VSCO Innovation, Technology & Agility

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
I work at VSCO, a platform committed to helping photographers thrive, and we use AI in a number of ways. Firstly, like a lot of technology companies, we’re increasingly using AI to improve the work we do day to day. We are also using AI to build new and differentiated product features to delight our community of photographers.

While our use of AI has emerged recently, VSCO has been around for over a decade, which means lots of data. While access to a vast corpus of high-quality photography has been an asset for us, we’ve gotten the most value by focusing on our creators and the challenges they face. AI can be a powerful tool, but to advance a business, that tool must be aligned with the needs of the customers. The story of AI at VSCO is one of being relentlessly obsessed with the needs of photographers across the world.

What are you most excited about in the field of AI right now?
My feeling is that the speculation that advancing AI technology will lead to the demise of software engineers is overstated and wrong. What we’re seeing is that AI can be a multiplier on the impact a software engineer has. By helping think through the trickier aspects of problems and handling the repetitive or time-consuming aspects of coding, software engineers and technologists can think more about their work at a higher level, thinking more about the forest and less about the trees. That elevation in perspective means more impact and value to our community.
In the same way, AI also has the potential to be a great help to the photographers who rely on our platform. We’re inspired to build a new generation of AI-powered tools to help the photographers who use VSCO thrive. By streamlining the more repetitive or time-consuming aspects of the photographic creative process, helping photographers looking for work connect with those looking to hire photographers and providing a vibrant creative community, AI can elevate and empower photographers to a higher level.

What challenges did your team overcome in AI adoption? 

The technology ecosystem is changing so fast that it’s difficult to keep up. AI and LLM-based assistants have been a huge accelerant to our work, but each new tool is a change. Making space to explore new advances and identify new tools has been critical. It’s also important to give time to learn and adjust to the new ways of working that AI tools provide. To take the greatest advantage of the evolving ecosystem, we need to emphasize flexibility in how we approach problems and make sure there’s time to learn and adjust as our tools change. The world of AI is also a bit of the wild west, and it’s important that we understand the risks and benefits when adopting new technologies.
This fluidity of tools can be a mental shift for technologists — professionals who often have a strong connection with the tools they work with — but the results, the impact of new AI on productivity, is undeniable. Show-and-tell has been a key driver in socializing awareness and inspiration. It’s so motivating to see a colleague demo for the team how they used an LLM coding agent to make their hard problems incredibly easy — and you can do it, too.