The PPAI Expo is the place to discover the latest and greatest in promo – but products aren’t the only news at the industry’s biggest trade show. At the SAGE Conference on Monday, PPAI’s technology partner announced a collection of new features – many of them powered by artificial intelligence – that boost distributors’ ability to create custom images for clients and much more.

Here’s a quick look at some highlights:

SAGE Design Studio

The SAGE Design Studio features several key upgrades, including an update to the tool used to erase sample logos. Users now have three options:

  • The free-form polygon eraser that has always been available.
  • A highlight eraser that allows users to highlight the logo they want to remove.
  • The new default option of a smart eraser that employs SAGE AI technology to let users erase a logo with a single click.

Layer functionality, common in professional graphic design tools, has been added so users can easily separate, stack, hide and reorder various design elements. SAGE Design Studio also now supports WebP, Google’s imaging format, in addition to PNG and JPEG files. The Magic Upscaler, a new AI-powered tool, allows users to upscale image sizes without losing quality. Users can now limit the fonts and colors available to their account within the tool as well.

The Design Studio has also added a tool to create lifestyle scenes using SAGE AI. Simply describe the scene in which you want the product to be placed – such as, “put this mug on a table next to a campfire at sunset” – and within seconds a realistic, royalty-free image is generated.

Other new features also provide users with greater flexibility in designing visual effects, including gradient, pattern, shadow effect and opacity options for shapes and objects so users can skew and curve shapes to ensure they look natural on curved products like tumblers.

New Features In SAGE Websites And Stores

SAGE has introduced a number of new features to support customizable websites, including six new widgets to make it easy for site owners to customize their pages without having to know how to code:

  • The countdown clock offers the potential to count down to a product launch or show how much longer an online store will be open.
  • The flipbook widget allows distributors to easily add a flip catalog created with SAGE’s Catalog Studio to their website or even turn a standard PDF file into a flipbook.
  • The quick search widget works like the standard quick search already on SAGE sites, but now you can place the quick search anywhere on the page.
  • The idea search widget gives SAGE websites AI-powered idea searching – visitors can type in a few details about their event or promotion and instantly get product ideas.
  • The icon widget includes a large icon library.
  • The new custom code widget is for more experienced users looking to add code to a SAGE website, and it enables third-party integration like adding an Instagram feed.

Other new features in SAGE Websites include back-end access to site performance and the history of updates on websites and stores, plus adding suppliers’ real-time inventory and notes to a shopping cart. The system also now supports automatic generation of an email to the administrator when a new client registers, providing the opportunity for a personal welcome so new clients don’t fall through the cracks.

New Features In SAGE Workplace Include Automation

SAGE Workplace subscribers can now use the Automation Center as the central hub for any automation they want to set up within SAGE Workplace – such as an alert to send a follow-up email when a client comments on a presentation created in SAGE Workplace.

The new SmartSearch allows users to search for products in the SAGE database of over 1.7 million products using natural language. Users can simply type in what they want, with as many details as they want, and AI then uses that prompt to automatically fill in the search fields and conduct the search.

The Presentations module features several AI-driven upgrades as well, including the ability to create instant virtual samples. With the click of a button, the tool pulls the client’s logo and adds it to all (or select) products within a presentation automatically. Like the Design Studio, the Presentations module also supports AI-generated lifestyle images.

Most of these features are already released and available for SAGE customers, and the full suite of upgrades is scheduled to be available by the end of January. For more information, visit sageworld.com.