Real Talk About AI from the Figma Leadership Collective

Figma Leadership Panel on AI Featuring Sara Vienna of MetaLab https://www.linkedin.com/in/saravienna/, Eliel Johnson of CVS https://www.linkedin.com/in/elieljohnson/, Andrew Hogan of Figma https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahhogan/ and myself. Photo by Chloe Jackman Photography https://www.chloejackman.com/

Implementing AI in your company is harder than it looks. Between ambiguous use cases, runaway costs and ethics that don’t come with a playbook there’s a lot that can go wrong. I recently joined a leadership panel at Figma’s Leadership Collective to talk about what it actually takes to get AI right, from the unexpected places it drives value to the messy parts no one likes to talk about. I’m deep in AI strategy in my current role, so I have thoughts. A lot of them.

Here are the questions from the panel and my extended answers 🎉

(Views and thoughts are my own.)

What are some of the hard parts about getting the company using generative AI?

When you up-skill an entire workforce with any new technology you will inevitably run into challenges along the way. I see it as my job to help guide and support my team during this time to make them successful. Here’s what I’ve run into:

1. Knowing when it’s actually needed. Not everything requires AI. Sometimes it’s a data science problem, not an AI one, and using the wrong tool can rack up unnecessary compute costs fast. At the same time, AI can sometimes be a “when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” situation for some product teams. I try to help…