By Kosta Bolgov
Freehand AI: The next step forward for the Intelligent Canvas
Kosta Bolgov
At InVision we’re obsessed with improving team productivity. With the introduction of the Intelligent Canvas, Freehand unlocked a new level of productivity through Smart Workflows. This game-changing set of capabilities bridges the gap between unstructured and structured work, adds intelligence and automation for each step, and strengthens connections with functional tools through bi-directional integrations. Every aspect of Freehand is geared towards reducing hurdles to bring teams closer together, and deliver maximum impact by focusing on getting real work done.
Because of this focus, we’ve been keenly observing how AI and the recent innovations of Generative AI have the potential to significantly unlock productivity and fundamentally change how teams work. Freehand is now ready to take the next leap, leveraging the massive opportunity AI presents to help make every team member even more productive.
That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of Freehand AI. Built into the fabric of the intelligent canvas, we believe Freehand AI takes a major step forward by not just smoothing out team workflows, but drastically reducing major steps in process, and maximizing the return on your collaboration tooling investment.
Unlock productivity for the whole team
Freehand AI can supercharge any of our Smart Workflows. Teams can save valuable days and weeks that would have otherwise been spent on synthesis, produce more thorough content, and reduce human error and bias that can creep into work on the canvas. Various InVision-made, AI-enabled templates are available to inspire teams around the activities and workflows where Freehand AI is best used. You can also add Freehand AI capabilities to any custom templates your team creates, allowing workflow owners to scalably deploy AI in a consistent way, producing more efficient processes for their team.
Go from messy to structured in seconds
Think of the last time you had a workshop and how many hours it took to organize all of your team’s feedback. It can take several hours, days, even weeks to read, understand, identify patterns, and ultimately author actionable synthesis. When looking at your entire organization, this time costs an astounding amount.
With Freehand AI, you can go from messy to structured in seconds. For example, you can take hundreds of stickies from a workshop and use Freehand AI to cluster them by sentiment, putting them into a format that is easy to scan and lets your team more clearly see patterns and gain understanding efficiently. From there it’s easy to highlight all of the stickies and use Freehand AI to write a summary that can be shared with your stakeholders, another task that done manually might take hours, and could easily be error prone. Let Freehand AI do the heavy lifting, and spend time on refinement.
It’s amazing that analysis and synthesis that previously might have taken hours or days can now be completed in under a minute, a truly mind-blowing level of productivity gain that is a uniquely great fit for the unstructured work that happens on the canvas.
Generate content to get to a solution faster
What really takes this to the next level is how Freehand AI can generate new content – accelerating work, eliminating writer’s block, and getting to solutions faster.
Building on smart workflows introduced as a part of the Intelligent Canvas, teams can now work more efficiently and spend their effort on refinement and iterations, rather than the initial zero to one effort.
For example, during a project kickoff, cross-functional teams gather to understand problems to solve and collaborate on various requirements and constraints. Inevitably, these get distilled into a briefing document. Freehand AI can transform all the sticky notes used during the kickoff into a long-form document, complete with an objective, hypothesis, and success measurement. Getting to a starting point with the diverse inputs of stakeholders incorporated has never been faster and the saved time can be invested in refining the draft.
Turn insights into action
If you’ve just completed a round of research, you’re likely left with dozens of insights and ideas. Next is the often daunting task of synthesizing those sticky notes into jobs to be done that your team can begin executing on.
Using the new Freehand AI-enabled research synthesis template, you can generate top themes and a written synthesis that informs next steps. Once the problems are well understood, next you might be ready to brainstorm. The Freehand AI smart object can take dozens of stickies with raw feedback and translate them into tasks on a kanban board that your team can easily digest, make updates to, and begin executing on, right away. Because the tasks are right on the canvas on a kanban board, assigning owners and estimating effort is simple with a drag and drop. No other tool makes this process as streamlined and intuitive – what you can do using Freehand’s Intelligent Canvas, now with Freehand AI, is absolutely groundbreaking.
The future of work: AI-enabled canvas
Cross-functional work is at the core of what drives the most impactful business outcomes. The launch of Freehand’s Intelligent Canvas marked our major investment in the future of visual collaboration as the center of workplace productivity. AI adds even more intelligence and automation to the canvas to make teams more productive. The impact on productivity can be especially large when AI is applied to areas where unstructured work with a high volume of diverse inputs happens and needs to be actioned, making it a perfect fit for Freehand’s Intelligent Canvas.
But this is still just the beginning. With the rapid advancements in generative AI, we believe there is even more potential to deeply transform how teams work, not only becoming a pervasive capability in nearly every product, but also accelerating development of the products themselves. There will be less dependencies on workarounds or solutions that are “good enough” – this acceleration will unlock workflows that are truly bespoke and highly optimized for use cases that previously received little attention or were highly manual.
With InVision as a thoughtful partner to help your organization deploy AI and smart workflows, Freehand will be there to make your teams more productive and increase the ROI of your collaboration tooling. And the best part? Freehand AI is Enterprise ready. Our approach, which uses a Freehand AI smart object that can be configured and deployed into a custom template, means you can drive consistency of usage. You don’t need to be good at writing prompts to benefit from AI; it can be as easy as writing down thoughts on a topic and Freehand AI can do the rest for you, making it accessible and inclusive for all. Freehand also has the ability to add your own open AI key to incorporate AI your team is already actively using. And if your team isn’t ready for this new functionality yet, access is admin controlled, so you can easily ensure it’s turned off for the whole team by managing their integrations.
Try Freehand AI (Beta) today
Starting today, Freehand AI (Beta) is available across all Free and Pro plans. With the incredible capabilities of the Intelligent Canvas, now including Freehand AI, and at half the cost of Miro and Mural, there has never been a better time to improve your team’s productivity, do more on the canvas than you ever have before, and improve your end-to-end workflows with Freehand.
At launch, the following Freehand AI usage limits are in place based on your plan:
- Accounts on a Free plan receive 10 Freehand AI responses for the lifetime of the account. Once that limit is reached, upgrade to a paid plan for more responses.
- Accounts on a Pro plan receive 10 responses per user per month.
- Accounts on an Enterprise plan receive 20 responses per user per month. Using your own Open AI key, as mentioned above, allows for more interactions.
These usage caps are in place while we test out the limits of this new technology to ensure the smoothest experience possible for everyone, and are subject to change over time.
To get you started, try one of these AI-enabled templates today:
Our belief is that even in its early days, this application of AI can greatly improve team productivity by reducing repeatable steps and accelerating synthesis. Stay tuned as we continue to iterate and improve on Freehand AI, with a focus on functionality that will help teams collaborate and get work done more efficiently. Want to learn more about Freehand AI? Take a look at this excerpt from our April 2023 Product Showcase Webinar: