Picsart now lets creators “hire” AI assistants through its agent marketplace

AI-powered design platform Picsart is launching an AI agent marketplace, allowing creators to “hire” AI assistants to help them with specific tasks, like resizing and remixing social content, or editing product images on Shopify.

With over 130 million users worldwide who lean into Gen Z, Picsart is like a more advanced Canva for social media managers and content creators. The company reached unicorn status amid the creator economy boom in 2021, but has remained relevant by continuing to ramp up its AI-powered products to serve the current market.

The timing is good for Picsart to launch such a market, given that widespread projects like OpenClaw have fueled industry demand for interactive, AI-powered chatbots that can carry out requests like a personal assistant.

“Creators have been stuck as the operator of every workflow — the one who does, and doesn’t decide,” Hovhannes Afoyan, founder and CEO of Picsart, said in a statement. “Our agents change that relationship – you set the direction, the agent builds a plan using real data, you approve it, and it gets executed.

Picsart says it will introduce more specialized proxies each week, but initially, creators can work with four different proxies: Flair, Resize Pro, Remix, and Swap.

Flair Agent is perhaps the most advanced of the bunch, integrating with Shopify to serve as an assistant for online store owners. The agent analyzes market trends to make recommendations on how to improve the store, such as suggesting product images be modified to look more cohesive. In a future update, Flair will be able to run A/B tests and identify underperforming products to proactively make recommendations on how the creator can improve their sales.

Resize Pro can resize photos and videos to the recommended dimensions on various different platforms, but it uses AI to scale the frame overall if the original media doesn’t help at a certain size. The AI ​​is supposed to ensure that resized images look like they were intentionally composed and not randomly cropped.

The Remix Proxy invites the creator to describe a style, such as “vintage film,” “watercolor,” or “cyberpunk,” and edit an existing photo library to fit that theme, while the Proxy feature allows users to change photo backgrounds in bulk.

For an agent like Flair, who is supposed to work behind the scenes asynchronously analyzing store data, it would be especially useful for users to be able to chat with these agents on WhatsApp or Telegram. Picsart integrates with these apps specifically because its APIs enable businesses to set up AI-powered chatbots; But as more platforms add similar tools, the functionality can expand.

“As agents expand into the messaging apps that creatives already use, this conversation is happening anywhere — in your office or on the subway,” Avoyan added.

In some cases, AI agents can be problematic, since any program based on LLM has the ability to hallucinate and can take actions that the creator did not intend. But Picsart allows users to set “autonomy levels” for agents like Flair, which gives the option to request creator approval before taking any action. These agents should also be less vulnerable to injection attacks than public-facing agents, assuming Picsart doesn’t roll out agents that directly interact with customers or the Internet in general.

Like many other AI tools, Picsart offers a free plan with only a few AI credits each week, but users can get much more capacity when paying for premium subscriptions, which start at around $10 per month when billed annually. To use an AI agent, you’ll probably need a paid plan.