For senior professionals it's even worse: more than a quarter of leadership devotes 5 or more hours per week just to making slides.[2] That's not time spent on analysis, on client relationships, or on decisions. The truth is that it's time spent formatting, like we're all graphic designers in disguise.
The best analysts I worked with spent more time fighting PowerPoint than thinking about markets. That felt like a fundamental waste.
Michel came at the same problem from a different angle. At Fisch Asset Management, he led the BI & Reporting team, the people responsible for turning raw data into the client-facing reports that go out every month. He knew exactly what those reports demanded, and he knew what the available tools couldn't do.
None of those tools could produce a proper PowerPoint. So Michel built his own system, simply because it was the only way to do his job properly, and because he was tired of watching his team lose hours every week to work that should never have been manual in the first place.
When I joined Fisch, we started working on it together, and at some point, the question became unavoidable: if we've had to build this for ourselves, how many other teams are doing exactly the same thing?
The Real Cost
The answer, we suspected, was a lot.
Everywhere we looked - asset managers, consulting firms, financial advisors - the pattern repeated. Talented people with years of expertise, still spending a meaningful portion of their week reformatting slides, copying numbers around, and checking that the chart colours matched the brand guidelines.
They're skilled professionals trapped in a loop that technology should have already sorted out.
How We Change The Reality
Meaningful changes to the entire approach, we believe, can deliver something that the market has never seen before. This is what Octigen does to empower professionals of different kind and help them dedicate their time away from slides.
1. Your template in PowerPoint.
You don't start over with a new tool or a new format. You upload your existing PowerPoint, and Octigen reads it, learns its structure, and makes it smart. When the next update runs, Octigen knows exactly what to change and what to leave alone. Your branding, your layout, your design decisions remain untouched.
2. Your data, flowing in automatically.
Whether your numbers live in an Excel file, a database, an API, or an SFTP feed, Octigen connects to the source and maps the values straight to the right charts, tables, and text boxes, natively. No copy-pasting, no "images that look like charts" but that at the end are locked in. No intermediary spreadsheet that someone forgets to update. When the data changes, the slide changes.
3. Recurring reports, configured once.
For the quarterly fund report, the monthly investor update, the weekly sales deck - you define the structure once: which slide types appear, in what order, with what tone and instructions. That becomes a reusable workflow. The next time you need to run it, you don't rebuild anything. You just run it. This is particularly powerful for automated fund reporting and sales deck automation.
4. AI that handles the mechanical work.
When you're creating something new from scratch, Octigen's AI takes your content - research, notes, raw data - organises it into a logical slide sequence, fills the placeholders, and fits the text. You set the direction and review the output. The AI handles the part that used to cost countless hours. Explore the full AI PowerPoint reporting platform features to see what's possible.
The result, in every case, is a native PowerPoint file: fully editable, pixel-perfect, ready to send.
Why We're Writing This
This blog is our way of thinking in public. We'll write about the product, what we're building and why we make the choices we do. We'll write about the industry, how AI is changing professional work, what gets overhyped, and what actually matters. And we'll write about the startup: the honest, unfiltered experience of building something from scratch in Switzerland.
If you've ever lost an evening to PowerPoint, I think you'll find something worth reading here.
- empower® × Nielsen, The Ultimate Global PowerPoint Study (2020). B2B survey of 1,102 employees across the US and Germany who work at least 50% of their time on computers. Key findings: the average employee spends 7 hours per week in PowerPoint - nearly a full workday - and 37% of that time is spent purely on formatting (2.6 hours/week). Creating and formatting charts is the single biggest time waster.
- SketchBubble, Fascinating PowerPoint Statistics to Amaze You (2025), citing Buffalo7 research. Key finding: 28.7% of a company's leadership devotes 5 or more hours per week solely to making PowerPoint slides.