In the past decade, few Indian-origin founders have had a front-row seat to such tectonic shifts in product design quite like Ronak Daga. Long before “AI-first design” became an industry tagline, Daga was building Red Baton into a global design and product-engineering consultancy — one that repeatedly ran into the same frustrating, universal truth, where a staggering amount of work was repetitive, pattern-based, and painfully time-consuming. Designers were spending disproportionate hours recreating the same foundational flows, and developers were constantly stitching together design-to-code handoffs that never felt seamless. The gap wasn’t creativity. It is related to speed, context, and continuity.
UXMagic.ai is Daga’s attempt to close that gap, heavily informed by a decade of learnings from customers and users. This platform sits at that intersection of design intelligence and workflow pragmatism. It’s not trying to replace anything that’s already there, or compete with giant ecosystems like Adobe and Canva; instead, the attempt is to integrate directly with tools designers already rely on—Figma, WordPress, Canva, Framer and so on. The idea is simple — to remove friction from the very first draft onwards. Daga believes that if AI can accelerate the scaffolding of a design, designers can reserve their craft, judgment and nuance for the things machines cannot yet touch. Daga believes AI has given platforms such as UXMagic.aia chance to stand in the same space as some of the industry giants, including Adobe and Canva. Edited excerpts.
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Q. You previously founded Red Baton and observed first-hand, gaps in the service industry when it came to UX Design. How did that help you build UXMagic.ai, and what is the one big gap that you’re trying to fill? Any interesting insights you discovered when building the AI-first design tool?
Ronak Daga: As I was building Red Baton over the last 10 years, it was easy to witness a few gaps in the software that had significant impact on workflows. But the industry kept evolving, and Figma became the tool of choice. I always believed that UX, or user experience, is based on several similar patterns. A majority of the design work that we do, especially while creating the first drafts of a design, was quite redundant and time-consuming. That was the first and the biggest gap that we tried to fill. Also, we realised the need to build something that would become an integral part of an existing workflow, and that is why it was important to build a direct integration with Figma so that users can get a fully editable version of the design by simply copy-pasting it.
What’s interesting is to see how demand for such tools has exploded in the last few years. AI that was a buzzword for many is now exhibiting its true potential from the standpoint of tangible benefits that the users are now deriving. Building this platform from Silicon Valley for a global audience has been an enriching journey, marked by constant learning and meaningful insights as we continue to learn and evolve.
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Q. The design copilot promises to help designers and developers with speed of delivery while keeping everything visual on-brand. How do you balance the trade-off between speed and preserving the subtlety of a brand’s uniqueness?
Ronak Daga: The user experience is based on several similar patterns. We recently released some significantly creative and meaningful features which a user can import their brand guidelines, user interface (UI) style guides and more into UXMagic. This ensures the output is always on-brand in any specific design style. At the same time, the prompts and sketches will also always give the output in a style that is reflective of the brand design philosophy.
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Q. Your platform spans prompts, documents, sketches, existing Figma files, and integrates with Figma, Cursor and other platforms. Given the complexity of UX ecosystems, how do you prioritise integrations? Do you feel it is difficult to break into a space that would likely already find footprint from the likes of Adobe and Canva?
Ronak Daga: Prompts, sketches or existing designs act like an input, while the output is usually in the form of code or design files in Figma. As Figma is the commonly used tool, we decided to integrate with it first and then code. The code directly integrates into vibe-coding tools which also happens to be an increasingly popular use case today. We work with a lot of our users to understand what they would like us to integrate with and that is how we prioritise any new integrations. We are still a young business, but certainly a customer-oriented one. Any and all enhancements in our product features are reflective of our commitment to our users.
I would agree that breaking into the space with the likes of some of the industry giants such as Adobe and Canva is indeed a really tough challenge, but with AI, new innovation is getting easier. There is always room for more players in the space. I believe the AI space has never been more exciting than it is at this point in time. Innovation is going to be different with AI, and our goal is to make a tool that is really easy to use so that not just designers, but also more casual users and enthusiasts, can use it with ease.
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Q. Do you believe AI can truly understand ‘taste’ and brand nuance, or will that always remain a human function? More to that point, where is the boundary between automated production and human creative judgment?
Ronak Daga: I firmly believe that AI is always going to be assistive in nature, and we will always need humans in the loop to get the job done. For example, our product allows you to get to the first draft ready about 70% faster than it would be if done manually. However, human intervention and creativity is what adds the final touch and double-checks what AI has generated. Not to be given any less weightage, designers modify any generations or designs to ensure that it has that unique touch. All automated production needs humans to check and add their creativity to it in the end. Our vision is to build a platform that brings the potential of technology and that touch of the creative human element to deliver projects faster, but also better. Both the elements are meant to complement each other, not replace one another.