Sakana AI adds interactive reading and PowerPoint export to Marlin

Letting an AI spend hours digging through the internet to drop a 50-page research dossier on your desk sounds amazing until you actually have to read it. Verifying the claims takes forever, and turning it into a deck for your boss takes even longer.

Tokyo-based Sakana AI rolled out two major features for its autonomous research platform, Sakana Marlin: Interactive Reading and editable PowerPoint exports. Both tackle the messy reality that parsing AI research has become just as much work as doing the research itself.

Question the report, jump straight to the proof

Marlin launched in June on a promise to automate end-to-end research using proprietary AB-MCTS technology, running autonomous research sessions for up to eight hours. But users at consultancies, financial firms, and enterprises ran into an unexpected wall: reviewing dozens of dense pages still took hours, and there was no easy way to ask the AI how it arrived at a specific conclusion.

The new Interactive Reading feature fixes this by letting you chat directly with an AI agent about the output. Instead of plowing through a long document chronologically, you can ask questions, debate interpretations, and jump straight to the relevant passages in the text.

The neatest touch is citation tracking. When you click a reference link in the report, the agent opens the original source page and highlights the exact sentence behind the claim. Users no longer have to manually open tabs and scan external articles to verify facts.

Decks you can actually edit

The second addition addresses the presentation bottleneck. Marlin can now export research directly into native PowerPoint slides, complete with fully editable text, shapes, data tables, and charts. Every slide also carries the source URLs for quick fact-checking.

The export tool supports custom templates as well. That means consulting teams and corporate strategists can drop their own company or client slide layouts straight into the exporter, skipping the painful copy-paste formatting grind after the fact.

Marlin is currently open to teams under a pay-as-you-go setup with instant credit card signup, alongside an available free trial.

Why it matters

We think Sakana AI just tackled the biggest unaddressed bottleneck in autonomous AI research: trust and delivery.

Most deep-research agents treat long documents as the finish line. In reality, handing a decision-maker a 60-page PDF simply shifts the grunt work from Googling to reviewing. If confirming an AI's claims takes just as long as doing the research manually, nobody will trust it in high-stakes environments.

By tethering claims directly to highlighted source passages and spitting out editable, branded decks, Marlin turns an impenetrable black box into a functional draft. It targets the practical needs of consultants and analysts who need to defend every bullet point in front of clients.

The real test will be whether users still gloss over citations when the interface makes them look authoritative. But as a workflow bridge between raw synthetic research and executive-ready presentations, it looks like one of the smartest enterprise UX upgrades we have seen this year.