By now we’ve all heard concerns about AI replacing workers and laying siege to entire industries. But before the AI launches a war against human civilization, it is quietly waging a war against evil meetings.
Last month, Figma, the hugely popular design platform favored by creators and designers alike, launched the public beta of FigJam AI, a set of tools aimed directly at improving meetings. FigJam AI is part of a series of big bets on AI from Figma this year, with even bigger risk-taking moves lately. This month, Adobe and Figma mutually agreed to withdraw a long-dormant $20 billion acquisition offer of Adobe after regulators in the United Kingdom and Europe raised antitrust concerns about the sale. (Adobe agreed to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.) In June, Figma acquired Diagram, a five-person AI startup that develops tools for the platform. In August, it launched an open beta of Jambot, an AI plugin that is now among the most popular plugins on the platform. (Currently all tools are built based on OpenAI’s GPT large language models.)
Start a meeting in FigJam and the AI can now suggest an icebreaker or brainstorming exercise. AI can summarize your digital sticky notes and suggest next steps, and Jambot can rewrite meeting notes in email format to the product manager. You can ask the ChatGPT-like Jambot plugin any question or task it with clearing up your nonsense; The “rabbit hole” feature will help you kill a few hours. It will even rewrite your notes as poetry.
“One of Figma’s core values is ‘Play,’ and we are deliberately incorporating fun elements into FigJam,” says Yuhki Yamashita, Figma’s chief product officer. “Entertainment is the way to keep people engaged, and that was actually a big part of our product strategy for FigJam; it’s what sets us apart from the average workplace tool.” Users seem to understand this; They asked Figma’s AI to create a dating roadmap and set up therapy sessions for their UX designers.
These tools aren’t just ways to make a mess. Technology and design meetings are, of course, a huge market and at the heart of Figma’s business. Although the company was built around a fanatical base of creative director types, two-thirds of the company’s users are no longer designers, according to the company. “It was so long ago,” says Jordan Singer, founder of Diagram and now a product designer at Figma, “that we didn’t imagine AI was doing the creative side of business and idea generation.”
At Code and Theory, a Manhattan-based, tech-first creative agency, Figma has become a part of nearly every major collaborative meeting with clients; So are artificial intelligence tools. The agency specializes in “design systems intended to scale,” including websites, e-commerce platforms, and even AI products. Half of its employees are creative and the other half are engineers.
The typical Code and Theory meeting begins with managers, designers, marketing professionals, and technical staff reviewing a website or product prototypes in real time. Marketing professionals can create websites or ad copy in FigJam while engineers code in Figma’s development mode environment. If this all sounds like the future of work, that’s part of Figma’s appeal.
According to Dan Gardner, co-founder and executive chairman of Code and Theory, Figma’s AI tools aren’t just about making meetings go a little faster; Still, this helps. A small spur-of-the-moment suggestion from an AI, or even a hallucination, can cause a meeting to stall due to its inertia. At Code and Theory, this meant better, if not shorter, creative meetings. “We think treating AI solely as an efficiency factor is a losing battle,” said Gardner. “AI is a tool for creativity. It’s a multiplier.”
Not everything is plug and play. Dave DiCamillo, Code and Theory’s chief technology officer, said FigJam AI is surprisingly excellent at creating organizational charts, but not accurate enough at creating Gantt charts for mapping production schedules. And no matter what AI produces, there is always a need for human review. “It’s 80% how we coach our teams,” Camillo said. With any AI product, “you still need to do the 20%,” he said.
If Figma has its way, AI might not take your business away, but it might expand it. Singer says Figma’s AI can help give non-designers the opportunity to visualize their ideas. “AI could really lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people,” he says. Gardner says he believes the creative workforce will soon be redefined “to be more about invention than skill” through AI tools. This means that soon anyone can become a designer or coder. It’s not hard to imagine a near-future future where product designs and the code that powers them can be created solely through language commands. (It would be a dystopia when your CEO starts making font and kerning choices.)
Figma isn’t saying much about its future plans, but it seems likely that it has broader ambitions for the consumer market. Adobe, which announced its own ambitious generative AI plans this year and has nearly $6 billion in cash on hand, is no longer Figma’s future owner; Now he can be his rival. In a statement after the deal collapsed, Figma said it was “exciting to find ways to partner for our users.”
But Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. “We think AI plays a really central role in the entire platform,” Singer said. In theory, this could mean not only better meetings, but also more capable co-workers. “In a collaborative environment where you work with many people on a project, AI really elevates everyone,” Singer said.