As design firm Figma rolls out its first major AI upgrade for its platform, CEO and co-founder Dylan Field is taking no chances with customers amid steep AI adoption and demand curves and consumer hype. Figma is paying the cost of the AI upgrade for now instead of attempting to charge customers.
“We’re gonna eat the cost for 2024, because we don’t know how people are going to use the features yet. We don’t know how many of you will care, we don’t know how good they get,” Field said in an interview with CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on Thursday speaking from the company’s Config conference. “Watch what the usage is in the beta, see what the costs are, and then you can go from there in terms of figuring out where pricing should be.”
Figma’s UI3 redesign, released in limited beta on June 26 with a waitlist for additional users, includes a new toolbox called “Figma AI.”
Roughly six months after antitrust scrutiny forced Adobe to call off its acquisition of Figma, the redesign that widely integrates AI functionality is another competitive wedge in a battle with Adobe and the other highly valued design startup, Canva, which has been moving more into the enterprise market, with a valuation around $25 million.
The fast growth of Figma’s all-in-one product design functions accessed over a browser has become competitive with Adobe’s lineup. This core innovation by Figma, akin to how Google Docs are shared and revised, takes the place of designers working in silos on desktop apps while struggling to keep track of various file versions. Canva, known for its easy-to-use software tools, continues to scale up, going after business accounts, integrating AI, and competing more aggressively with Adobe.
In a blog post this week, Figma stressed a focus on technology that meets user needs what users need, rather than tossing out trendy ideas, including AI implementations, like chat box functions. “There’s a risk of these features feeling tacked on and distracting from what matters,” a group of top executives at the company wrote.
“What we care about is making sure we’re not just sprinkling AI fairy dust on top but rather really baking AI functionality into the product in order to make a designer’s life better,” Field told CNBC.
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“It definitely feels like a race to me,” Field said, referencing the AI model industry, whose customers include web companies rapidly adopting AI features. Adoption of the most consumer-desired AI features to beat out similar companies for market share may also be a race, he said. Figma is feeling the AI heat.
“It’s all about, as an individual company, how do we build for our audience, which is people making products,” Field said.
In June, Adobe shares surged the most since the Covid bull market of 2020 after better-than-expected financial results and the integration of AI into its product, Firefly, and its Enterprise business platform.
“The only thing constant is change,” Field told CNBC. As the large language models from Amazon and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, among others including Meta, get faster, “prices are decreasing,” he added.
Figma’s UI3 incorporates various generative AI features to streamline and standardize creative processes from page and app ideation through execution. Typing in directives for a page can generate aesthetics and prompt design ideas. It also streamlined design for Figjam, its original AI-powered workspace that generates agendas and allows for web design teamwork. A new product called “Figma Slides” is a potential competitor to Google Slides and Canva. Figma’s design tools are embedded in enterprise offerings from companies including Google and Oracle.
The AI competition is another step on the path to a potential IPO for Figma after the thwarted Adobe deal. In May, Figma announced a tender offer to allow current and former employees to sell shares at a $12.5 billion valuation, with the valuation up 25% from a 2021 fundraising but well below Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition offer. Canva also recently completed a transaction to allow early employees and investors to cash out at a $26 billion valuation — well below its peak private value of $40 billion. Like Figma, it’s also a highly anticipated IPO candidate.
“Either it’s M&A or IPO and we tried one of those, so you can probably guess as to the one that will be in our future,” Field said.
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TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
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Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.