🫣 Who ya got in the AI design wars? 🤔

Hey there,

Q: What is a good indicator that AI has taken over the world?

A: My wife, a teacher, asked me about ChatGPT yesterday.

When the teachers come for a technology, it’s time to put your helmets on and adjust your seat into an upright position.

Anyways, welcome to all our new subscribers. As always, please consider passing this newsletter on to a friend!

It’s been another wild week for AI. Here’s what we have for you this week:

• Adobe, Canva exchange blows

• Microsoft launches Notion alternative

• 3 tools to take the uggh out of presentation decks

Adobe, Canva exchange blows

Apparently, Adobe will not go quietly into the night. This week, the multimedia GIANT announced Firefly, its own art generator tool. Not to be confused with its other AI (Adobe Illustrator), Adobe’s new AI tool is a generative AI made for creators. It’s currently in beta and offers tooling around digital imaging and photography, illustration and design, and even video and 3D imaging.

What remains to be seen is if the tool is as easy to use as some of the other generative art tools have become. Adobe isn’t very well known to be “user-friendly” for non-designer-types.

Canva, on the other hand, is a non-designer’s dream. [Spoken from a first-person perspective]

The product team at Canva also announced some AI-ish features coming soon at their annual “Canva Create” event. Among its many new updates forthcoming, Canva showcased a number of AI-powered features, including:

• Ability to erase and replace items in an image

• Text-to-slide deck functionality

• More AI-generated text, including 18+ languages supported

• Better and faster text-to-image capabilities

• Image-to-design template options

As a Canva user, I’m excited about its AI tools. That said, there are so many features inside Canva already that I’ve yet to use. I wonder at what point are there diminishing returns in a tool’s feature set? I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet for AI-powered tools, but there has to be an end to the madness, no?

Microsoft launches Notion alternative

Microsoft has been on a bit of a roll when it comes to AI-powered tools. Last week, its Copilot tool for O365 was all the rage. Now, they’ve introduced Loop, its clone of Notion.

Loop has three main functions:

1.) Loop components: Widgets to help users collaborate in a chat, email, document, or another Microsoft tool.

2.) Loop pages: Canvases that allow users and teams to organize components and add additional elements.

3.) Loop workspaces: Spaces where other components and pages live specific to a project or theme.

What’s cool about Loop is that, for users of other Microsoft tools, you can easily use it alongside, inside, or parallel to apps like Outlook, Teams, and Word. The AI-powered Copilot tool will also be integrated. It’s currently in private testing.

As a marketing leader at an organization using the Microsoft suite, it’s exciting to see these types of tools being built and integrated. While Microsoft isn’t known for being first to market with specific functionality, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the impact tools like Teams, Planner, and Power Automate can kick a team’s cadence up a bit.

We currently have a patchwork system of Microsoft and third-party tools that, at any moment seems like it could fail. I’ll be examining Copilot and Loop to see just how many third-party tools I can remove from the equation.

Will you be doing the same?

3 AI-powered tools for making presentation decks

For those of us tasked with creating slide decks, AI has been a huge help given all the great slide-builder tools being introduced. As I’ve covered here before, coordinating the creation of a slide deck amongst a group of colleagues isn’t exactly enjoyable. That said, AI is helping take the uggh out of slide deck creation.

Here are three tools marketers, salespeople, startups and so many others, can use to level up their slide decks:

SlidesAI

With just a few clicks, you can transform any piece of text into visually appealing slides that are perfect for any occasion. Whether you're making a sales pitch, giving a lecture, or presenting at a conference, SlidesAI.io has you covered.

Choose from a variety of presentation types, including general, educational, sales, and conference, pick the total number of slides and let our AI-powered tool do all the heavy lifting.SlidesAI.io is the ultimate time-saver, automating the slide creation process so you can focus on what really matters: delivering a killer presentation.

Tome

Tome is an AI-powered storytelling format that makes it easy to create powerful stories with any type of content. It has features such as drag-and-drop creation, responsive pages, one-click themes, live interactive content from the web, video narration, and easy sharing for any screen. It is used by storytellers in product & design reviews, company strategy, customer education, sales decks & pitches and to share complex ideas.

Just this week, Tome introduced an easy way to turn docs into presentations.

Canva

Introduced at this past week’s “Canva Create” event, Canva is taking its presentation capabilities to the next level.

To save time and avoid the anxiety of starting with a blank page, Magic Design offers a solution to generate a first draft of your Canva Presentation. All you need to do is provide a brief idea, and Magic Design will use its intuitive capabilities to create an outline, slides, and content for your presentation.

This way, you can focus on adding your personal touches and making your presentation more engaging. With Magic Design's help, you can make your presentation stand out without worrying about the initial draft.

Tweet of the week

Thanks for reading. Each week, we’ll review the news and highlight some AI tools creatives need to know about and deliver them straight to your inbox.

If you have a product you think we should add, you can submit it here. Contact us here if you’d like to contact us about advertising, sponsorship, or partnership opportunities. Of course, you can always visit ReplacingYou.com to see the entire landscape – with tools being added daily.

Until next week,

Cheers,

Ben