Day: October 2, 2025

• Figma’s CEO said his company’s tools will not do the work of a top-notch designer.
• Dylan Field said that Figma’s AI tools “raise the ceiling” for designers to do more.
• He said they would remove the “drudgery” of the design process.

Figma’s CEO said the design company won’t do the job of a world-class designer.

Dylan Field, Figma’s 33-year-old billionaire chief executive, appeared on a Wednesday Rapid Response podcast. He talked to host Bob Safian about how his company’s tools won’t replace a designer’s work but will help remove the “drudgery” of the design process.

Figma, a San Francisco-based technology company, offers design tools for creating websites, apps, and other digital products.

Field said Figma’s AI tools both “lower the floor” to bring more people into the design process, and “raise the ceiling” for designers to be able to do more.

“Ultimately, all of us humans, we expect more from AI than we expect from a human. You know, if you say, ‘Okay, here’s a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,’ Figma better get it right,” Field said to Safian.

He said that if an AI can’t even execute a minor command, people will dismiss its capabilities.

“I’m not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer, because we won’t,” Field said. “There’s a need for designers to lead the charge, and AI will only get you so far.”

“But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we give more access to more people?” he added.

Figma had a blockbuster IPO in July, with its shares opening at triple their asking price. The company raised $1.2 billion during the offering.

The company celebrated by holding a block party in front of the New York Stock Exchange, complete with free pizza, merch, and a DJ.

Canva’s cofounder, Cliff Obrecht, shared similar sentiments earlier this year about how AI would affect designers.

Speaking in a July episode of the “Masters of Scale” podcast, Obrecht said Canva’s tools free designers’ time for “high-value work,” and not embracing AI as a creative was “folly.”

Representatives for Figma did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• China’s top automaker BYD posted its first sales drop in over 18 months.
• BYD sold 396,270 cars in September, a 5.5% decline from a year earlier.
• BYD said in August that its “short-term profitability” was being weighed down by discounting.

Tesla’s biggest rival in China, BYD, saw its sales slip for the first time in over 18 months amid China’s bruising EV price wars.

The Chinese automaker said in an exchange filing on Wednesday that it sold 396,270 cars in September, a 5.5% decline from the 419,426 cars it sold a year earlier.

The last time BYD saw a sales drop was in February 2024. That month, BYD sold 122,311 cars, a nearly 37% drop from the 193,655 cars it sold in February 2023.

BYD did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

China’s EV market has been caught in the throes of a brutal price war. Some 100 brands, including Elon Musk’s EV company Tesla, have been locked in an intense competition for a slice of the world’s largest auto market.

In April 2024, Tesla announced that it was slashing the prices of its Model 3, S, X, and Y by 14,000 yuan, or about $1,930 each. Musk said at the time that Tesla’s “prices must change frequently to match production with demand.”

“Other cars change prices constantly and often by wide margins via dealer markups and manufacturer/dealer incentives,” he wrote in an X post on April 21, 2024.

However, price cuts haven’t helped Tesla ward off its Chinese rivals. The company’s annual sales declined for the first time in over a decade after it delivered 1.79 million vehicles in 2024, a 1% drop from the 1.81 million vehicles it delivered in 2023.

In December, Xpeng founder and CEO He Xiaopeng said in an internal letter that the automotive industry will face an “elimination round” from 2025 to 2027.

Earlier, He said in an interview with Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times published in November that most Chinese automakers won’t survive the next decade.

“I personally think that there will only be seven major car companies that will exist in the coming 10 years,” He said, though he did not give the names of the seven companies.

BYD said in its earnings report in August that its “short-term profitability” had been pulled down by “industry malpractices” such as “excessive marketing” and discounting. The company’s net profits in the second quarter of 2025 had fallen 30% from a year earlier.

BYD’s shares are up nearly 27% year to date.