Miro launches Intelligent Canvas

In what it called its biggest product update since the company’s founding in 2011, Miro has launched Intelligent Canvas, an AI-driven platform designed to help teams manage their entire innovation lifecycle.

“In many cases, the tools designed to make us faster are actually slowing us down,” Jeff Chow, chief product and technology officer at Miro, said in a July 17 blog introducing the platform. “We blow all our energy figuring out how to work or where to work instead of actually doing work. Teams can’t get on the same page and decision-making is disconnected. Innovation is supposed to feel like a sprint towards a shared goal. The reality is more like death by a thousand cuts.” 

The Intelligent Canvas, he said, should improve the user experience via new AI capabilities, new workflows, interactive experiences, and scalable templates.

AI everywhere

The Intelligent Canvas, powered by Miro AI, features agents known as AI Sidekicks that Miro said provide domain experience when needed, participating on the board like any other team member. The initial set includes Product Leader, Agile Coach, and Product Marketer.

“And we’re not doing this alone,” Chow wrote. “We’re partnering with industry experts like the Product Marketing Alliance, the world’s biggest product marketing community, to harness their specialized knowledge around the craft of launching new products and building marketing campaigns for Miro customers.”

In addition, the core toolbar gives access to generative AI (genAI) features, providing AI prompts to help users create documents, user stories, and diagrams using their work on the canvas by, for example, turning a series of sticky notes with customer feedback into user stories.

A simplified new UI

Miro also announced it has simplified its user interface, adding Spaces to help organize information from multiple boards, as well as third-party documents, in a central hub accessible from any board. 

And to let users focus better when using advanced features, new modes reveal only the essential tools required for the task at hand. The first offering is Diagramming Mode, which Miro said will be available across all plans. More modes are coming soon, though the company did not set a date.

Flexibility

Five intelligent widgets, built with the new Canvas software development kit, are data- and context-aware, and communicate with each other to “speed up certain actions and get teams into the habit of creating on the canvas together.”

The current list includes: dot voting — colored dots that users can place on objects on the board to vote on them; polling, which lets users create polls directly in a board or template; people, which triggers context-sensitive actions when users drag and drop a user avatar on a project component; story points, used to add estimates of resources or timing for a job; and counter, which totals the number of assigned story points to help with capacity planning.

In addition, a dozen intelligent templates bring together AI features, interactivity, and integrations with other tools to allow users to create workflows for functions such as sprint planning, road mapping, product planning, team capacity planning, cloud infrastructure optimization, and more.

With more than 50 new features on the horizon, Chow said Miro is “going to be thoughtful when it comes to rolling them out.” Regular new releases and updates will arrive over the next couple of months, and “we’ll be listening hard to feedback along the way.”