By now, we’ve all heard the worries about artificial intelligence replacing workers and laying siege to entire industries (if not the world at large). But before AI starts a war against human civilization, it’s quietly waging a war against bad meetings.

Last month, Figma, the wildly popular design platform that’s become a go-to for creatives and designers alike, launched a public beta of FigJam AI, a set of tools that are aimed squarely at improving meetings. FigJam AI is part of a series of big bets on AI by Figma this year, moves that have recently taken on even bigger stakes. This month, Adobe and Figma mutually agreed to withdraw Adobe’s long-stalled $20 billion acquisition offer after regulators in the U.K. and Europe raised antitrust concerns over the sale. (Adobe agreed to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.) In June, Figma acquired Diagram, a five-person AI startup that builds tools for the platform. In August it launched an open beta of Jambot, an AI plug-in that’s now among the platform’s most popular. (At the moment, all of the tools are built off OpenAI’s GPT large language models.)

Start a meeting in FigJam and AI can now suggest an icebreaker or a brainstorming exercise. The AI can summarize your digital stickies and suggest next steps, and Jambot can rewrite meeting notes into the form of an email to a product manager. You can ask its ChatGPT-like Jambot plugin any question or task it with clarifying your ramblings, and a “rabbit hole” feature will help you kill a few hours. It’ll even rewrite your notes as a poem.

“One of Figma’s core values is ‘Play,’ and we intentionally incorporate playful elements throughout FigJam,” says Yuhki Yamashita, Figma’s chief product officer. “Fun is how you keep people engaged, and this was actually a big part of our product strategy for FigJam—it’s what differentiates us from the average workplace tool.” Users seem to be catching on; they’ve asked Figma’s AI to make things like make a dating roadmap for UX designers and come up with therapy sessions.

These tools are not just ways to screw around. Tech and design meetings are, of course, a huge market and very much at the heart of Figma’s business. Though the company was built around a rabid audience of creative director-types, two-thirds of the company’s users are now non-designers, according to the company. “It wasn’t too long ago,” says Jordan Singer, Diagram’s founder and now a product designer at Figma, “that we didn’t imagine AI doing the creative side of work and ideation.”

At Code and Theory, a Manhattan-based technology-first creative agency, Figma has become part of almost every major collaborative meeting with clients—and so have its AI tools. The agency specializes in “design systems that are meant to scale”—including websites, e-commerce platforms, and, yes, even AI products. Half of its employees are creatives, the other half are engineers.

The typical Code and Theory meeting starts with execs, designers, marketing pros, and technical staff all riffing on a website or product prototypes in real time. Engineers are coding in Figma’s dev mode environment, while marketing experts could be coming up with website or ad copy in FigJam. If it all sounds very future-of-work, that’s part of Figma’s appeal.

For Code and Theory’s cofounder and executive chairman Dan Gardner, Figma’s AI tools are not just about meetings that move a little faster—though, of course, that helps. A small prompt suggestion from an AI, or even a hallucination, can get a stalled meeting over its inertia. At Code and Theory, that has meant creative meetings that are better, though not necessarily shorter. “We think that the conversation around AI only as an efficiency driver is a losing battle,” Gardner said, “AI is a tool for creativity. It’s a multiplier.”

It’s not all plug and play. Dave DiCamillo, Code and Theory’s chief technology officer, said FigJam AI is shockingly excellent at creating org charts, but it’s not quite accurate enough in generating Gantt charts to map out production schedules. (Figma noted that these features are still beta.) And there’s always the need for human review, regardless of what an AI produces. “The way we’re coaching our teams is that it’s the 80%,” Camillo said. With any AI product, he said, “you still need to do the 20%.”

In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, Figma noticed its users were congregating, chatting, and generally lingering on Figma design pages. That led to the 2021 launch of FigJam, a kind of web-based digital whiteboard. The product took off and it was around this time, not coincidentally, that Figma’s valuation began to skyrocket.

If you’re like me, meetings are like death or taxes—inevitable, though we’d all probably prefer to avoid them. (Play is not one of my core values, though my 2-year-old would certainly like that to change.) And yet the future is coming. For every dead-eyed Zoom chat or meeting that could have been an email, an AI will soon nudge us from our before-the-first-coffee-hits stupor. And Figma has competition, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom itself are among the other very large companies trying to use AI to make our meetings less terrible.

If Figma has its way, AI may not take your job, but it may expand it. Figma’s AI can help give non-designers the opportunity to visualize their ideas, Singer says. “AI really can lower the barrier to entry for so many people,” he says. Gardner says he believes creative workforces will soon be redefined through AI tools “to be less about skill and more about invention.” This is to say everyone could soon be a designer or a coder. It’s not hard to imagine a near-term future where product designs—and the code that powers them—can be generated simply through language prompts. (It’ll be a dystopia when your CEO starts making font and kerning choices.)

Figma won’t say much about its future plans, but it seems very likely that it has even broader ambitions for the consumer market. Adobe, which this year announced its own ambitious generative AI plans and is sitting on some $6 billion cash, is no longer Figma’s future owner—it may now be its competition. In a statement after the deal fell apart, Figma said it’s “excited to find ways to partner for our users.”

But Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that “we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.” In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. “In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,” Singer said, “AI really up-levels everyone.”