For years, marketers have bemoaned the task of producing compelling visuals at the quality, quantity and speed demanded by the organization. The traditional creative process of moodboarding styles, art directing a shoot and meticulously refining visuals isn’t something that scales easily — at least not to the volume and speed of today’s content cycles.
While that creative process is essential for some businesses, it might not even be necessary for others. Stock image and video platforms are an undeniable resource. Still, even those have time-consuming drawbacks (like getting caught in a doom scroll trying to find the perfect stock image with all the required visual elements).
These days, as more AI-enabled tools infiltrate the tech stack, the big question for marketing teams producing visual content is where and how to allocate that human creativity — and where to let smart tools help.
From automated image generation tools to design assistants, below is a rundown of tools to make your visual content production more efficient, using AI to handle the tedious, manual tasks while still focusing creative control where you want it.
Smart tools for visual content creation
Over the last year, industry-standard creative tools like Adobe, Canva and Figma have quickly integrated AI features to take on the more tedious, time-consuming tasks involved in production, allowing marketers to focus their creative energy where it’s needed most.
1. Canva
Launched in 2023, Canva’s Magic Studio suite of AI features automates and streamlines several labor-intensive design tasks. The Magic Design tool, for example, can generate entire presentations (including outlines, slides and content) from a single text prompt. Magic Write uses an LLM to expand, refine and summarize written content for assets:
