OddBytes Improves Employee Communication and Engagement with Beautiful.ai

Founded in 2022, OddBytes is a cutting-edge, multi-venture technology company that bolsters the connection between consumers and brands. Through personalized and tailored experiences, brands can advertise their products and services to their desired target audience, while online users can discover new stores and products as well as receive relevant recommendations. 

We caught up with Dani Nabors, CEO of OddBytes, to learn more about how her team is leveraging Beautiful.ai to keep employees connected.

When Dani took over OddBytes, it was primarily a Microsoft organization. And that was one of the first changes she made. “When we took over the company, I said, ‘alright, we're not messing around with PowerPoint anymore.’” Dani discovered Beautiful.ai and immediately recognized that the team could spend significantly less time building decks, without compromising design.

She says, “I was immediately fascinated by how much quicker I can make decks that are just beautiful. My PowerPoint decks never looked that great. At some point you just give up on the effort because to make it really look professional in PowerPoint it takes six hours, and who has six extra hours?”

Improving communication throughout the organization

With 135 employees scattered around the globe, being able to collaborate on presentations helps facilitate better communication across the organization. The ability to assign slides to colleagues, and comment and provide feedback in real-time, has allowed their team to cover more ground in less time. OddBytes relies on Slack to help keep them connected, and having Beautiful.ai integrated into their Slack network makes collaborating on decks more seamless. She says, “Presenting me things in Slack is so much more helpful than having to sort through my 600 notification emails.” Beautiful.ai’s Slack integration removes the clutter of lengthy email chains and unlocks a more efficient way to collaborate on decks throughout the business.

As for improving communication on an individual level, Dani leverages the DesignerBot rewrite feature to help organize her thoughts. English is her second language, and instead of jumping over to Google translate, she can utilize DesignerBot to help her rework her copy in a way that makes sense for the overarching story. 

Dani’s voice and tone is professional, but direct, and she didn’t want to lose that in translation. “DesignerBot has really helped me write sentences in English that sound better, without coming across as too corporate” she says.

Saving 50+ hours of design time

Any business can recognize that time is money. And the time historically wasted in PowerPoint can be redirected to more productive, revenue-driving projects with a presentation tool like Beautiful.ai. The ease of use allows the team at OddBytes to spend more time on business-focused tasks instead of tinkering with presentation slides.

For Dani, having a starting point with pre-built slide templates has been critical to time management. “With layouts to choose from you can already cut 40% of the time out before you even really start because you don’t have to spend time staring at a white slide and say, ‘where do I take this?’”

Dani adds, “What used to take weeks to put a deck together with everybody probably spending 10 to 15 hours on it— with five to six presenters, that's 60 to 90 hours— I think now we're done in under 10.”

Beautiful.ai saves them money simply in giving them time back, but also by requiring less resources to get a presentation out the door. OddBytes has been able to eliminate the need for their creative team overseeing the entire presentation design process. Now, they can set up the templates and team themes, and let other departments do the rest without having to worry about them staying on brand. 

Building trust and engagement among employees

One of the biggest wins for Dani has been building employee trust and engagement. “For us, it's really done a lot. A lot in employee engagement, more trust in the data, trust in what is being presented, and trust in the presenters,” Dani explained. “It really makes you look so much more professional and modern, which helped with a huge increase in employee engagement and trust in the narrative.”

“In PowerPoint, people are used to text heavy slides with 14 bullet points, single spaced. You could watch people's eyes roll back into their heads as soon as they saw these slides.” She says, “The layouts and the graphics, and the way you guys actually force people to embrace less is more, I think that is a real game changer.” Beautiful.ai encourages the presenter to visualize more and understand what needs to be on a slide versus what needs to be narrated.

Beautiful.ai has upgraded everybody's presentation game. Now at OddBytes’ town hall meetings, presentations have become more conversational. Things like emojis, pictures, and meaningful infographics force you to look at presentations differently. And as a result, colleagues and peers are actually paying attention and following along with the presenter. She explains, “People are more engaged, they ask more questions, and are more willing to dig into something as it’s being presented to them.”

Dani leaves us with, “Beautiful.ai has really changed how we present. We went away from this corporate style of ‘read after me’ to a very interactive, fun presentation that provides substance and value.”