Figma uses AI to transform digital design

Figma's Chief Product Officer David Kossnick has been talking about how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of digital design, and the tool getting the spotlight is Figma Make. The pitch is simple: instead of dragging boxes around a canvas, you describe what you want and the software builds a working prototype around it.

What's notable here isn't the novelty of AI-assisted design—plenty of tools claim that now—but who Figma says gets to use it. Kossnick frames Make as something a marketer, a product manager, or a founder with zero coding background can pick up and actually ship something functional with, not just a static screen. That's a meaningful shift for a company whose entire reputation was built on giving professional designers a shared canvas to collaborate on.

The bigger story is workflow, not features. Figma has spent a decade making design collaborative in the way Google Docs made writing collaborative. Layering AI on top pushes that collaboration further down the chain, letting developers, designers, and non-technical teammates work from the same prototype instead of handing off static files and hoping nothing gets lost in translation.

Whether Figma Make actually holds up under real production pressure is a separate question from the marketing. Generating a clickable prototype is one thing; generating something a dev team trusts enough to build on is another. Kossnick's comments read as confident, but confidence from a CPO on a company blog post is not the same as evidence from teams shipping real products with it.