Just back from holiday in the Caribbean, so I missed attending Figma Config 2026 in person. I kept tabs on the beach, though. I will not be posting any pics! Here is my read on what Figma announced and what it tells us about where the creative tools market is heading.
I do like something Dylan Field said. For years, the pitch on AI in creative tools was that it lowers the floor and raises the ceiling. He said something more honest. AI has lowered the floor, but it has not raised the ceiling. The ceiling is still raised by people, the designers, creatives, and builders.
That reframes everything Figma shipped. The announcements aren’t about AI doing the design for you. They are about giving the human more powerful materials to work with. Code as a material you can drop on the canvas. Motion with a real timeline. Shaders you describe in plain language and shape by hand. Generative plugins you build by describing what you need. AI handles the repetitive setup so the person can spend time on the part that only a person can do.
So, watch how this lines up across the 3 companies I track. Adobe is threading AI through a professional creative suite built over decades. Canva is making design accessible to people who never trained as designers. Figma is betting on the canvas as the place where everything connects, where the designer, the code, the motion, and the AI live in one shared space. 3 bets on the same question. What is the human’s role when the machine can generate a first draft of anything?
Here is the part that connects to everything I have been writing about all spring. The Figma agent doesn’t get more useful because it is smarter. It gets more useful because of context. Skills that package how your team works. Connectors that reach into your stack. Attachments that bring in the brief and the research. The agent becomes valuable when it knows your work, your conventions, and your stack. That is the same lesson the data platforms and the customer experience platforms learned this year. The intelligence isn’t the hard part anymore. The context is.
So, the real story of Config isn’t that Figma added AI features. Every company did that this year. The real story is Figma betting on the human staying at the center, with AI as the material and the canvas as the place where the person does the work only a person can do. In a year where so much of the AI conversation has been about replacement, betting on the person is the more interesting bet, and the one worth watching.
The floor is lower than it has ever been. Anyone can make something now. But making something and making something worth making were never the same thing. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. That is what taste is, the judgment to know the difference. The tools handle the can. The should still belongs to the person, their point of view, and what they are willing to risk. That is the part of the work I’m not worried about losing as a creative. The should is still ours.