As AI Disrupts Design, Figma CEO Says Creativity is Still Human

Cloud-based interface design platform Figma has had more than a stumble on the stock exchanges. Its shares are down more than 80% since its initial public offering in July last year, but its troubles aren’t over yet. Morgan Stanley and Piper Sandler both recently cut their price targets on Figma even further despite the company reporting 46% year-on-year revenue growth in Q1 2026. 

That creates a unique dichotomy.

Figma grew its revenue by monetising its AI products, including Figma Make and Figma Weave, which are designed to streamline and automate creative pipelines. It saw high retention rate even after implementing add-on purchases and saw a 5x user growth on its model context protocol server.

Yet, its services sit alongside Anthropic’s Claude Design and Google Stitch that allow users to generate functional designs and web pages via prompts. While cutting the price target, Morgan Stanley acknowledged that the design company’s recent results “provide a strong case for Figma’s positioning in AI”, the broader debate remains centred on whether AI-generated design workflows could reduce reliance on traditional design platforms over time.

However, Figma Co-founder and CEO Dylan Field is convinced that AI-native design companies and front-end models cannot challenge the decade-old company’s relevance.

“We do not expect that the creative breakers that will differentiate the company will come from AI invention,” he told AIM during a media briefing ahead of Figma Config 2026, Figma’s annual conference in San Francisco, where the company unveiled a slate of AI-powered capabilities.

Field acknowledged that AI models are becoming increasingly capable, particularly in coding and frontier mathematics. But he argued that the qualities that make products stand out still come from human judgement rather than model intelligence. Figma’s Chief Design Officer, Loredana Crisan, agreed.

“AI is a tool. This is why we’re leaning into AI, because we think that you need what AI can produce. It’s a material.”

She noted that when looking at creative designs, one doesn’t think about the execution, but something much deeper comes to mind. “We see the human behind them, their intention, judgement, care, and point of view,” she added.

Figma is betting that human judgement will remain critical. That leaves it with enough room to release products to help designers focus less on repetitive work and more on decisions around user experience, intent, and expression.

“We’re looking at the ways in which we can bring AI into a creative environment in the way that designers expect,” Crisan said.

That idea runs through many of Figma’s announcements this year.

The company’s newly introduced code layers, motion tools, shaders, AI workflows through Weave, and fresh agent capabilities allow teams to automate tasks and create custom tools. The aim is to bring more of the product-building process into its canvas, rather than forcing users to switch between multiple applications.

Figma has released its Design Agent beta to 100% of users on Pro, Org, and Enterprise plans.

Beyond new creative tools, Figma also expanded the role of its AI agent. In the keynote, the company introduced connectors that allow the agent to pull information from services such as Slack, Notion, GitHub and Atlassian, alongside “custom skills” that let teams save prompts as reusable workflows. The announcements suggest Figma is increasingly positioning its AI not as a standalone assistant but as an operating layer that spans design, code and collaboration workflows. 

Winning Without Owning the Model

As AI companies race to build larger and more capable foundation models, Figma is taking a different route. The company has built smaller models internally, and instead of building a foundational models, wants to benefit from advances across the AI ecosystem.

“For us, it is very clear that as models get better, Figma gets better,” Field said.

That philosophy is perhaps most visible in Weave, the AI-powered creative platform Figma acquired last year and is now integrating into its broader canvas. Rather than relying on a single AI provider, Weave allows designers to combine outputs from multiple visual models, blend them with brand assets and fonts, and shape the final result within a shared creative workflow. 

Field described Weave as “a single canvas where you could bring all of the world's visual models and string them together.” 

The Next Design Problem: Agents

Another question hanging over the industry concerns agents. As AI systems begin performing tasks on behalf of users, software updates may increasingly serve agents rather than humans. As for design companies, what happens when the user is an agent?

Field believes that the shift creates more work for designers, not less. “You’ll always want to be able to audit what your agent is doing,” he said.

In addition to auditability, he argued that agents create further design challenges, design surfaces to work with, and tools to build. The economics of AI also remain unsettled.

While much of the industry focuses on model performance, conversations are turning towards measuring whether AI-generated output delivers meaningful business value. Field suggested that businesses are entering a phase in which token consumption and computing costs are facing greater scrutiny. “When you compare that to human time, sometimes it’s totally irrational.”

According to new research that the company unveiled at Config, 57% of respondents believe design has become more important in the AI era. Among developers, that figure rose from 44% in 2025 to 65% in 2026.

For Figma, that debate reinforces its central argument. It still has a foot in the game.

And the market sentiment has started to reflect that. Last week, Citi initiated coverage on Figma’s stock with a ‘Buy’ rating and a $36 price target, implying a 80% upside. Meanwhile, on Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for the stock turned ‘bearish’ from ‘bullish’.

Meanwhile, the company’s focus on India is also becoming more visible. It will host the first-ever Config India in Bengaluru on October 15. This comes after Figma opened its Bengaluru office in November last year and marks its growing investment in one of its fastest-growing product and developer communities.