Introducing Mural’s New AI-Powered Teamwork Features

Written by 
Matt Heying
 and 
  —  
May 22, 2023
Embrace AI. Empower teamwork.

Spark more ideas, move faster, and be more effective with AI at your side

Too often, blank page paralysis is the enemy of creative thinking and productivity. We’ve all been part of a brainstorming session, project kick-off, or another meeting that starts off slow — and by the time your team hits that creative flow, the meeting is over.

You can’t afford to let slow starts and cognitive overload hinder your team’s productivity and innovation. That's why today, we are excited to preview the next generation of the Mural collaboration platform — smarter, more efficient, and enhanced by AI.

AI-enhanced work needs a visual component

We believe AI should give you momentum, help streamline work, and free you to focus on what you’re uniquely good at: problem-solving, complex thinking, and innovation. In other words, AI can take on manual, time-consuming tasks, while people tackle high-order thinking skills that require creativity and deep analysis.

We’ve also learned from our customers that there is vast, untapped potential for visual collaboration, and it’s through this lens that we are approaching our investment in AI-powered teamwork. Whether or not the work you produce is visual in nature, visuals (like sticky notes, mind maps, and frameworks) are a powerful way to help your team understand complex ideas, get aligned, and think creatively. 

Kit Friend, an Agile coach and Atlassian specialist at Accenture, explained how visual work has made his team more productive. “Mural has enabled us to visualize and contain a plethora of random working bits into one cohesive space and way of doing things,” Kit said. “We’ve broken down silos to now be in one suite for the vast majority of our work, which is really powerful.”

That’s why we’re excited to build on our new, easy-to-use UI with AI-powered features to create a next-generation, smarter Mural platform so teams across every department can do their best work together.

Introducing AI-powered teamwork, made visual

Today, we’re excited to share the first look at our new AI capabilities, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI. These features are designed to help your team get started quickly and conquer the blank page by generating ideas, finding common themes, and helping to expand on a concept. 

With these new, AI-powered features, your team can:

  • Generate and expand on ideas quickly and more effectively than before.
  • Streamline workflows and offload common tasks in Mural, freeing you up to focus on what really matters.
  • Synthesize ideas and move forward quickly with better recommendations, insights, and consensus.

With these features, we’re making AI technology more visual. That means thoughtfully weaving AI-enhanced features into the ways you’re already using Mural — from generating ideas and visualizing how they’re connected to creating beautifully organized murals. And by unblocking the flow of ideas and freeing yourself from monotonous tasks, you can focus on solving the hard problems and driving the right business outcomes.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s coming and how these features can help your team do their best work ever.

Mind maps with AI: Generate and visualize ideas

Ever been in a meeting where everyone is just staring at their screen, waiting for someone else to come up with an idea first? Or maybe you’re stuck down one solution path and don’t know where to go next. AI can help you get unstuck. Now, you can create a mind map in seconds to kickstart your creative process. Mind maps are diagrams that visualize how concepts are connected — perfect for brainstorming and going deeper on a topic. Simply start with a central idea, and our AI will build a mind map based on that input. You’ll be generating and expanding on ideas faster than ever.

Gif of the Mural platform that shows AI-powered mind mapping

Clustering: Organize and synthesize ideas

Generating, organizing, and understanding ideas is essential to the creative process. Unfortunately, it can also be incredibly manual and time-consuming. Now our AI-powered clustering lets you automate this process, making it easy to identify patterns and similarities between ideas, and automatically move related items together into named groups. 

Gif of the Mural platform that shows AI-powered sticky note clustering

Quick start actions: Save time and streamline workflows

When you’re prepping for or running a meeting, the little things can really slow you down. Setting the agenda, staying on schedule, formatting content in a mural — it all adds up. Now with AI-powered actions in the Mural platform, you can offload some of those tasks. For example, you can add sticky notes in bulk, start a timer to stay on track, and start a voting session to get consensus. And it’s not just the little things; you can also use actions for more complex tasks, like content and idea generation, without ever leaving the mural.

Gif of the Mural platform that shows an example of an AI-powered action in Mural. The user asks the platform to generate 10 ideas for virtual team icebreakers, which appear on the screen in the form of sticky notes.

Trust and security: Keep your data safe

Mural is powered by Microsoft Azure, enabling us to scale and operate on a secure cloud built to meet the needs of global enterprises. As an enterprise-ready solution, the new AI-powered features are built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI, enabling us to leverage Microsoft’s capabilities and framework for responsible AI safely and securely. Learn more about our approach to trust and security.

What’s next?

We’re just getting started, and there’s much more to come! Help us shape our AI-powered capabilities — and the future of visual collaboration and teamwork — join the waitlist for our private beta* program.

Join the waitlist.


*AI-powered capabilities subject to testing and defects. Provided warranty free, "as is" and "as available" basis. Mural not liable for any losses that may result from private beta.

About the authors

About the authors

Matt Heying

Matt Heying

SVP, Product
Matt is a leader in product management, software engineering, UX design, and data science and has defined, designed, and built B2B cloud-based collaborative applications for over 20 years.

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