Keeping Human Intent at the Center of AI Creativity With Magnific (formerly Freepik)

[00:00:00] The leading issue of agentic AI in businesses right now is ensuring agents act with compliance guidelines. And Denodo applies guardrails across your entire data estate. By aligning your company's data infrastructure under one system, these guardrails perform consistently across your platform. So start scaling your business and start with Denodo. Simply visit denodo.com to learn more.

[00:00:27] What happens when the same AI tools used by Hollywood Studios are suddenly available to anyone with an idea, a laptop and a subscription? In fact, you don't even need a subscription. Well, my guest today is the CEO and co-founder of Freepik, which many of you know, will recently relaunched as Magnifique.

[00:00:54] And he believes we're entering what he calls the no-collar economy, where professional creative work is no longer isolated to what job title you have, what technical skills you have, or what budgets that you have. And today we're going to discuss why AI could lead to more creative jobs rather than fewer. So we're going to bust a few myths there. And also learn how teams can automate the boring parts of production without automating creativity itself.

[00:01:24] And why giving everyone access to spectacular technology won't necessarily make everyone a great storyteller. And with that scene perfectly set, let me introduce you to my guest now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Hi, Neil. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm Joaquin Cuenca. I started as a software engineer.

[00:01:53] I'm the CEO and co-founder of Freepik, which now is Magnifique. Awesome. Well, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today. And many people will know about Freepik, but Freepik becoming Magnifique is much more than a rebrand. So what has changed in the way people and businesses create with AI that convinced you that the company needed to evolve and change too?

[00:02:17] We actually call this not a rebrand, but a relaunch internally because it was kind of relaunching the company. What convinced me to do it is, you know, it started in 2022. It is when I saw the second Dali, second version of Dali. That Dali became immediately useful. I saw that it was capable of drawing things that I would have liked to, you know, pay somebody to do it for me.

[00:02:44] So I understood that we, something has had clicked in the world. Like there was like one of those shifts. It wasn't possible before to get a drawing that was exactly what you needed. And now it became possible. So our whole, the whole opportunities that we had in front of us just exploded. We began from a world where if we wanted to help people create great designs and do things that were beautiful, we were forced to sure string the requirements in an existing image. If you wanted to make it easy.

[00:03:13] And now we were jumping on a world where we could actually completely understand what people needed and deliver something that was unique to them. It's incredibly cool. And you have a massive community. I mean, you serve more than a million paid subscribers.

[00:03:29] And while users are generating huge volumes of images and videos every month, what have you learned at the scale about the difference between AI that might look impressive in a demo and AI that actually people love working with and actually get their work done quicker? What have you seen here? Well, it's 1 million subscribers and over 70 million visitors that come every month and enjoy some of the free things that we have on the platform.

[00:03:58] So it's not only the paid subscribers. We are blessed to have a gigantic community that we love. So listen, your question, like the number one thing that we learn, it is how important it is intentionality. With AI, it is super easy to get something. That is whatever the AI wants. It's very easy to just loosely describe something and get something that looks cool in a demo. But if you want to really touch people, you need to embody some emotion.

[00:04:28] You really need to think, oh, you know, this take, it's cool, but it's not exactly what I want. So you need to be able to describe exactly what you want and to have tooling that helps you direct the camera, direct their emotions, the emotions, the people, the characters, get consistency. If you want something that goes below, that goes beyond that demo, you need to use like the traditional skill set of filmmakers.

[00:04:55] It's convey emotion, understand what is the message, play with the music. So everything comes together really, really well. And you've also described the rise of the no-collar economy. That's something I came across when I was doing a little research on you, and I love that phrase because the ability to create professional content is no longer limited by somebody's job title,

[00:05:21] the technical skills they have in a creative suite somewhere, or access to an incredibly large limitless budget. So what does it mean for the way we think about creative work and opportunity? Because it feels like an exciting time. Anybody can get these ideas out of their head, and everybody is creative and innovative. But what do you see it meaning here? Okay, let me unpack it a little bit.

[00:05:45] So when you study all the big revolutions in the world, all of them came, number one, with existing workers getting afraid of the future because there's some uncertainty. And there are some difficult changes. Okay? So it's some people, and this is right, it's something we need to acknowledge. Some people may lose their jobs.

[00:06:10] The things that they were doing became something that a machine can do, and therefore it doesn't make any sense to get a human doing that. Okay? That happened during the Industrial Revolution. Let's remember the Luddites, I think, in the UK. Okay? That happened on the Digital Revolution. We got afraid that the accountants would lose their jobs because now it became trivial to just add colons, multiply, do the basic math that they were constantly doing 24-7. Okay?

[00:06:37] But the Industrial Revolution, what actually happened is that we got a new set of jobs that became way more exciting than the old set of jobs. So the Industrial Revolution, it gave rise to the blue-collar economy, like the workers, you know, like a new industry, the industry itself. The Digital Revolution, it created the white-collar economy to some, you know, first approximation.

[00:07:07] Like almost all these software engineers, people working in offices, that was enabled by computers and then the internet. Okay? So you get like, instead of just destroying like the jobs of accountants, it actually created many, many new jobs in the white-collar economy. And it is our belief that the Gen.AI media revolution, it's going to create many new opportunities for creatives.

[00:07:36] So if you have, you can tell a story that is compelling. Now you have the tools to bring it to reality by yourself. You don't need a crew of hundreds of people. You can do it by yourself. So what we see is that we see new projects, big and small, like it's the whole range. It goes from teams of 300 people down to teams of one person. Okay? So we call it like full-spectrum productions.

[00:08:03] It's not only like the super, super expensive one, like the super expensive ones get some benefits from using AI, but also you can get middle ground, like productions with 10 people, where you get an audio expert, some actors that record voices and performances, and then somebody is putting it together, down to one person that is using AI for basically everything. Okay?

[00:08:29] And what that implies is that we are going to see many new projects that get greenlighted because now it is much cheaper to greenlight projects. We used to have many, many projects that looked lovely on the storyboard, but it was too expensive to do then. And it's not only too expensive, it was too risky because the ROI was uncertain. Now we can explore the whole thing.

[00:08:54] You know, you can do one production with a modest budget, modest for a film. It can be like with 20,000, 10,000, 50,000. And you can get something that really captures people's attention. And then if you get traction with that, you can scale it up and do something that is in a higher quality. Okay?

[00:09:17] So what we see is way more projects being greenlighted, which means that way more people will work in the creative industry. And the other trend that we see is that big productions in marketing used to be only for very big, very large brands like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Nike. Those brands, they were capable of putting together short emotional stories instead of a traditional ad.

[00:09:47] While the rest of the economy, the rest of the companies, they have to go with a banner or something that is way less compelling. Now everybody will be able to create those stories, to tell those stories and create something that can engage more deeply with the public. And when regular brands, smaller brands do that, you know, they will have to hire an expert in audio. They will have to hire an expert in photography. People from the, maybe people from the film industry.

[00:10:17] When before none of them were employed by those brands. Okay? So we see like the opportunity, we see it like an expansion in the creative industry. Uh, and that's why we call the no color economy. We think that people with that, you know, creatives that were no color, they're going to have a new, a new industry, a new economy that is going multiply by 10. And when I was doing a little research on you, one particular stat really stood out.

[00:10:45] And that is 72% of new creators joining the platform. They identify themselves as beginners, but at the same time, hundreds of enterprise teams are using that same technology for their professional campaigns. What does that combination tell us about how AI is changing? Who, who gets to create and who gets to compete? It's a, it's great that you've got both worlds now on the same platform. Yeah, I guess it's a reflection that we are day one, like we are all beginning.

[00:11:14] Uh, so it's true that it's a bit weird that we have exactly the same tool, tool set for people working in Hollywood on big production. Um, and amateurs are doing like the first project. Um, I think this will evolve, obviously. At the end of the day, people working in Hollywood, they're able to deploy more capital to get, uh, more specialized tools. But today we are this exciting time where anyone can join.

[00:11:44] Uh, you know, you, you get a subscription that is like 10, $15 and you can start doing your own productions at home. Um, it's like at the very beginning when we started getting, uh, video cameras and everybody with this passion was able to, you know, film new things. And then of course the industry became super specialized, much more like out of reach, uh, and, and much difficult to do something amateur that reached that quality.

[00:12:13] Uh, but we are this exciting time where anybody can join. Anybody can do something that really captures people's attention. It's a unique moment in history. And as companies move from individual AI tools to collaborative production environments, such as spaces, what, what does it take to automate creative workflows while keeping people in control of quality brand consistency and, and final outcome?

[00:12:39] Well, so number one is giving them the right, uh, basic, uh, basic blocks to build those workflows. So we give them basic blocks that can ingest your style guide, basically like extract your guidelines for your company or for your brand and help you create assets in, in your brand. And then we make it very easy now to, when you create a workflow, which is something very visual, you can see, okay, start here from here.

[00:13:09] I go there. That's how I transform it. So we codify the whole, all the steps. Okay. Instead of being like one of something that, that you do clicking here and there, you have a graph where you can explicitly see all the components and how they work together. And once you have that, then it's as easy to say, okay, these are the input things. These are the things that I want to be able to change anytime. This is the output that I want to extract. Okay.

[00:13:38] And then you have it in the platform as a, you know, behind a one click button on the API or, you know, it's super easy to consume. So effectively you can, like all the boring work that you do many, many times is something that now you can codify once. It's almost as if you were coding a new software, except that it's visual and you are in charge, you know, you are completely empowered to do it using visual tools.

[00:14:08] But once you create the software, you can repeat it as often as you want and you have complete flexibility into what you get. It's a phenomenal way to codify all the workflows in your company or in your project. And there's an old rule in IT that you can only measure what you improve. Well, you can only improve what you measure.

[00:14:29] Now, many businesses still measure things like AI adoption through licenses purchased, users activated or content generated. And it feels like it's almost a legacy way of looking at that. So I'm curious from your side, what do you think leaders should be measuring instead to understand whether their AI adoption is improving the quality of work, how they collaborate and ultimately improve business performance? What should they be measuring there?

[00:14:55] Well, I'm a big believer into going down to the source and measuring actually dollars. It's like you need to ask for a real return on your investment. Otherwise, people are playing and you want people to play when they are learning. You need to make sure that you are delivering because that's what's going to help you understand what's your next bottleneck.

[00:15:24] If execution becomes much easier, you want people with a strong intention into what they decide to execute. Otherwise, you are not going to get results. You will get people that feel that they are very busy and they are doing like things that maybe look cool, but do not deliver returns for your company. So I'm a big believer into just setting a goal that is rooted in money. That's the ultimate KPI for a company.

[00:15:53] Again, at the beginning, it's perfectly okay to play a little bit and to give people a bit more freedom. They will need that. They need to understand the landscape. But at some point, you have to ask for return. One concern around AI is that lowering the cost of producing content could flood the world with mediocre material or worse still, AI slop, which is a phrase we keep hearing at the moment.

[00:16:18] But if everyone can create professional-looking content, what becomes the new source of competitive advantage for individuals, brands and creative professionals that want to stand out from the crowd? Well, I don't think that what makes something successful is how spectacular it is.

[00:16:41] Just like something that we all have extraordinary cameras, but that doesn't make us great filmmakers. There is something else, which is what is the story that you tell. Does it connect emotionally? The little details, like how does it work? That's what people need to work on. So the good news is that before, you got like a small set of people that were thinking on those, let's say, details, which is the really important part.

[00:17:09] And you needed like a large investment to deliver on that message. Now that became easier. But the core of delivering a message that is impactful, that does it in a way that connects with the public, that's still absolutely 100% what makes it work or not. This is the real thing that you need to work on. 100% with you.

[00:17:33] And you are someone that has built a profitable European technology company that serves global creators and enterprise customers alike while competing with heavily funded Silicon Valley businesses at the same time. So from a personal point of view, what lessons from that journey do you think other founders can apply that might be listening, especially when they're trying to build and scale an AI company here in Europe compared with some of those budgets and investments in the US?

[00:18:02] Any big lessons that you've learned along the way? Yeah. So number one is that it's important to build some differentiator because if you are offering exactly the same as others, then you start competing only on price. And competing on price, as soon as any heavily funded VC company from the US gets in the game, becomes very difficult because they will be able to lose money for longer than you.

[00:18:29] So it's important to have something that is kind of unique in the market. It can be little things, little things that accumulate, that compound. So for us, it's how much value we deliver to professional teams. So it's controlling, it's reporting, it's like things are special to them. Like we listen a lot to our customers and we direct the product on the direction that they need.

[00:18:58] But that will be like the biggest learning for me. If you do something that is completely commoditized, it's going to be extremely difficult to succeed if you cannot raise large quantities of money. Fantastic advice. And if we do have any of the 70 million plus monthly users listening from your community that want to find out more about what's on the horizon, etc. Any teasers? What can we expect from you for the rest of the year and beyond?

[00:19:28] What's your vision there? What excites you about that future too? Well, we are trying to empower more and more individuals. We are trying to make the boring part of the job go away and make it completely automated. We know that recently we released Spaces, we released Agents, we released NCP.

[00:19:56] So we are going into a world where it's becoming every time more and more easy to use the product, even if the product is extremely deep and complex. Because you can use an agent to explore the features. We are creating more agents that can collaborate between them with the intention to help the user to deliver on their vision. Everything that we do, like the thing that we do not believe into is one-click solutions.

[00:20:23] Because we believe that if there is not a strong message that you want to convey, let's put it this other way. If there is only one button to click and this is it, then what's the difference between you pressing that button or me pressing that button? To us, that has, you know, everybody will be pressing that button and that becomes a commodity and that becomes irrelevant. The interesting part is the thing that is unique to you. That's the thing that nobody can replicate.

[00:20:52] So we are here to empower those individuals to, you know, to craft their messages. And I suspect there will be new announcements, features and so much more coming our way in the months and years ahead. So for people listening that want to be part of that journey, where can they find more information about your team, announcements, find out more about anything we talked about today? Where would you like me to point to everyone? Well, you can follow us in social networks.

[00:21:20] We are very active on X, formerly Twitter. We are active on LinkedIn. And we are launching new features every day, almost like, yeah, certainly like every week. We are launching multiple features. The last thing that we have released is a vast number of plugins for different platforms.

[00:21:42] So if you are super comfortable working on Figma or on the Adobe ecosystem or on any other creative tool, we are making it very easy to use features from our platform on your platform of choice. We will do more of that. I mean, we have many, many things in the oven.

[00:22:04] I think the average number of features that we launch is more than one every two days now. It's getting close to one every day. So the cadence, it's really stepping up. Many of them are with a focus on enterprise users, teams. So it's like integrations with third-party tools that they need. But there are many, many that is for everybody, even for individuals. Wow.

[00:22:34] It sounds like you're going to be incredibly busy. I will add links to your website, your LinkedIn, and all the social channels, etc. I urge people to go check that out. I would love to get you back on early next year, see how things have evolved from today. Because I suspect it's going to continue to keep moving, especially the number of improvements and features that you're adding there. But more than anything, thank you for sharing your story today. Really appreciate you, Tom. Thank you, Neil. It was a pleasure.

[00:23:00] I think today's conversation was a fascinating reminder that making something easier to create doesn't automatically make it worth watching. But my guest explained how AI is lowering the cost of creative production and allowing ideas that might never have received funding to finally get made. And I think there's something beautiful in that.

[00:23:24] And as technology becomes available to everyone, the advantage moves back to something wonderfully human. Simply having an idea worth sharing and knowing how to make somebody feel something. That's the way the magic happens. And I also loved his rejection of the one-click feature. If you and I can press exactly the same button and get exactly the same result, where's the creativity in that?

[00:23:53] How do you stand out from the crowd doing that when everyone's doing exactly the same? So maybe AI's most interesting role isn't to become the creator, but to give millions more people the tools to become one. And I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think we are all creative, each and every one of us. And you just have to go in any infant or primary school. Every child in that class will be creative.

[00:24:19] And yet, as we get older, it's kind of beaten out of us and we're led to believe that only a certain number of people are creative, which simply isn't true. But that's my view. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Will AI flood the internet with more forgettable content? Or are we about to discover a new generation of storytellers who simply never had access to the tools before? TechTalksNetwork.com. You can leave me an audio message there.

[00:24:46] You can find ways of working with me, meeting me on the show floor of a tech conference near you. Whatever it is, please let me know. But that's it for today. So thank you for listening. And I'll speak with you all again very soon on the AI at Work podcast. Thank you.