Like many companies navigating this new era of artificial intelligence, Canva has had an “interesting” year. Looking back at the last six months, Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer of the Sydney-based company, explains why the so-called SaaSpocalypse never kept him up at night, how Canva shifted from a design company to an AI company without losing what made it great, and why being only 1% of the way there is actually the most exciting place to be.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response recorded live at the Cannes Lions festival, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You and I were talking about the challenge of this year, living dangerously with AI changing so much and Canva itself being under a different kind of pressure. Has it been a good year? What’s made it a dangerous year?
I’d probably say it’s been an interesting year. I think we’ve always been running a marathon at Canva. We’ve always had an incredibly long-term vision. This year feels like we’re sprinting that marathon just a little bit.
You said that you now consider Canva to be an AI company that does design rather than a design company that does AI. That seems like a big change to make in a company as big as Canva.
It has been a big change. Having a strong bench of AI researchers and ML [machine learning] engineers has enabled us to move rapidly on the product and, particularly, to develop our own unique blend of AI. It’s not just repackaging an LLM [large language model]. It’s deep technical research and unique IP that now exists within the Canva platform.
This past year, the team has scaled up, which has enabled us to ship more, but we’ve also entered a new cadence of product shipping. To me, it feels really exciting because it’s almost a return to our startup roots. It’s not thinking about 6,000 people and moving them all like the Titanic. It is a bunch of speedboats now going around and shipping as much customer value as we possibly can on a week-by-week cadence.
When you’re moving at the pace of AI, I guess your product pace has to be faster than it was. How much do you worry about what that means to your users? If the product changes too fast for them, they’re not looking for it to change. They’re looking for it to continue to do the things they want it to do. Is all the change behind the scenes, or how do you get the customer up to speed with you?
Definitely, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes change in terms of how quickly our teams are putting features out, and particularly how quickly we get it out to our own internal team. Every great software company, every great AI company, is shipping to itself first. So we’re literally shipping new stuff to the Canva team every day to try out, to see if it’s good enough quality, and to see how we need to change the experience to map to it.
But as you say, if you did that to your customers, they would be incredibly frustrated because they just want to turn up and get their job done. So you have to be careful when you roll out a very major change to app architecture or anything like that, but you can roll out smaller stuff quite easily. You can roll out improvements to models, a new filter that you could apply to an image, or a new kind of workflow that you can apply to your images. So we try not to move all the pieces around too much, but adding in new pieces you can do fairly scalably.
When you think about the playbook of how you’ve had to refocus the company and the product, do you look at some of the companies in Silicon Valley and say, “Oh, we’re going to do it that way,” or, “We’re not going to do it that way”? You guys are far from Silicon Valley in Sydney.
We’ve made, I think, a couple of really pivotal changes to the way we work with our teams to enable that. First, it is: Use whatever tool you need. So we’re not mandating Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, or whatever tool you want to use in your part of the company. You can figure it out. You’ve got budget to try out tools, figure out your workflow and your process, and tackle the problems that you have. Giving people that freedom is really important, because they need to feel comfortable experimenting. If you force a tool on them, they’re just going to do that very begrudgingly, and they’re not going to enter into this very experimental mindset that we need them to.
The second part is giving them the time to explore and try things out. I’m sure we’re all terribly busy and trying to get 101 things done every single week, and you naturally fall into the patterns you would normally do things in. You’ve got your tried-and-trusted tools, you know how they work, and you’ll always reach for them. So you’re not looking for that medium-term and long-term improvement that you can get through some of these tools. So we give our staff plenty of time to sit back, put down their usual tools, step out of business as usual, and experiment.
Something we did a month ago called AI Discovery Week really speaks to that. For the whole week, we said to people, “Please don’t do your normal work. We want you to think of the problems that you have, the tools that you’ve heard about, the opportunities that you’ve heard from colleagues in other industries, and we want you to try those out for the entire week.”
At the end of the week, we did a massive show-and-tell where people showed off what they did, and we had about 400 or 500 different projects that people showed off, employing AI in different ways, from our legal team to our finance team to, of course, our product and engineering teams. It was super energizing.
There’s a phrase that became popular earlier this year: SaaSpocalypse.
Yeah.
The idea was that businesses based around software, not unlike Canva, were suddenly vulnerable to obsolescence because of what the models could do. Is that something that worried you or spurred you in a different way?
I don’t think it worried us, but it certainly gave us an interesting viewpoint to take as we thought more deeply about building an AI platform. I think this notion that there’s going to be one place the entire world goes to do all of its work is not going to be reality. Tools like Canva that focus on particular areas, like visual communication and visual content creation, will be able to create an experience that is far deeper [and] far richer, and gets you better results. At the end of the day, that’s what we all want. We want better results for what we’re trying to do, and Canva can certainly do that with visual AI.
There’s a lot of talk these days about the responsibility of AI companies, that just because you can do something maybe doesn’t mean you should. What kind of responsibility do you feel Canva has?
We feel a very deep responsibility. We now have a quarter of a billion people who use Canva every single month. Being able to fuel more of that through AI, through better product development, is an incredible responsibility that we feel. We are very optimistic that Canva will get to over a billion people using Canva itself. That puts a responsibility on us to make sure every person in the world can access that, not just the rich few, not just a few people who can speak English, but literally everyone in the world who speaks different languages, who has different economic capabilities, and who operates on different devices. We need to make sure Canva empowers the whole world to design through everything we do, and that the AI we use and develop truly represents the world as well.