6 Essential AI Tools Utilised by Top Product Designers in Major Corporations

A survey indicates that 74% of creative professionals spend over half their time on non-creative tasks. However, as a product designer, when asked about your favourite job aspects, routine tasks are unlikely to be mentioned.

Thankfully, the advent of AI tools has transformed the landscape for product designers, enabling a shift from repetitive tasks to creative endeavours. We've carefully selected six professional AI design software platforms, covering their features, pricing, limitations, and reviews.

#1. Adobe Sensei

Adobe Sensei, integral to the Adobe ecosystem, is a staple in Creative Cloud Suite and other Adobe marketing and analytics applications.

As an AI design software, it empowers designers to create precise designs, identify data patterns, make informed decisions, and enhance marketing targeting. It offers automated design, object recognition, and image editing.

Key features include:

• AI and machine learning capabilities
• Predictive analytics on customer behaviour
• Personalised offers and content
• Budget optimisation across targeting criteria
• Campaign performance tracking
• Intelligent content analysis and recommendations
• Enhanced video and audio optimisation
• Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud

Pricing: $35.99 with a 43% discount on the first purchase, regular price at $63.59. Discounts available for students and teachers at $23.99.

Renowned users include Coca-Cola, Cisco, Land Rover, Lenovo, IBM, NASA, and Canon.

#2. Midjourney

Midjourney excels as an AI-powered text-to-image generator, perfect for creating various images from app icons to product illustrations.

Its impressive features include:

• High-resolution custom image generation (2048 × 2048 pixels)
• Enhanced realism in image rendering
• Advanced zooming and repositioning tools
• Virtual assistance and user guides

Pricing: ranges from $10 to $120 per month

Midjourney is favoured by marketing agencies, designers, and illustrators globally.

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#3. Zeplin

Zeplin, although not an AI tool itself, integrates seamlessly with AI to automatically organise and tag design components, streamlining design communication.

Zeplin's automated design handoff process ensures developers receive complete, consistent, and annotated designs.

Key features:

• File, artboard, and screen status tags
• Jira integration for direct design integration into developer workflows
• Compatibility with tools like Sketch, Trello, Slack, Teams, and more, facilitating layout management without complex screens overburdened with layers
• User flow mapping for quicker, more efficient user journey design

Pricing: from $8 to $12/month. Special rates for large teams available on request.

Renowned among leaders in design-first organisations such as Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, and TikTok, Zeplin is used by over 200K companies. According to internal statistics, 97% of teams using Zeplin deliver higher quality products, with designers and developers saving 10 hours per week. Moreover, 94% of teams report improved team alignment.

#4. Copy.ai

Copy.ai is crucial for product designers to effectively express their design intentions and build trust by explaining why their designs offer the best solutions. Regular communication with the team, which includes developers, product managers, content designers, and other specialists, is essential. The more time spent on collaboration, describing solutions, and creating common terminology, the more value they collectively produce.

Developed on OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model (LLM), Copy.ai enables swift creation of product descriptions, advertising, sales and body copy, and other text types in seconds. It offers a variety of tools, writing frameworks, and features to facilitate this process and is available in over 25 languages.

Key features include:

• Over 90 copywriting templates
• Multilingual support
• Built-in plagiarism checker
• Tools for sentence rewriting and outline generation
• Capabilities for website call-to-action and email generation
• Efficient product description creation
• Support for over 2000 integrations

Pricing: $49/month for entrepreneurs or small teams maximising output, and $249/month for growing teams.

Copy.ai is actively utilised by companies like Phoenix, Siemens, and Virgin.

#5. Airtable

Airtable is a cloud-based, AI-augmented project management software, offering a visually appealing and user-friendly interface for teams to store, organise, and collaborate on structured data. It provides templates for easy setup and use and supports real-time collaboration and communication.

Key features include:

• Customizable views allowing users to analyse and organise their data as needed.
• Role assignment features for control over what collaborators can or cannot do within a workspace or base (Owner/Creator, Editor, Commenter, Read-Only).
• The ability to customise reporting with the platform’s out-of-the-box extensions. These extensions enable users to generate charts, graphs, and top-line metrics tailored to their team’s reporting needs.
• Software integrations with other business-critical tools like Jira, Asana, Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and Tableau.

Pricing: from $24/month to $54 billed monthly.

Airtable is employed by teams at over 450,000 companies, including Time, Levis, Shopify, and Autodesk.

#6. Pendo

Pendo is a product analytics and user feedback platform that leverages AI to analyse user behaviour and provide insights to enhance product experiences.

Its best features include:

• Tools for creating in-app guides and onboarding flows, customisation of guide layouts and triggers.
• Native analytics offering insights into user behaviour and feature usage. Includes Paths, retention, funnels, and analytics widgets.
• Product adoption facilitation through product analytics, feedback collection via surveys and polls.
• Product feedback collection tools like CES polls and mobile app reviews for gathering user feedback, and segmented feedback for insights from specific user groups.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on monthly active users (MAU), available upon request.

Pendo is used by companies like Cisco, Salesforce, Coursera, and Morgan Stanley to deliver exceptional product experiences.

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