ICONIQ Capital, a US-based investment management firm, has surveyed 300 executives from software companies to gain insight into their use of AI.
The report found that despite the rise of AI-powered coding and prototyping tools like Replit, Lovable, and Bolt, Figma remains the go-to platform for UI/UX design.
The survey revealed an 87% adoption rate for Figma, and teams overwhelmingly stick with its real-time collaboration, component libraries, and plugin ecosystem rather than seeking out AI-specific design tools.
“Design teams aren’t yet feeling the urgent need for AI-native product or design platforms. However many are using low/no-code solutions to Bolt, Lovable, and v0 by Vercel for rapid prototyping,” the report added.
Recently, Figma introduced a series of AI-powered features onto its platform. This includes a new prompt-to-code tool that turns static designs into interactive prototypes using natural language. Figma also unveiled Figma Sites, which enables publishing directly from prototypes to live websites.
In April, Figma confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States. The development comes more than a year after Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma was cancelled due to regulatory concerns. Adobe paid a termination fee of $1 billion to Figma.
As of last June, the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) had reached $700 million, according to research firm Sacra. As per Crunchbase, it has raised a total of $748.6 million through multiple funding rounds.
The rise of AI-powered coding tools, commonly referred to as ‘vibe coding’ tools, has sparked several debates about the need to use Figma for building prototypes of software products.
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and a renowned venture capitalist, earlier said he encountered a CEO of a “moderately big tech company” who replaced the design tool Figma with Replit, an AI code companion tool.
“Replit is so good at generating apps that they just go straight to prototype now,” Graham said as he recalled what the CEO told him. “This surprised me because I don’t even think of them as being in the same business.”
However, AIM interacted with multiple user experience designers, who said that Figma will continue to hold its relevance despite the ease with which one can code prototypes with tools like Replit, Lovable, and others.
The consensus is that building prototypes isn’t just about making user interfaces functional; it’s also about creating a seamless user experience.
Platforms like Figma help teams align on a shared vision, maintain a unique design system, think through user flows and journeys inside a product, and test assumptions before allocating resources towards building the application.
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