Canva's CEO on Its Big Pivot to AI Enterprise Software  🔗 **Source:** [Canva's CEO on Its Big Pivot to AI Enterprise Software](https://share.snipd.com/episode/2ff00ab2-f162-4dc2-b426-fe817c222494) ## Highlights - **Canva Reframes Design As Concept Editing** - Melanie Perkins says Canva is shifting from object editing to concept editing, where users describe an idea and AI creates the first draft. - She frames it as moving from pixels to objects to concepts, while keeping the editable Canva file underneath. Transcript: Nilay Patel The last time you were on the show, I said, what is Canva? And you said, Canva is an online design platform. And your news this week is that I believe the company is changing its own conception of itself. Tell us about that change and what led into it. Melanie Perkins So there are some things that are changing and there are many things that remain the same. So our mission is still to empower the world to design and we're going to be doing that very much over the years to come. But something that we've always believed is that we should take the latest and greatest technology, we should build the latest and greatest technology and put that into our community's Hands and enable them to achieve their goals. And what is the latest and greatest technology has certainly changed over the last few years. And so obviously AI is at the center of that change. But obviously the latest and greatest technology today is AI. And so we're really excited to be doubling down into that space. Nilay Patel All right. But I'm looking at a press release that says we're moving from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. That seems like more than bringing the latest and greatest technology, right? It seems like a rethinking of what Canva's product is. Unpack that a little bit for me. Melanie Perkins Okay, so let's get into it. So when we launched Canva for the very first time, we really, one of the huge innovations that we had was moving from pixels where everything was very granular and required deep expertise To be able to move anything around, to be able to design anything, to objects where you could lay out a design. You could just have ideas for different objects. You could search our stock photography library, our illustration library. You could drag it onto the page. You start with a template or start from scratch, you could collaborate and design. And now what we're really excited about is with AI, we're moving into the concept layer. So you can just take an idea, you can write it in, and then something can get created for you. But very importantly, you can still move into the Canva's object editor and lay things out, collaborate, edit away. And so we're really excited about bringing it to this third tier of concept editing, which we think will be extraordinarily exciting. So it's our biggest launch ever and it's becoming the system where work happens end to end, but still very importantly with design at its core. I was going deep the other day into the definition of design and to design is to mark an idea. And really to mark an idea is at the essence of design. So we're really excited about bringing new tools and capabilities to be able to do exactly that. ([Time 0:05:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb86df37-5c38-427b-83d7-6a75e923432a)) - **Chat Works Only Because It Becomes A Canva File** - Canva kept the chatbot prompt box, but Melanie Perkins says the key differentiator is that prompts turn into normal editable Canva files. - Instead of regenerating everything in chat, users can drag, drop, tweak text, and collaborate inside the standard editor. Transcript: Nilay Patel I'm curious about this. I'm just looking at pictures of the interface. It looks like a chat bot. You can ask it all kinds of questions as you showed off. Make me a content plan. Do a bunch of stuff for me out on these platforms. You can connect directly to the platforms and have it published for you. That feels like, in particular, the cutting edge of marketing, right, is automating the creation of assets and the publishing to platforms and collecting the data and iterating through That. But the interface is still a chatbot. And it feels like maybe that's going to be the interface for everything forever. Did you experiment with other kinds of interfaces or is it just the open-ended text boxes, the end-all be-all of AI? Melanie Perkins So I think that's where I was going through those three tiers of pixels, objects, and concepts. I think that's what's really exciting to me is that in most chatbots out there, you're kind of like in a chat and you kind of go backwards and forwards asking for the same thing and it will Regenerate the entire thing over and over again. It's kind of annoying. But with Canva AI, you've got the ability to have the conversational editing, which is extraordinarily powerful and brings completely new capabilities. But then you have the normal Canva that you know and love where you can just drag and drop. You can collaborate. You can do all your iterative editing. You can go and change a word here and update that and not having to prompt to do that. So it actually helps to make complex things simple by bringing it all together into one spot. So rather than having to, so you'll see in the interface, there's Canva AI, it's like a brand new tab inside the editor. And so you can go there, you can dictate into your phone, you can do it on the fly, get that first pass and then it will lay it out just in the normal Canva that you know and love and then you Can just edit that as you would typically do. After a lot of experimentation that was where we landed that it's just it's so powerful to be able to dictate for everyone's different accessibility needs, even accessibility needs On a day-to basis like sometimes now I can just be like talking to my phone, ask it to generate something, and you can just do that on the fly. But then that creates a normal Canva design that you can collaborate, you can edit, you can use our 100 million plus stock photos and illustrations and drag and drop and design that. So, you know, really the huge opportunity is this end-to workflow. I would take an idea and turn that into a finished usable work in one seamless platform. ([Time 0:09:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11f57c0f-70df-42b9-9309-56163af30307)) - **Canva AI 2.0 Uses The Whole Product** - Canva AI 2.0 now orchestrates tools across the whole product instead of acting in isolated pockets like earlier AI features. - Nilay Patel's wanted-poster example exposed the old limitation; Melanie Perkins says the new system can invoke background remover and other tools automatically. Transcript: Nilay Patel Can I ask just a question about the relationship of the AI to the tools in Canva? And I'm going to basically just do personal tech support with you. So I used Canva this week. My daughter's having a detective-themed birthday party. Cool. So we took photos of all our friends, and we're going to make wanted posters. Awesome. I was like, I'm going to talk to Melanie, and I better use Canva to do this, right? Yeah. It seemed very natural, so I could ask you very weedsy tech support questions. And just in the version of Canva that I was using, it was clear that the AI tools operated in some places and not others, right? They weren't seeing the whole Canva tool palette. And very simply, it's background remover, which I believe is one of your most popular tools. It's everyone's most popular tool. I could do it in some parts of Canva and not the other. I couldn't look at my sort of finished layout and say, actually, can you just go ahead and remove the background from this? I had to get to where I needed to be and then ask the question, is the new Canva AI, can it address the whole set of tools? Is it using Canva as a whole or is it still narrowly sliced? Melanie Perkins You hit the nail on the head with what we were doing with Canva AI 2.0. So it actually goes across the entirety of Canva. So you were using Canva AI 1.0. I'm very excited to get your hands on Canva AI 2.0. We'll have to get you into the million, though I guess by the time this podcast out, maybe we'll have to make a special exception because it will help with exactly that. And so you can say, for your example, for your wanted posters, create me the wanted poster and you can upload the photos and it can actually orchestrate all of the different tools in Canva To be able to create that on the fly without you having to go to the different spots. But you can still go and edit the different particular parts, the element editing, if you want. But it actually is able to orchestrate it and then create a layered file in Canva standard format. Nilay Patel I think I understand how the user will see it. I think architecturally, I'm very curious how you build the product that way. Because it doesn't seem like there's like some industry standard way of saying, now you can use the software. Like about half of the attempts I see are, we're just going to take screenshots of everything and very slowly click around. And there's an infinite number of variations on that approach. There's the MCP approach, which everyone was really high on and seems to have arrived at whatever point it's going to arrive at. And now maybe half the industry is back at, well, we should just do APIs. What approach did you land on? Melanie Perkins So I think the reason we've been able to make so much progress in this space, firstly, was the decade of investment in this interoperable format. So being able to have this design format that spans presentations and whiteboards and docs and videos, the full gamut, has been a really powerful part of why when we launched the foundational Model, the design foundational model, it actually is able to create across all of these different formats and is that layered file, which means that you can operate at a full design Level, you can operate on a page level, you can operate on a like a photo level or text. And so the huge investment in that space is why we've been able to bring this to life with Canva AI 2.0. And there's an extraordinary amount of complexity behind the scenes. We've had hundreds of people working on this project for some years to get to this point in time. But I think that the really important part is one of our engineers described it as an orchestra because there's so many tools and systems under the hood that need to talk together to be Able to bring that thing to life. So when you say, I want to create a wanted poster for my daughter's birthday party, it will then be able to go and reuse background remover. It will be able to go and use all of the different tools to be able to assemble that. But from a user standpoint, they just get to say what they want and then we go and do the hard work to achieve that goal. ([Time 0:11:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68bf4f01-e05a-4267-8c91-1895776ac5a6)) - **Canva Spreads AI Risk Across Partners And Credits** - Canva mixes outside AI providers with its own design-focused research instead of betting on a single model company. - Melanie Perkins says free and paid tiers get different AI credit levels, and the first million users receive a $100 monthly AI pass. Transcript: Nilay Patel That's why comes back. It's surprising, but it turns out it's a fun game to play to see if I can get through the media training, Melanie. The other question I have is who the model providers that you have doing this are, right? Because we are hearing every single day that token use rates for agentic software are through the roof. We're watching Anthropic have to modify its pricing. There's all kinds of stuff happening in that world. And you're launching an agentic AI product that just from the interface alone makes you want to use it a lot. Melanie Perkins I'm happy to hear that. Nilay Patel It's not like, you know, Anthropic literally in Claude, there's like a usage meter. And it will tell you like, you're done now, or pay us more money. Are you going to have like a token usage meter in Canva in the same way? Melanie Perkins Yeah, so we asked so many questions in that very short space. There's more to come. Nilay Patel Don't worry. Melanie Perkins We have been investing in the areas that we really need to. So becoming domain experts in design has been a really critical part of our research strategy. But then partnering with incredible companies that are spending billions of dollars to build the best in their own areas and then bringing that technology onto Canva is also a key part Of the way we're approaching this. Being experts in design because that's where we really need to specialise, because there isn't great technology in that space. And then we've got a 100-person research team working very specifically on these problems themselves. On the AI credit front, we have different tiering available for each of the different packages. So in free, you get a certain number of, you get limited credits, and then in pro, we get much more generous, and then in our business package, you you get far more generous than enterprise More so. But actually for the first million users, we're giving everyone an AI pass, which we're really excited about. So it's a $100 monthly pass. We're going to be giving everyone in that first million so they can just go completely wild and test out all these new products. ([Time 0:15:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8bbeeb9-6e5b-4daa-b85b-1bdc582f2708)) - **Canva Wants To Be The Visual Layer Of Work** - Melanie Perkins argues Canva's enterprise wedge is that most work eventually becomes a visual artifact like a deck, doc, whiteboard, or report. - She says connectors let Canva pull context from Slack, Gmail, and internal files, then turn it directly into editable output. Transcript: Nilay Patel The last time you were on the show, you were making the inroads to enterprise. You had sort of relaunched for enterprise. And we talked a lot about how what you needed to do for enterprise was not necessarily product focused, but just workflow focused. You needed user authentication systems and management systems and dashboards and all that stuff. And you built it out. And that seems to be going really well. I think the numbers I have here are you're at $4 billion in annualized revenue, $500 million of which is enterprise. So in two years, you've grown. Is that the part of the business that's growing the most? Melanie Perkins The whole company is growing very rapidly. But yes, enterprise has been growing extremely rapidly. We grew by 100% over the last year, 95% of Fortune 500 companies and getting really deep footprints with thousands of people at companies now, which is extraordinary to see. We think that this, with Canva AI 2.0, will radically change that. It will be a huge step change again and becoming the system at the centre of work. Really bring things together. I think a lot of people can relate right now. It feels like there's a lot of fragmented systems, things that are kind of in lots of different places. Being able to have that all on one platform, having that with all of the work and all the designs and presentations and documents all in one place and with Connectors being able to go even Further and pull in context and information from your Gmail or your Slack, we think is going to be a huge step change for the way work gets done. Nilay Patel So that's the part I'm really interested in. The idea that a company is just a collection of disparate databases that are not well organized or managed and that there's truth in those databases. If only we could read them all at the same time. That's a big part of like the AI thesis in general. Like you hear it all over the place. I, you know, I work with a bunch of cranky reporters. I, I don't think they put all their ideas in the databases, but like, I get it, right? There's, there's a sense that there's a lot of opportunity in the disparate data sources in a company and you can bring them together to platform and then take action on it and achieve Some results. Is Canva the right tool to do that work, right? You're kind of like right up against Claude or you're right up against like Oracle, whatever, like big enterprise business process automation vendor is going to say, AI will connect All your databases. And then there's Canva. And I'm wondering if you want the whole opportunity or just the design opportunity? Melanie Perkins Well, to me, design, as we've just talked about before, is bringing creativity and productivity together. And being able to do that in a way that we think is pretty extraordinarily powerful. I mean, I had my own experience of this the other day, which I was like actually blew my mind. I was like, I had to answer a whole bunch of questions and I was like, they were going into like all sorts of different questions over the last decade. And then I was able to just type it into Canva AI 2.0, each of the questions, and I was able to construct answers based on all of my designs and all of my documents from the last decade. And it kind of blew my mind that I was like, this is the only place that actually has this information about me. And so being able to have that full visual suite from docs to sheets, whiteboards, presentations, all of that context. And then I guess the other thing is that when you think about it, most things kind of end up in a design format of some description at the end of the process. And so being able to have all of that context right there beside the AI tools, we think is pretty powerful. ([Time 0:17:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2a8ad825-414b-47ff-aebe-5c512b730057)) - **Melanie Used Canva AI To Discover Her Own Massage** - Melanie Perkins uses Canva AI on her own calendar and connected tools to generate planning docs for her week. - One generated schedule surfaced a massage booking she thought was a bug, until she realized her partner had arranged it. Transcript: Nilay Patel Does it work for you? What's the dynamic inside of Canva? You're obviously on the bleeding edge of this technology and you obviously have your own tool. How does it work for you? Melanie Perkins In what sense? Sorry. Nilay Patel Do all of your tools have AI access to all the other tools or do you work only in Canva and let Canva AI go talk to all the other tools? What's your setup? Melanie Perkins Oh, yeah. Since getting connectors, obviously Canva has always had all my designs and my presentations and my documents. But being able to get connectors and being able to pull information has been pretty astonishing. So for example, being able to say, hey, create me a plan for my next week and how I can optimize my time. And being able to go and read my calendar and then create me a document about my upcoming week. It was like, there's a lot going on. And it told me I had a massage book. And I was really surprised about that because I didn't actually know until I read that in my Canva doc. And then I was like, oh, I think there's like a bug here. And then I realized that my partner has sat. Nilay Patel The bug is it's booking self-care for you whenever it wants. Melanie Perkins And so I think it's really cool because there's a lot of things that would be like very, very manual, like going and doing a calendar audit. And that all of a sudden can actually happen inside the one thing and it can actually create the presentation or can create the document. And then you can have people collaborating on that. People talk about AI slop and I think the AI slop is often it's like one shot generation you kind of just take that and you put it somewhere else. I think that what Canva has a really it's really exciting about with Canva is that that is really just the draft that's the starting point and then you can use it to iterate you can use that You know through manual editing or you can use that through being able to iteratively edit through Canva AI inside the editor itself. And to refine it to really be able to clearly articulate your idea. So we're pretty excited about the possibilities that it unlocks. ([Time 0:24:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba4a2f04-9212-4ede-bd68-161216c5600a)) - **Use A Goals Options Pros And Cons Framework** - Break complex decisions into goals, options, and pros and cons rather than arguing in the abstract. - Melanie Perkins says Canva now has a complex decision-making template that dictation can fill automatically through Canva AI. Transcript: Nilay Patel I feel like it's time for the decoder questions because you've talked about how much you use Canva internally. The last time I asked you how you make decisions, you said you had a process called decision decks where you literally made Canva documents with all the pros and cons and you mocked up The products. Is that still the process? Melanie Perkins That is still the process. Prototyping has become a very key part of it. So often now there's like a workable prototype before anything gets launched. I think the really fun thing about, I don't know if I talked to you about the complex decision-making framework. Nilay Patel No, this is new. This is definitely new. Okay. Melanie Perkins This, for anyone that needs to make complex decisions, I find this extremely helpful. It's like splitting it out into like what are the goals, then what are the options, what are the pros and cons for each of the options. But it's really fun because like now we have a template inside Canva, which is the complex decision making framework doc. And you literally just dictate using dictation through Canva AI and it will actually go and fill out this template. So there's a lot of really exciting ways of like how you can take your ideas and like the thoughts in your head and then have that distilled in a way that other people can see and understand Which I guess is the essence of design like if you think about design in the sense of it previously you know design can sometimes be thought of as like making things look pretty but really Design is about expressing ideas and being able to communicate that effectively and being able to turn something from an idea into reality and so we think all these new tools really Help to facilitate that. I use Canva code all the time. I used to do a lot of mock-ups and now I use Canva code to create prototypes all the time for every idea that I have, which is pretty powerful because it takes the idea far further than it Could before. ([Time 0:31:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/36752e13-7d72-43b7-aa33-b6da6efce276)) - **A 2011 Canva Deck Predicted Prompt Driven Design** - Canva's AI push was not a sudden pivot; Melanie Perkins says early 2011 pitch decks already imagined prompt-driven design. - She says an October breakthrough turned that long-held vision into a company-wide priority staffed by hundreds of people. Transcript: Nilay Patel I'm really curious about, you know, just in that context, decisions and structure, how you made the decision to say, okay, we're going to do Canva 2.0 and we're going to lean heavily Into AI the way that we're going to lean into AI, right? That's a lot of people. It's a big decision. I imagine that there was a decision-making slide or a deck. And then this feels like it sort of inherently is a top-down decision. We're all doing this. Melanie says, we're all doing this. We're all doing this. Walk me through that decision and walk me through any structure changes you had to make in order to accomplish it. Yeah, absolutely. Melanie Perkins So I'm going to take us back to 2011 and to a deck that we had, which was called Kansas Chef before Canva was even called Canva. And the first slide, when you go into it, it's like, what do you want to chef up today? And then you could type into a search box and the idea was that you could type whatever you wanted and then you'd pop into the editor and you could collaborate and you could have the editing Tools. If we share it with you after this, you'll see it's like bizarrely similar to what we're launching today. So I guess this has been the dream for a really long time, but the technical ability to do this has been hard. I'd say in 2017 we had this document, we called it Getting Smart, and we're like, in the future, future, future, there's going to be search-driven design rather than going to the buffet And getting something that will be able to happen on the fly, like a chef cooking something up from the raw ingredients. And now it feels like we can actually do that. Back in October, we'd been researching into this space for some years. The foundational model, that was a huge step. The design foundational model, that was a huge key piece. But then in October, there was a significant breakthrough in the company that meant that we could actually do it. So as soon as we saw that, we were all like, oh my goodness, this is really exciting and groundbreaking for what Canva can unlock. And so that was when we really started to go all in and realized that that technology needed to be pushed as far as it could go, which is what we're launching today. Nilay Patel Did you send out an email? Did you send out like a Canva deck being like, we're doing this now, decision made. How did that work? Melanie Perkins That is a great question. How did we? So there was a team working on it already and then we really bolstered up that team. So then we were like, okay, we need to get every single person that can possibly help bring this to life onto the project. And we started the weekly show and tells and we turned it into a more of a centralized AI team within hundreds of people. It went from a smaller team to then many hundreds of people to bring it to life, everyone working on the different parts that needed to become part of this orchestra. Nilay Patel Yeah, I'm curious. That structure part seems really interesting to me. We have a software tool, you know, standard sort of deterministic software tool with a select box and a text arrow, all that stuff. And we're going to build an AI that can use that tool. Now we've got to take all the engineers we had and point them at that problem. Did you have to rethink your product team or did you just make it bigger, the team that was working on that part? Melanie Perkins I think a little bit of both. Once the team had this big breakthrough, and we all saw it in action, we're like, my goodness, this is the coolest thing ever. And then we had to figure out who could actually help from across the company. And I think that's the goal-oriented structure I was mentioning before, is that when there's a goal, then you need to figure out who are the people that can help bring this to life? And then everyone, that's where, then we were doing the weekly show on tell so everyone can get a really clear understanding of, like, where everything is at, all the pieces that needed To be orchestrated to come together. I think Canva already being interoperable meant that there was a lot of these things that had already been built and that then could just come together in an exciting way. We do something called the Canva Jigsaw. We've been doing different variations of the Canva Jigsaw since the earliest days, which is like it's often a goal. And then all the pieces that need to be worked on independently to be able to bring that to life. ([Time 0:34:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/085417c3-5f0e-4e52-a7bd-2e9858fea7a3)) - **Canva Treats AI As A Company Wide Operating Shift** - Melanie Perkins says AI is changing every job inside Canva, from engineering and QA to design and product management. - Rather than picking one winning tool, Canva gave teams broad access and pushed an "AI native transformation" across the company. Transcript: Nilay Patel You're fundamentally the software CEO. I think that's a fair description. I think you make software. The nature of software development itself seems to be going under some kind of existential crisis. One of our designers here at Diversion Box Media described all software development now is calibrating yourself to a database and just like talking and seeing what happens. Maybe that'll turn your brain to mush are you using as much cloud code or codex to make canva is it seems like every other company is racing to do yeah so i use canva code really extensively From the perspective of like when you say canva code that's your own coding product you're not using cloud code or because it's so cool. Melanie Perkins So what you can do now, I used to create mock-ups all the time. Anytime I had an idea, I'd create a mock-up. And now anytime I have an idea, I can use Canva code. But with this latest release, you can actually go in and edit the text. So you can actually create something. You can edit the text. You can drag and drop. You can move things around. We've been really investing heavily on the AI front and upskilling our team. So can you make Canva with Canva code? Yeah, we do make Canva with Canva code. Not deployed. We have many incredible engineers that actually make it sound to go out to hundreds of millions of people, but we use it for prototyping all the time. Nilay Patel Yeah, I think that's the question I'm asking is more about those folks and how you think about the costs associated with those folks. Like the nature of software engineering is changing in some big, meaningful way due to the, in particular, the coding tools that are available. Are you rethinking how that works inside of Canva as you ship new versions of Canva? Because every other software CEO I talk to, their minds are exploding. They don't quite know how it's going to go, but they know it's definitely going to change forever. Melanie Perkins I think one of the things that we've invested really heavily in is continuously upskilling our team and systems. So we've taken a very intentional approach to give all of our team access to all of the latest and greatest tools. So we actually have not selected a winner. We have just given them everything. And it's been very intentional because we want everyone to be playing with the latest and greatest and to be upskilling all the time. We need to be upskilling every one of our systems. We need to be upskilling because the way we build product is completely different today. The way we do QA is completely different today. The way we do actually every system and process inside the company has had to have like an AI native transformation. And so every specialty inside the company has had to have an AI native transformation. What a designer does today, what an engineer does today across every single part of the company. So it's been a huge area of investment on the tooling, on giving our team time, on the specialties. We've had this focus on AI everywhere, and then AI impact, and now AI native, because we really want to be rethinking everything in this AI era. Nilay Patel There's some sort of rebalancing of power between product managers, designers, and engineers, because AI lets them all do each other's jobs? Where have you landed on that inside of Canva? Melanie Perkins I think we're all here to build the best experience we can. And I think having really solid expertise, it's never been the best way to build product. In fact, great PMs often think about the design perspective. Great engineers often think about things from a design perspective. So really it's about the team that are like there to like just create the best thing possible. And you know, having people in their separate siloed, isolated lanes and say like, that's my territory was never a great way to build product. And so I think that with AI, it's really leaning further into that. It's like everyone thinking about like what is the best product experience that we can build and everyone will bring different skills to the fore. So a designer will obviously have a certain expertise. A PM will have a certain expertise. An engineer will have certain expertise. But we've always thought of it as a bit of a team sport where the best idea should be winning and everyone should be collaborating to create the best outcome that they possibly can for Our community. ([Time 0:38:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4601a922-6df1-41c6-b703-96e0a762d46a)) - **Canva Tries To Reduce AI Backlash With Optionality** - Melanie Perkins responds to anti-AI sentiment by positioning Canva AI as optional assistance that should accelerate, not replace, a user's intent. - She says Canva kept AI in a separate tab so templates, manual editing, and scratch creation still work unchanged. Transcript: Nilay Patel So I understand that this sort of positive case for AI, why you made the decision. I understand that the product promise of just tell this box what to make and it will make you a first draft and you can go on from there based on the data you have. There's a pretty significant downside to AI, particularly as it relates to brand. There's polling here in the United States, at least, that basically is just bad vibes around AI. The last NBC News poll that we are constantly citing is AI is pulling under ice in terms of favorability and just above the war in Iran. That's not a great place for AI to be as a concept that has favorables aren't favorables. People are voting against data centers in their communities. AI is widely associated with job loss, and maybe now you're going to cause some enterprise job loss because social media teams don't need to be as big as they needed to be anymore. There's a lot of layouts that are being blamed on AI across the board. You're leaning into AI with Canva, right? They're like, you're rebranding the whole product as having AI in it. How do you think about that downside risk that people don't like it? The more they're exposed to it, the more they're saying, wait, stop, I don't want this around me. Melanie Perkins I think it's kind of like any tool. It will be whatever you want it to be. And so if you want it to help empower people, if you want it to help deliver better experiences for your customers, if you want it to uplift students and to give them great quality education Materials, it can do that. And I think that's... Nilay Patel Wait, can it do that? I'm actually not so certain about the student thing. Melanie Perkins We launched something called Learn Grid. And Learn Grid enables across many countries to be able to have the curriculum aligned content created. And that can be worksheets, that can be immediate feedback, and it's free. So we're really excited about being able to put these tools in teachers and students' hands around the world. We've got 100 million teachers and students using Canva today. But the access to great tools is very divergent depending on the wealth of a school, for example. And so we're really excited about being able to bring that accessibility to students around the world. Nilay Patel Right. But I think my question there is, it's more of the slop question, right? People are experiencing the tools that exist today, and maybe mostly they're experiencing the free version of ChatGPT or whatever AI overview Google puts in front of them running On the cheapest possible model at the biggest possible scale. And they're having these experiences. And I know that the industry likes to say most people have never used AI and certainly no one's paying for it. But like a billion people have used ChatGPT. And then the polling is the polling. I'm just sort of wondering how you're thinking about communicating this is an AI product. Because it, to me, feels like that comes with all kinds of baggage. And I'm watching OpenAI by TBPN because they think they have a marketing problem. I'm watching all the venture capitalists be like, the media is lying about AI and it's going to change everything for the better. And then you're racing into being like, Canva's AI now. And I think you know that a bunch of designers are going to be very unhappy about this, right? There's some people who are going to just say, this is bad. They're ruining the product. And I'm just wondering how you are thinking about navigating that balance. Melanie Perkins I think, you know, there's going to be a plethora of opinions on any topic. What we always do is just like put what our community want to need at the centre of it. So we've had a lot of people asking, you know, even yourself quite specifically. You're like, I've got this goal. Why can't Canva AI just know everything about it and be able to help me with that first draft? And so that helping people achieve their goals is always going to be at the centre of what we do. And that's exactly what drives these sorts of decisions is like being able to like take out a lot of the manual work from being able to, you know, create, lay things out. So really believe that AI should accelerate your vision and creativity, not override it. And I think that's really important that like AI is just like another tool in our toolkit and it will help achieve our goals if we choose to use it and so we've been really intentional about The product design like Canva AI is a new tab so if you just come in and you love templates you can use that if you come in and you just love the elements and just like creating things from Scratch that's totally fine that's totally cool if you want to be able to express an idea just like by, through dictation or through typing, you can do that too. So I think it's really important that like we understand that every, every one of our community members is like at different stages and different scales of comfort with AI. And so we want to be, we want to be making sure that we're helping to facilitate that. So I think there's, there's just like the full spectrum and it's really important that Canva isn't turning into a chatbot by any stretch of the imagination. But if you do want to be able to just chat to something and have it help you out, you can do that too. So really enabling all of that. I think I can't speak for other companies out there in the world, but Canva has benefited greatly from an incredible community. We've got, you know, a quarter billion people that use Canva each month. There's a lot of love for our product. And I think that that love really comes from being able to have Canva be the thing that helps people to express their ideas and turn that into reality. And we take that extremely seriously. So with all of these product developments, we are continuing to keep that at our core. ([Time 0:42:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ff3c8aa-8437-477c-b637-563f0743c19e)) - **AI Looks Most Valuable As Enterprise Work Software** - Nilay Patel pushes the idea that AI may be fundamentally enterprise software because repetitive work and marketing automation create obvious ROI. - Melanie Perkins agrees Canva AI will sit at the center of work, especially for cross-platform content creation and deployment. Transcript: Nilay Patel Welcome back. I'm talking with Canvas CEO Melanie Perkins about how weird it is to do automated marketing with AI right now. Let me ask you about the competition because you're describing goals. And, you know, when I talk to executives and I describe goals and what people really want, we often realize you're talking about business software, right? And your enterprise is growing for you. And this very much feels like an enterprise offering to me. Like you're going to connect to all these other systems and you're going to get some work done and you're going to do work. That's what this feels like to me. And I know Canada has a big consumer base and a lot of people have fun with it. This feels like a work product. Is AI fundamentally enterprise software? To me, like I don't think that people yearn for automation in their personal lives. Like I think you want to get rid of busy work at work so you can do something more important, and a lot of work is inherently repetitive. And AI just makes a lot of sense in this zone. Do you think AI is fundamentally enterprise software? Melanie Perkins I think you're right. Canva AI will totally be the system at the center of how work gets done. But that doesn't mean that if you're creating those wanted posters for your daughter's party, you can't be like, pull the invite list from the party coming up. And just like wanting that to kind of connect together. Nilay Patel This implies that I have a good access to the database of the eight-year girls coming to my house next weekend. Melanie Perkins But yeah, it often will be about work. And, you know, work means many different things to many different people. So work can mean a teacher in a classroom. Work, can mean at a large company, work can mean a small business trying to just get their marketing collateral created. I think, you know, we've gone from broadcast communication, where everything is like one to many, to being able to have like a hairdresser, being able to send out a campaign on someone's Birthday to say, here's a special voucher for your birthday, particular thing that you like, you're being able to have that much more personal communication, I think, is another aspect. Nilay Patel It does feel to me like the cutting edge of, in particular, social media marketing is automation in this way. And I've probably watched more TikToks and Instagram reels of social media managers explaining how they have built incredible dashboards using AI tools, automated entire workflows, Built content pipelines. You can see it. There's something very important happening there. Presumably Canva will participate in that and they will build those tools inside of Canva. Right next to that is Meta itself and TikTok itself and YouTube itself, who are all working on tools exactly like this. Mark Zuckerberg in 2025, I'm just going to read you this quote. He said this to Ben Thompson. In general, we're going to get to a point where if you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account. You don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting. You don't need any measurement. You tell us the results you want and we will give them to you, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. That's a redefinition of advertising. That is they're describing to some extent your product, right? You tell it what you want to achieve and AI is going to make a bunch of creative and schedule it across their platform. I know TikTok is working on this. I know YouTube is working on this. They all see this thing that they can sell to their biggest clients, their advertisers. How do you think about competing with the platform's own native capabilities that look a lot like what Canva is trying to make for marketers in particular? Melanie Perkins It's actually funny. It sounds like, you know, back in 2012, we had this pitch and we called it, we had the design engine and we said like all these other platforms are going to like, have tools. And they did like for lots of companies having lots of different tools for like a specific platform. But it's kind of annoying because as a company, you probably want to be advertising in lots of different places. You probably want to be having your pitch decks and your docs and all the different things. And you don't want to have that fragmented across lots of different tools and systems. And so Canva, it's kind of everything in one place rather than having to go and have your knowledge in lots of different places. So that's, I guess, one of the key things that we've been leaning into for the last decade is that Canva can be that thing that is at the center of your work. Nilay Patel So the back and forth there is these platforms either have bad analytics or are not very generous in sharing their analytics or make you pay extra to access their analytics. Meta obviously has its own models. Google obviously has its own models. They might say, look, if you want to run this creative, you've got to make it in our tools. If you want to use this stuff, we will throttle you if you come to us with creative made elsewhere. We're going to push you towards our tools. So you use our models and we get two bytes of the apple on token pricing. I've heard this from a bunch of AICO's that database access in general is going to become a new pricing vector. We're going to charge tolls. You want to connect to our system, the customer will have to pay some higher access fee. Have you seen any glimmers of this yet, or is it too early to say? ([Time 0:51:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0235c09d-9974-4284-b7bb-d1be5a7d78eb)) - **Canva Builds Its Own Models Where Design Is Underserved** - Canva expects falling inference costs to support its AI business, while investing in proprietary design models only where outside labs are weak. - Melanie Perkins cites Magic Layers, built in-house, which split generated images into editable layers and saw 8 million uses in four weeks. Transcript: Nilay Patel I'm curious how this one plays out. Because the other thing that I see at Meta doing is investing heavily in AI, like themselves. And every week, Zuck has spent another $200 trillion hiring three AI researchers who are going to build in the best model. And who knows how that will pay off the same way who knows how any of this will pay off. But one way it could pay off is for him to say, if you want to buy advertising on our platform, you're going to generate it with our AI models. And because we own the model, we can charge you less than Melanie, who has to go buy tokens from someone else and pay their margin and pay her margin. And you can just see how that would, like, I know a lot of social media managers who are fully convinced that they need to make their videos in Instagram's edits app, because Instagram Will promote it more heavily, even if they're not actually making videos, even if they're just feeding it through to get whatever little metadata that says edits. And like, maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But the perception of meta as a platform, the perception of YouTube as a platform is that they will self-preference in this way. So if they're also the model providers and they can have lower pricing and the perception of self-preferencing, how do you expect to come up against that? Melanie Perkins Let's check back in a few years. Okay. Nilay Patel I kind of thought that's what you would say, but it's just, I see it coming, right? Especially for Meta, which has to find some way to make money with the model that they're building. And as of yet, I don't know what it is, except for maybe they're doing reels targeting on GPUs. Melanie Perkins But I can certainly say, you know, from a customer's perspective, being able to create all of the content that you want in one place, having little friction between that, being able To deploy into lots of places. It's, you know, what we've been specializing in, I'd say, for the last decade. And certainly being able to take that to other platforms has been great for our customers, but then also great for the other platforms because then they are able to have all these people That can do their marketing on those platforms. Nilay Patel The last time we talked to your model provider was OpenAI, I believe. Is that still the primary partner? Melanie Perkins We partner with OpenAI and Anthropic and then, of course, our own internal models. We love to collaborate with everyone. Nilay Patel Yeah. Are their models interchangeable or do you use them for specific tasks inside of Canva AI? Melanie Perkins We always take the best model for the best task continuously. So it's been great to have so many great partners in the space, from Google to Anthropik and OpenAI. Nilay Patel My sense of the situation is that every token costs the big companies money. They're all subsidizing token use. At some point, that's going to turn, right? They're going to want to make a penny a profit on every token. What does that do to your pricing when that happens? Melanie Perkins So investing in our own models has been a really core part of our strategy. And we were able to bring the cost down, the latency down. So that's been a – and the price is being driven down radically. Like if you look at the price of LLM queries, it's grown down 50 times in the last three years. So it's pretty exciting from that standpoint of having so many big companies racing to provide the cheapest models. Nilay Patel When you say your own models, are you like in the fight for GPUs? Are you training them on someone else's cloud? How's that working? Melanie Perkins Yeah, it's been a really important area of investment, which is why we've got our own research team of 100 people that are investing in the areas that we need to. So, for example, I was mentioning the design side, like Magic Layers was from our own research org. It's been really exciting to invest in the areas that other companies aren't. We don't need to go and compete in areas that there are billions of dollars of investment already happening. But in the areas that we know we can give great advantage to our customers, we certainly do that. So Magic Layers was, you now take any image from wherever you might generate it into Canva, and then it will actually split it out into layers. So you can just edit it like a Canva template. Nilay Patel Does Magic Layers happen on your models? Or is that, are you going out? Yeah, no, that's certainly our models. That's really cool. When you were, when you've made the decisions to invest in your own models versus going out to other providers, is there a cost performance ratio? Like, how do you make that decision? Because investing in your own models is expensive. Melanie Perkins It is expensive, but, like, for example, Magic Layers has had 8 million uses in the four weeks since launching. And it just really hit a pain point that people had, which was that you generate something and you have to go and re-prompt the LLM over and over again to be able to do it. So being able to, like, just go in and make that tiny little text tweak or, you know, to be able to collaborate or whatever it might be has been really important. So I guess every time we're choosing a model, it's like what is the best in the world? We want to have price brackets for each of the different areas of our company. So you've got different models. You can choose your premium models or you can choose standard models. So we are domain experts in design and visual AI, and so that's been really the focus of our research and development. ([Time 0:58:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c9842e9a-1551-4c29-8080-18dbed53b96c)) - **At Canva's Scale Every Button Has A Constituency** - Canva's scale now creates a product-management constraint similar to Microsoft Word: too many users rely on too many specific features. - Melanie Perkins says Canva uses extensive testing, over 1 million user wishes yearly, and a separate AI tab to avoid breaking core workflows. Transcript: Nilay Patel One of the reasons that I think designers are always mad at Adobe is their pricing goes up, they change the plans, they charge for more, features go up. Go away. You're at a scale with Canva now where you have what I would call like the Microsoft Word problem, where like the toolbar has to have every button in it because you're so big that even if It's like 1% of users use the button, it's like millions of people use the button. And you can't have millions of people mad at you because you remove the button. It feels like Canva is at this scale, which is why AI is in a tab, right? You can't change it too much. How do you think about making sure your Canva customers, who all use the product every day, seem to be very happy with you, stay happy with you, even as you roll out these products? They might fundamentally threaten their jobs or how they work. Melanie Perkins I think all of those considerations you said is absolutely very much on top, very much something we focus greatly on. So, for example, when we launched Canva AI, what we're really excited about is there's like so much breadth and depth in Canva's product now that like a casual user might not be aware Of all of the different things and capabilities that Canva can do. Many users are very deeply aware of every single button in Canva. But Canva AI really brings that all together. So you can just say whatever it is that you want, and you might not know the specific tools you need to be able to use to bring that to life, but it can do it for you. So we're really excited about how that will be able to make complex things simple, even from the perspective of being able to create your first design in Canva. We also do an extraordinary amount of user testing. And we do that with existing Canva community members, with new users. And that really helps to refine the products before we're getting them out the door and into our community's hands. And then we get more than 1 million wishes a year from our community. And so we're actually, we've just granted 40 of them at Canva Create. And so all of these things that we're doing are very much in partnership with our community. And I think that's a really key part for us is that we want to be building Canva in partnership with our community, getting their feedback, helping to learn from what they want, what they Need to do to achieve their goals. And that's very much at the center of how we think about it. All right. Nilay Patel I need to ask you one very important question right at the end. Sure. Do you promise to keep affinity free? Yes, absolutely. Melanie Perkins We've made that an absolutely key commitment. Nilay Patel I feel like every time I talk to you, someone's like, make sure you ask her if affinity is going to stay free. Melanie Perkins I can very much say affinity is going to be staying free. It's a critical thing. We knew that that was a really critical part of why Affinity was created in the first place, is being able to make it more accessible. And then a key part of Canva has always been having our free product. We've got hundreds of millions of people using our free product. Affinity itself has had more than 5 million downloads since we announced it. So yeah, it's a really key part. ([Time 1:08:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aef976e1-e1b3-47ef-b3b0-b1877f341a89))