I wrote a pitch slide this week. Three columns: “GPTs / Skills / Plug-ins,” “Declarative agents,” “Us.” First two columns were check-mark rows showing what those tools can’t do. Third column showed what we can.

It was a clean slide. It felt good to write. It was the wrong slide.

What the slide was actually saying

The slide said: these other tools fail, and we succeed where they fail. Read it with that framing and the whole thing reads like we’re in a war with the stack everyone in the room already builds on.

But we aren’t. We ride on top of that stack. Every tier of our platform leans into it — our cloud tier is Azure Functions, our enterprise tier is Copilot Studio, our identity is the IdP the customer already has. We’re not replacing anything. We’re the layer that makes the existing stack faster.

The feature-vs-feature slide obscured that. It positioned the partnership as a competition. It put the room on the defensive about tools they were already paying for.

The fix

Delete the comparison. Replace it with three things we do, with no references to anyone else. One slide, three beats, positive framing:

  • Goal in, swarm out.
  • One file. Travels anywhere.
  • One codebase, three tiers — laptop → cloud → the enterprise product the customer is already using.

No row checking “can’t.” No row checking “can.” No other vendors on the slide. The work we do is the whole slide.

The test I should have run first

Before any comparison slide ships, it has to pass two questions:

  1. Is the thing we’re comparing against actually a competitor, or is it part of the stack we sit on? If it’s part of the stack, you can’t knock it without knocking the deploy target you need. The comparison loses you room allies.
  2. Does our story need the comparison to stand up? If our three best beats land without mentioning anyone else, the comparison is dead weight. Delete it.

Both tests would have killed my first slide. Ran them late. Shipped the better slide second.

The bigger lesson

Positioning drift is easy because it feels like sharpness. Comparison slides look crisp; they’re satisfying to write; they let you show a table. All of that is surface rhetoric. The deep position — what does our tool actually do in the world? — almost never needs a comparison to land. The comparison is usually a substitute for clarity.

The next time a pitch slide has “us vs them” columns, ask: whose stack are those “thems” in? If the answer is “the same stack we live in,” delete the columns. Describe what you do. Leave the room intact.

Every competitor on your pitch slide is a potential partner. Some of them are already your partners. Read the list that way before you write it.