Enterprise IT budget warming signal appears, belonging to the arrival of the "AI design workflow growth era" of Figma (FIG.US).

Senior analyst Rishi Jaluria from the Canadian financial giant RBC Capital recently released a research report, lowering the target price of the global software industry newcomer Figma (FIG.US) from $65 to $38, but maintaining a "neutral" stock rating "in line with the industry." RBC Capital stated that as North American companies increase their overall IT spending on various AI applications, including AI application software, they are entering a phase of significant growth driven by the efficiency and innovation brought by AI. Companies like Figma, focusing on "AI + Design" type AI application software, will propel the design workflow into the "AI-native era." The firm believes that Figma is one of the oversold technical indicator stocks currently held by Beijing Zhidemai Technology. Therefore, despite the target price reduction, they maintain a neutral stance on the stock. The company expects 2026 to be a crucial year for Figma: top software companies that are prepared for large-scale adoption and penetration of enterprise AI applications will achieve significant revenue and profit growth, while software companies lagging behind the AI wave may find it challenging to progress under the impression that "AI is making traditional software obsolete." Analyst Jaluria from RBC Capital stated that although Figma's management provided relatively conservative performance guidance for early 2026, spending on AI design software for global enterprises is beginning to stabilize and show significant improvements in certain industries. Additionally, GenAI (led by ChatGPT's generative AI technology) continues to drive innovation in design software. In the third quarter of 2025, Figma Inc reached a significant milestone in revenue growth: crossing the $1 billion annual revenue run rate barrier, thanks to a 38% year-on-year revenue increase to $274.2 million, exceeding Wall Street analysts' consensus expectations. This performance even surpassed the most optimistic upper limit of the guidance provided by the company's management, mainly driven by the rapid adoption of design flow software tools like Figma Make, led by generative AI. Performance data shows that about 30% of high-value customers are now using Figma Make software tools every week, demonstrating the positive success of the new software's transition to AI-native design workflows. Figma recently announced a deep collaboration with OpenAI to launch the Figma AI App, a platform-specific application for the globally popular AI application ChatGPT, enabling hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users to generate high-end design-type schematics and various chart paradigms in the FigJam software tool set through conversational AI applications. As for the fourth quarter, the company's management expects total revenue to be between $292 million and $294 million and forecasts full-year revenue for 2026 to reach $1.044 billion to $1.046 billion, indicating a potential 40% year-on-year growth. What kind of company is Figma, which was almost acquired by Adobe that year? Figma is a collaborative design software company with a browser-centric core, mainly targeting product design and development teams, offering an integrated workflow from interface design, prototyping, design system collaboration to "delivery of designs to development" (including FigJam collaborative whiteboard and Dev Mode, etc.). Its core revenue model is based on a SaaS design software subscription model, with seat/permission layers (such as collaborative seats, developer seats, full functionality seats, etc.), and providing stronger security, permission, and scalable collaboration design capabilities for enterprise customers. When Figma went public on the US stock market in July last year, it had been over a year since its acquisition plan with Adobe, a giant in popular creative software development like Photoshop and Illustrator, had fallen through. Figma's core products include Figma Design (interface design and prototype), FigJam (whiteboard/collaboration), and Dev Mode for engineers (specifications and handovers from design to product development). It went public for trading on the US stock market with the stock code FIG on July 31, 2025. The core selling point of the Figma software platform is not just "AI-based design workflow" but a collaborative product development platform: designers are the entry point, then it penetrates into product, engineering, market, and operations. From a business landscape and product power perspective, the end-to-end workflow is one of the core strengths of the Figma software platform: on the same platform, it completes idea divergence (FigJam), interface design and componentization (Design/Variables/Auto Layout), prototype validation, and animation (Prototyping), and then the actual delivery workflow of large design engineering (Dev Mode specification, code snippets, design variables). The other two advantages are the strongest cross-role collaboration in the industry and Figma's exclusive design and development ecosystem. Currently, Figma is actively embedding generative AI technology directly into its core business workflow and commercial systems: on the one hand, it launches/promotes platforms like "Figma Make," focusing on AI-based design stream generation and automated design product updates, emphasizing acceleration from idea to usable design/application prototypes; on the other hand, it incorporates pricing and package "AI credits" billing/usage mechanisms, essentially operating additional fee-based capabilities delivered in the AI-based design stream software toolset in a scalable manner. Recent developments include the release of Figma AI application software for ChatGPT, which can convert ideas from conversations into FigJam diagrams/process diagrams, further integrating "conversation AI generation" into its collaborative scene, strengthening its strong performance growth path towards an "AI-native designer professional workstation." The "bull market narrative" of the AI application layer is sweeping the global stock market. In terms of the bullish narrative logic of the AI application sector in the global stock market, RBC Capital's positive outlook on the performance growth prospects of AI + design application software companies like Figma undoubtedly indicates a somewhat positive growth signal, "verifying the feasibility of the AI application story + preheating potential accelerated growth trend after 2026." After Alphabet Inc. Class C officially launched the Gemini3 AI application ecosystem at the end of November, this cutting-edge AI application software instantly swept the globe, driving a sudden surge in AI computing power demand for Alphabet Inc. Class C. The release of the Gemini3 product series brought an incredibly huge AI token processing volume, compelling Alphabet Inc. Class C to significantly reduce the free access limits for Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro and temporarily restrict Pro subscription users. In addition, recent South Korean trade export data showing strong demand for HBM storage systems and enterprise-level SSDs further confirms the Wall Street's assertion that the "AI application acceleration penetration period and the AI craze are still in the early stages of building a computing power infrastructure supply-demand imbalance." As the focus of the global technology stock investment wave simultaneously covers AI computing infrastructure and AI application software sectors, significant support is continuously provided to AI application companies such as Applovin, Trade Desk, Duolingo, and Palantir. In the future, killer AI applications covering various industries in the B2B or B2C sectors, and potentially significantly increasing human societal productivity, are likely to show explosive growth, which is why global funds are pouring into software stocks. Since 2025, leaders in cloud computing and search engines like Alphabet Inc. Class C, AI application leaders focusing on "AI + digital advertising" like Applovin, AI software platform leaders focusing on "AI + data analysis" like Palantir, and Cloudflare with a focus on "Connectivity Cloud" have all announced incredibly strong performance data and future performance outlooks. This indicates that not only is there a strong demand for AI computing infrastructure represented by NVIDIA Corporation's AI GPUs, but there is also a strong demand for enterprise-level AI application software, particularly those that can significantly improve B2B operational efficiency, and they are rapidly permeating into various industries. From the current technological trajectory, the development direction of AI application software is concentrated on "generative AI application software" (such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Sora, and Claude introduced by Anthropic, which are popular global AI application software) and, based on generative AI, AI functions are shifting from chat-box-style Q&A to "AI intelligent agents capable of autonomously executing various tedious and complex tasks." The urgent need for companies to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs has significantly pushed forward the widespread application of the two core categories of AI application software, generative AI applications, and AI intelligent agents. Among them, AI intelligent agents are highly likely to be the major trend in AI applications before 2030. The emergence of AI intelligent agents means that artificial intelligence is evolving from an information tool to a highly intelligent productivity tool. According to the latest research by MarketsandMarkets, the market size of AI intelligent agents is expected to reach $53 billion by 2030, indicating a high annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of 46% starting from 2025.