Beyond PowerPoint: using AI to make an interactive Defence Investment Plan

"PowerPoint makes us stupid" — so said General James Mattis, later US Secretary of Defense, at a military conference in 2010.

Mattis's point (I think) was that forcing everything into presentation format degrades thinking, over-simplifies problems, and gives the illusion you've planned or understood something when you've merely described it.

A decade and a half later, much of UK Defence still runs on slides.

To be clear, I've nothing personal against Microsoft's simple, useful (and ubiquitous) visual communication tool. But I've been experimenting with what an alternative future might look like; the result is an interactive version of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), built with an AI coding assistant, that you can scroll, tap and interrogate in your browser.

→ Try it here: Interactive DIP

Creating an Interactive DIP

I chose the DIP because it's topical, publicly available and — most importantly for this experiment — it's an extensive document built on underlying facts and data. That means we can present the information in different ways and allow a reader to explore it.

The interactive DIP wasn't "written" as a webpage. It's generated from two files (plus the official DIP documents on GOV.UK):

• A brief — a markdown document describing the structure, the visual style, the interaction rules.
• A data file — a JSON file holding the numerical data extracted from the public documents, tagged with the source table it came from. The numbers on the site are not hard-coded; they trace back through the data file to a named table in the official documents.

I used Claude.ai plus Claude Code (an AI coding assistant) to develop those two files and then render the interactive experience. Change the data file, and the site changes. If you want a different rendering — say, a one-page summary, a briefing pack, or even (if you must) a slide deck — then you can generate it from the same sources.

Why this approach could be applicable in Defence

A lot of organisational knowledge today is what you might call PowerPoint deep: the deck is both the briefing product, and the thinking behind it. The data and the caveats live nowhere else; they are lost when the presenter changes jobs.

The emerging AI-powered alternative flips this. You maintain a curated core of text and data — plain, structured, version-controlled, readable by humans and machines alike — and you draw up visualisations as required.

This isn't a fringe idea. Engineers have worked this way for years ("docs as code"). Google Cloud recently published a draft open specification for exactly this kind of knowledge store in the AI-enabled era (markdown files with structured front-matter). Many websites including GOV.UK have quietly worked this way for a decade or more: authoring in markdown while the software renders the HTML.

What's new is that AI assistants have collapsed the cost of the last mile — the rendering. Producing a polished, bespoke visualisation used to take a designer and a fortnight. Now it takes a well-written brief and an afternoon. Which means the economics finally favour investing effort in the curated core, not the deck.

Limitations of this approach

The DIP is laid before Parliament; the PDF must be an authoritative, accountable artefact. The interactive version is just an unofficial, consumable explainer. It needs to be checked for accuracy. It's not a replacement for the official document.

Prettier isn't smarter. An interactive rendering of a shallow argument is still a shallow argument. The value in this approach isn't the visuals; it's the discipline underneath — versioned and inspectable. If anything, AI makes it easier to produce impressive-looking emptiness. Without this discipline, Mattis could equally say "AI makes us stupid."

From 'PowerPoint deep' to 'deep PowerPoint'

I doubt the world is abandoning slides. Hopefully what will happen is a move from bad PowerPoint to good PowerPoint — from decks as the container of the thinking to decks as one rendering of thinking held properly elsewhere: deep PowerPoint.

In that world, when a senior leader asks for "the deck," you don't open last month's version and update a few boxes. You point your assistant at the curated core and ask for a deck — this audience, this length, these emphases — and it draws one up. Tomorrow's audience gets a different deck. Neither deck is the document — the document is the underlying data.

The interactive DIP is an experiment in what that could look like for Defence.

The brief, the data file and the code are all open in the repository if you want to poke at them - or tell me why such an approach won't survive contact with reality.