The Time-Saving Presentation Fix That Helps IDC Stay On-Brand

When your business depends on turning data into insights, every hour counts. For IDC, traditional presentation tools were slowing analysts down—until they found a better way.

IDC (International Data Corporation) is a global leader in technology market intelligence, employing over 1,500 analysts across 150 countries. With deep expertise in areas from telecom to cloud infrastructure, IDC delivers data-backed insights to clients through detailed reports, trackers, and presentations. As Vice President of Research Technical Operations, Hugh Ujhazy is responsible for enabling these analysts to produce their best work efficiently and at scale.

Historically, IDC's analysts operated in academic silos, crafting their presentations independently with traditional tools like PowerPoint. While some took pride in design, most faced a tedious, inefficient process rife with redundancy. Decks were inconsistent in quality and branding, requiring hours of effort to create, redesign, or locate prior materials.

The adoption of Beautiful.ai marked a shift from isolated slide authorship to collaborative content development. According to Hugh, the "Smart Slides were a revelation." Analysts could now build, adapt, and revise visual narratives without professional design support to make them look polished. 

Closing the gap between data and insight

“At IDC, we’re in the business of producing insight over data,” Hugh explains. “We live in a world where the gap between data and insight has to be as short as possible.” Bridging that gap quickly and clearly is core to IDC’s value proposition.

To maintain competitive advantage, Hugh and his team knew they needed to overhaul their content creation process. Traditional presentation-building methods were slowing things down and that delay translated to missed opportunities. “With the process that has Beautiful.ai at the very heart of it, we want to be days between data and insight,” Hugh said. “The shorter that gap, the more valuable our data becomes.”

Eliminating “blank page syndrome”

One of the most common creative challenges IDC faced was what Hugh refers to as “blank page syndrome.” Just as silence in a conversation begs to be filled, a blank slide demands structure. “Those Smart Slides were a big thing,” he recalls. “Creating guardrails around that content means that I can tell the story in a succinct way.”

Beautiful.ai’s Smart Slide technology provided those guardrails, empowering analysts to focus on narrative instead of layout. Rather than wrestle with formatting, they could jump straight into the story supported by structured, design-forward templates that made ideas easy to follow.

Reducing time to impact across the organization

Before adopting Beautiful.ai, IDC conducted a survey of its analysts and discovered a significant time drain. “Analysts were spending about 50, 60, 70 hours a week creating their content,” Hugh said. “About 30% of that time was spent collecting and organizing data.”

Adding or removing a funnel step, transforming layouts mid-flow, and accessing shared assets reduced both frustration and time to impact.

In the old workflow, analysts kept massive “reference decks”—some stretching to 200 slides—which they cobbled together to create new presentations. The result? Disjointed Frankendecks that required the analyst to verbally stitch the story together during delivery. This process wasn’t just inefficient, it risked diluting the clarity and impact of their insights.

“Using Beautiful.ai in our production process, the time to production of a deck has been going down,” Hugh noted. “We've probably given hours if not days back to the analyst.”

Unlocking new insight through AI-powered features

One of the most transformative moments came when IDC began using Beautiful.ai’s AI slide generation capabilities. “One analyst came to me, and we were looking at a presentation they were working on,” Hugh recounted. “We took a document, handed that into the AI, and it created a diagram stacking up key takeaways in a particular way.”

The reaction from the analyst was telling: “I’d never thought of doing it like that.”

That spontaneous moment of realization revealed a new frontier — not just speeding up content creation, but enabling analysts to see patterns and connections in their data that might have otherwise been overlooked. “Generating new insights out of the pieces coming together was a Eureka moment for them,” Hugh said.

“Those things, when all come together in Beautiful.ai properly, are achieved,” Hugh concludes. “We can’t do what Beautiful.ai does in any other way.”

For IDC, Beautiful.ai isn’t just another presentation tool, it’s how its teams move faster, communicate smarter, and tell better stories. From analyst insights to sales deck, IDC has turned hours of formatting into minutes of real impact.