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Whether you’re an Android or iOS person, most people have heard of PicsArt. The platform launched more than a decade ago and has become one of the go-to services for all things image and video editing, with more than 150 million monthly active users.
However, it hasn’t been an easy journey for the company. Despite being an early mover in the smartphone-based editing domain, the company has seen significant competition from players like Canva and Adobe who have been playing a cat-and-mouse game for quite some time—building their own similar products. When I spoke with Artavazd Mehrabyan, the CTO of the company, at the recent WCIT conference in Armenia, he was pretty vocal about the challenges, saying it is tough to be or at least stay different for long in this market.
“A lot of things that PicsArt had before were copied into the competitors. PicsArt was the first all-in-one editing service on mobile. There was no other player before 2011. We started with this approach and it was copied, among many other things,” Mehrabyan said. He pointed out that the same is happening with AI, where competitors, including mainstream photo services, are offering very similar capabilities.
For example, PicsArt offers object generation, allowing users to use advanced AI to create required photo elements. The same capability has also been incorporated into other products in the category, creating an overlap of sorts.
PicsArt AI GIF generator
However, instead of pushing to stand out by adding more tools to its existing batch of over two dozen AI capabilities, the company is looking to make a mark on users by improving the quality of what it is delivering. Specifically, Mehrabyan said, the focus is on how they are productizing and tailoring the features to help customers get to their goal – whether they want to remove a specific object from a vacation image or generate visually appealing advertisements, complete with im …