Turning a Photo Editing App Into a 100M+ User AI Platform | Mikayel Vardanyan @Picsart

How do you keep a company relevant when the underlying technology keeps changing? At HumanX Amsterdam, we sat down with Mikayel Vardanyan, Co-founder & COO of Picsart, to explore his entrepreneurial journey — from building an outsourcing company and one of the early SaaS monitoring platforms to helping scale Picsart into an AI-powered media production and distribution platform with more than 100M monthly active users. We discuss how AI is disrupting traditional software outsourcing, why only a handful of frontier AI models may ultimately matter, what makes proprietary models defensible, and why speed and distribution are becoming increasingly important competitive advantages. Mikayel also explains how Picsart evolved from an Android photo editing app into a global creative platform, why the company started investing in AI as early as 2016, and why video is now becoming one of its biggest areas of focus.