How has Shutterstock evolved as generative AI has changed creativity over the past few years?
We’re still the best choice for high-quality, impactful content that helps customers tell stories and move their ideas forward. Our evolution comes from expanding our offerings to serve the deeper needs among our core audience, and the wider needs of a range of customers. Whether it's integrating third-party AI tools like our image generator, design assistant and search assistant, or providing multimodal content data to the world's leading AI and technology companies for model building, we're evolving to meet customers wherever they are in their AI journeys.
On the core content side, AI enhances what we're already giving to creators – it's another tool in their toolbelt so that they can build whatever they want. Generative AI is this cool new technology that enables them to do what they want, faster and easier, to make a greater impact. Our team has done such a good job of integrating models like Runway so we can be a one-stop shop for everyone to get what they need, drawing on our 20 years of expertise in fueling great work for creatives and non-creatives alike.
When did you start thinking about introducing third party models and working with AI companies as a data provider?
By 2021, it was clear that Shutterstock’s 20 years of high-quality creative content and rich metadata represented something far greater than a stock library – it was a valuable foundation for training the next generation of AI models. We recognized early that our breadth, curation standards and deep expertise positioned us to become a key data partner for leading AI companies, helping them train models responsibly and effectively.
That recognition led to partnerships like our collaboration with Runway that leveraged Shutterstock's licensed image and video data. AI models like Runway’s require continuous streams of fresh, diverse content to evolve and stay relevant, and our ongoing relationship ensures they have access to exactly that. And it doesn’t end there. We continue to expand our training-ready data beyond images, video, 3D and audio to include templates, fonts, podcasts, scientific imagery and additional emerging album formats. Through acquisition and internal innovation, our continuous expansion of high-quality assets gives Shutterstock depth and diversity across our content types.
In terms of integrating generative AI directly into our own platform, that work began in late 2022, as early generative image models began gaining traction. Shutterstock quickly understood the transformative power of the technology and the critical role our data would play. We launched our AI image generator in January 2023, which became the foundation for the evolution of our broader GenAI product suite.
Why did you first start working with Runway?
For us, Runway felt like a natural partner for what we were trying to achieve, especially in video. We began working together in early 2024 through a multi-year data licensing partnership that laid the foundation for integrating Runway’s generative video capabilities into our own product ecosystem. Runway has always been at the forefront of foundational video generation models, and as demand from our customers grew, it was a natural step to extend that relationship by integrating Runway’s API.
The technical integration was straightforward, but what stood out most was the collaboration itself. It’s never felt like a handoff. The support across Runway’s partnerships and product teams has been extremely useful, and our customer needs are genuinely influencing the Runway roadmap.
How does the integration actually work? What do customers see?
Right now, we have Runway’s image generation capabilities integrated into our own AI image generator, so it’s one of the engines powering the product. We’ve gotten great customer feedback on that integration, especially around the more cinematic look and feel of the outputs.
We're also working on a video generation platform that we’re beta testing with Runway. Starting with early access to Image to Video generation for some of our customers, this capability will later expand to all users. The next step will be turning on full video generation, including both Image and Text to Video, for our customers.
What trends are you seeing in how customers actually use generative AI?
Ideation and storyboarding have become major use cases, and we’re seeing a growing portion of generated content being licensed. We’ve also seen an increase in how many times people prompt, how many times people download and really every overall usage metric. It’s really exciting to see how generative AI allows people to experiment and create in new ways.
How are you thinking about integrating video generation?
We’re really excited about Image to Video as a workflow. The big questions customers have are, “Once I have this video, what do I do next? Do I want to extend the video? Do I want to make edits?” Things like that are on our roadmap for 2026. That creative control, consistency and the workflows and apps, those features are all available via Runway.
Strategically, as we think about our generative roadmap, we want to provide the same breadth of content types that we have in our stock content, and video is a large part of that. It’s all about unlocking more for our users.
What excites you most about AI and creativity?
AI is the great enabler – people who are not designers now can be. The interesting part about AI and creativity is that it speeds up the time in which a person can go from what's in their head to an output. AI isn’t replacing creativity – it’s transforming how ideas become commercial-ready impact. For our customers, whether it's creating a quick comp, storyboarding or generating final assets, it’s like having a creative partner working with you, saving you time and bringing your ideas to life.
AI removes the barriers for someone who has a really good idea to go from that thought to something they can iterate on. For a long time, that’s where so much of the hard work has been, and Runway is great for that. Shutterstock has been working on that even prior to generative AI, so it’s really exciting to continue that work with new, transformative technologies that help our customers fuel great work.
