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It took ChatGPT only 5 days to reach over 1 million users [1]. It's the fastest-growing app in history so far.
When it was released on November 22, 2022, the world rapidly embraced it due to its friendly interface, free access, and the magical feeling of artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT is merely the name of a friendly product people can use for free. The business of its owner, OpenAI, is actually selling access to GPT, one of OpenAI's Large Language Models (LLM).
Besides ChatGPT, tools like Bard, Dall-E, MidJourney, Synthesia, GitHub Copilot, and Notion AI represent the explosion of generative AI applications that we have seen in the past months. All these tools are now revolutionizing how people do their work, streamline processes, and solve problems.
In this blog post, I will explain how Pixelmatters:
- Sees this AI revolution evolving.
- Helps tech companies reposition their offering considering AI.
- Adopts AI into its workflows to increase productivity.
How we view the current AI revolution as a leading Digital Product Studio
With the explosive growth and democratization of ChatGPT, tech companies quickly started to consider implementing generative AI (mostly via OpenAI) in their products. It was the start of a race that is still ongoing.
But... how long will this last?
I see this wave as a profound revolution. Similar to how mobile or the cloud changed everyone's perspective on how to create technology, AI is now forcing people to adapt, companies to do better, jobs to be optimized, and new ones to be created. But at the end of the day, AI is just a tool. It's a means to an end.
In 2 to 5 years, AI will not be a differentiating factor in your product. It will be as common as hosting your software on the cloud, which the user doesn’t really care about and takes as granted. Every company will have integrated AI in some way, and everyone will be used to using AI in their day-to-day work. The challenge is how to use AI in a way that increases the value of your product.
How Pixelmatters helps companies reposition their products to include AI
The ease of access to generative AI has allowed companies to introduce new AI-powered features into their products. However, the high pace at which this is happening means that companies' positioning in the market needs to be rethought. They need to showcase the power of AI and how they are using it while actually providing value to their customers instead of solely following the hype train. That’s where we at Pixelmatters, a digital product studio, come in!
For example, what was advertised as a simple knowledge base and documentation tool for a company now needs to be repositioned as an AI-powered workplace search tool. I'm referring to the recent work we have done with Glean. In just 2 months, ahead of the launch of Glean Chat, an AI chat assistant for the workplace, we rebuilt their entire website to showcase Glean's new AI capabilities.
Another interesting example is SchoolJoy, an up-and-coming educational AI tech company. They needed help to showcase the value, safety, and reliability of their AI solutions for schools and districts. You can read the client review here.
How we embrace AI tools as a digital product studio
Gone are the days when it was inevitable for mundane tasks to consume significant time and energy. Everything is (or at least, can be) faster today. As technology continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, our ways of working have to advance too.
With the market flooded with generative AI tools for pretty much everything, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish what is useful from what is not.
Our approach at Pixelmatters is to be surgical when selecting potential tools to adopt. Besides all the new apps coming out, existing products that successfully integrate AI into their offerings, to me, represent the most likely big winners.
Below, I'll share three cases where excellent existing products became increasingly powerful because of AI and how we are using them at Pixelmatters.
GitHub Copilot: faster and more effective coding
With the introduction of Copilot, GitHub has taken the commitment to helping engineers write better code to the next level. It is being used by more than one million engineers at over 20,000 organizations.
We’re investing in GitHub Copilot Business Plan to ensure strict control over our developers’ configurations related to telemetry and the prevention of plain usage of public code. This strategy aims to maintain the security, confidentiality, and copyright integrity of the clients’ projects we work on.
More than three billion lines of code generated with AI have already been accepted, making it the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool2.
At Pixelmatters, our engineers use Copilot to:
- Generate code snippets.
- Generate unit tests quickly.
- Generate entire functions or classes.
The main reason we use Copilot is to increase coding speed and free up our engineers' time from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more challenging engineering problems. I believe that AI will not replace engineers; instead, it will make them faster and more productive.
In fact, a recent study by GitHub showed that engineers who used GitHub Copilot completed tasks 55% faster than those who did not use GitHub Copilot3.
Notion AI: writing and consuming information more efficiently
When Notion AI was announced, its value offering went through the roof, and 2 million people joined the waitlist. Their AI integration helps their customers produce, organize, find, and consume information much faster and easier.
Here’s how we are more productive with Notion AI:
- Summarize meeting notes.
- Surface takeaways from sales calls.
- Brainstorm marketing ideas.
- Complete sentences and paragraphs when writing info docs.
We were already using Notion before, but now with Notion AI, we are much faster and more efficient at writing and extracting the relevant information we need from wikis and documents.
Figma AI: a superpowered digital design
Ok, I cannot tell you how much we love Figma at Pixelmatters. Any digital product design studio runs on Figma and uses it for everything design-related. We are big fans due to their collaborative approach, but also because of their ability to ship innovation at an incredible pace.
Figma AI was announced last June, so it's very recent, and we are still implementing the new capabilities into our workflows. However, I can already tell you why we are super excited about it. Here are some of Figma’s AI features that we believe enhance design and implementation:
- Create color palettes instantly from images.
- Generate appropriate copy to fill designs.
- Automatically generate button states (e.g. hover, clicked).
- Generate code from a design selection.
- Update code components to match the most recent design.
- Summarize comments left on designs.
Collaboration is where Figma shines, but with these new AI capabilities, designers gain superpowers they never had before, without compromising on quality. The future of design workflows is here, and our designers are empowered and ready to shape the visual experiences of tomorrow.
Conclusion
The future of work is here, and the team at Pixelmatters is committed to staying at the forefront of innovation, embracing AI, and continuously optimizing our workflows to deliver exceptional work as a leading digital product studio. AI is an ally we use to help our clients thrive in the AI-powered future!
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