Collaborative design platform provider Figma has added a suite of generative AI features to its FigJam whiteboarding software to help users produce, summarise, and sort meeting content.
Launched in April 2021 as a spinoff tool to facilitate user conversations and collaboration efforts on the Figma platform, FigJam aims to support ideation and brainstorming through workflows and basic diagrams housed in a digital whiteboard.
While Figma was originally envisioned as a platform for designers, the company’s chief product officer, Yuhki Yamashita, said that two-thirds of Figma’s weekly active users are non-designers, and it is this group of people that the company wants to be able to service with the new AI capabilities.
“Figma and FigJam are redesigning the way teams work together,” he said. “We believe AI is going to be a core part of this process.”
With the new features, which have been bundled into a package labelled FigJam AI, customers can use text prompts to generate meeting templates and diagrams, request icebreakers, brainstorm, and create calendars, tables, charts, and more to populate blank FigJam canvases.
Users will have the option of picking from a selection of predetermined prompts or generating their own, depending on their specific organisational or meeting needs. Some prompts, such as the meeting icebreaker, will offer up different output each time they are selected and can also be adjusted or customised to better suit the session.
While a lot of other tools in the whiteboarding market provide users with the ability to generate diagrams, what sets FigJam apart are the AI-generated board layouts, according to Katie Chambers, FigJam advocate at Figma. These help to address a common pain point for users around how to structure meetings and make them more engaging for participants.
“We're really excited to have FigJam AI level up people’s facilitation skills… while helping them to think about how to structure their meetings by using that generate functionality to create those templates that are now available,” she said.
Ideas that emerge from brainstorming sessions can then be automatically sorted by FigJam AI, making it quicker to see any overarching themes that have emerged. These ideas can also be summarised so that meeting participants have greater clarity over the key takeaways and next steps.
The ability of AI to help kickstart the creative process is something that Yamashita said he’s excited about, adding that the company is going to continue to explore the opportunities AI has to offer.
FigJam’s new native AI features are powered by OpenAI and will be free for all customer tiers at today’s launch.
