Is Microsoft’s AI-powered designer tool something marketers must pay attention to?

Few months ago, Microsoft announced Designer, a Canva-like web app. It can create designs for presentations, digital postcards, and other materials for social media and other channels. It uses user-generated content and OpenAI's text-to-image AI, DALL-E 2, to create designs, with drop-downs for further customization.

Further to that, Microsoft released an updated version of Designer, its AI-equipped design tool, for public preview last week.

What does it offer?

Designer can now generate hashtags and captions that can be used for social media posts. Besides, it can also offer various suggestions for hashtags and captions for users to choose from. AI-powered visuals can also be created, complete with backgrounds and text transitions.

According to Microsoft, Designer will be enhanced with more features in the future, such as the capacity to place an object in a particular location in a graphic and instantly fill in the rest of the picture. Meanwhile, upcoming "erase" and "replace background" options will allow users to clean over objects, people, or backdrops that they did not intend to be in a graphic.

Designer will continue to be free during the preview period for users. Once the Designer app becomes generally available, it will be included as part of Microsoft 365 subscriptions and will have some functionality available for free to non-subscribers, according to the company.

Gone are the days when marketers had only limited AI and non-AI tools to lean on for designing. Since the introduction of ChatGPT, the market has seen a flood of new tools, opening up a plethora of opportunities for marketers.

In this regard, we believe Microsoft’s AI designer tool will indeed be game-changing for marketers of all sizes, including SMBs and enterprises. Particularly for enterprises, which have missed out on AI-based creative generation so far, the time has come.

And the designer tool has the potential to take on existing design platforms like Canva and Photoshop.

Here are a few ways we believe it will assist marketers.

Reduce manual work:

As the Microsoft Designer tool automates many of the design tasks, users are no longer required to do them manually. Be it selecting the image, resizing it, adding different elements to the creative, or positioning it correctly, just by simply describing, marketers get the capability to bring out what they intended to create. It in turn makes it easier for them to create professional-quality designs without having to do much manual labour.

Boost Productivity:

As Microsoft's Designer tool looks increasingly advanced and user-friendly, once-difficult tasks may possibly become simpler for marketers. Especially the features for caption generation and finding the relevant hashtags for social media posts will be huge time savers for marketers. In a short period of time, they will be able to increase the number of posts created and speed up the work flow.

Personalization made simple:

As the powerful AI capabilities of Designer will help marketers fine-tune the creatives as per their preferences, personalization and customization will be no headache for marketers. They will be able to uplevel the generation of eye-catching images in a significantly lower amount of time, giving them more options for ab testing. This, in turn, helps them find the best performing piece of content that resonates well with their target audience and improves audience engagement.

Overall, Microsoft’s Designer tool is something marketers should pay attention to, as it is all about simplifying, quickening, and streamlining marketers' creative journeys.