Figma CEO says it is ‘eating cost’ of AI upgrade for customers in 2024
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.
Canva ranked No. 6 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, while Figma ranked No. 26.
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.
“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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Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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