Over the past two years, one question has consistently emerged in conversations with customers: "What about AI?"
While AI promises to disrupt many industries, it remains difficult to grasp how this technology will reshape creative workflows.
Our customers look to us for guidance: What is IMG.LY’s vision? How will our SDK help them harness this wave of innovation?
Last month, we took our first significant step by launching an initial suite of generative AI-powered features for our web SDK. We've embedded these tools deeply into photo, video, and design editing workflows and the response from customers and prospects was overwhelmingly positive.
And this is just the beginning. An immense opportunity lies ahead for both IMG.LY and our customers to drive transformation in the creative domain through our SDK. In this post, I want to share our vision for the future of creative tools powered by AI and our SDK.
Going forward, we're focusing on three central goals:
1. Deep Integration of AI Capabilities into Editing Workflows
The pace of AI innovation continues to be remarkably fast. New models and configurations emerge almost daily, some as APIs, others open-sourced on platforms like Hugging Face. While some offer generalist features, others provide specialized, industry-specific capabilities, such as automatically obscuring license plates, blurring faces or replacing skies for property exteriors.
The true value of these AI tools emerges not in isolation, but when they're seamlessly combined within existing workflows.
That's why we built a plugin system for CE.SDK.
The CE.SDK plugin system has fundamentally changed how quickly we, and our customers, can integrate new capabilities. We've created a way to bring AI models and agents directly into connected workflows within the editor, making AI feel native rather than bolted on.
A recent example is our integration of OpenAI’s gpt-image-1 API, which we implemented in just a few days after its release. We used it to build a visual prompting workflow that takes into account all elements of a page, text, images, and annotations, to generate results based on the complete layout context.
These early successes are encouraging us to ship even faster and bring new features to our customers.
We're now partnering with fal.ai to provide a nearly out-of-the-box experience to use any new generative AI model through their platform (more on this soon). Fal.ai excels at speed—when exciting new models emerge, they offer API access within days. This partnership ensures our users can quickly access new AI capabilities with minimal effort. More partnerships and integrations are on the horizon, bringing world-class AI APIs with intuitive interfaces directly into the editor.
2. Enabling AI Agents as Creative Collaborators
AI agents, like humans, leverage tools to accomplish tasks efficiently. CE.SDK occupies a unique position as a highly adaptable, multi-platform technology for editing various media types—including a fully documented headless version that's perfect for programmatic control.
Thanks to CE.SDK's fully documented API and headless architecture, AI agents can be created to navigate and operate the editor programmatically. This opens the door to agents that act as powerful scaffolders:
- Generating initial designs and layouts based on brief descriptions
- Automatically aligning content with brand guidelines
- Transforming static designs into dynamic videos with a single command
- Creating engaging short video content from prompts
- Adapting existing designs to new formats and dimensions
Crucially, everything an AI agent creates remains fully editable by human users. You can refine, add nuance, and perfect the results through collaboration. AI provides the scaffolding, humans remain the tastemakers, adding the creative spark that makes designs truly exceptional.
3. AI-Powered SDK Configuration and Customization
AI agents are already actively involved in building, refining, and optimizing software tools—a trend that's accelerating rapidly. This shift directly impacts developer experience and points to an exciting future where our SDK serves not just human developers, but AI agents as well.
To facilitate this interaction, we've already taken steps like making our documentation available in LLM-friendly formats. But this is just the beginning of our journey toward radically improving the experience for both developers and AI agents.
Our ultimate goal is conversational configuration. Imagine describing your requirements in plain language, and having an AI agent handle the rest:
- Configuring the SDK's visual aesthetics to match your brand
- Setting up custom functionality and workflows
- Integrating media libraries and plugins
- Optimizing performance for specific use cases
This isn't just about making development faster. It's about democratizing access to powerful creative tools, allowing anyone to build sophisticated editing experiences—regardless of technical expertise.
Looking Forward
We believe that AI collaboration represents a transformative shift in creative technology, empowering users and developers to achieve extraordinary outcomes. At IMG.LY, we're committed to being at the forefront of this exciting journey. Our vision extends beyond simply adding AI features, we're reimagining how creative tools are built, configured, and used in an AI-augmented world.
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