Today, I’m talking with Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva, a popular online design tool.
I always enjoy talking with Melanie. She was last on the show a couple of years ago, just as the AI revolution was coming to the worlds of art and design. At the time, Canva had escaped a lot of the criticism being leveled at its competitors for adding AI tools. Melanie attributed that both to how much Canva users love the product and also the huge inroads it was making into the business world. Canva is a tool that empowers non-designers to design, and that group of people was just trying to get work done. They didn’t seem nearly as threatened by AI as professionals using other creative software — they may have even felt empowered.
It’s been two years, and it’s safe to say that AI is all over design software now — and a lot more people have a lot more feelings about AI in general. But Melanie and Canva are pushing even more aggressively into integrating AI. The company just announced a big new update that allows people to simply tell Canva what to make and have it go through various data sources like Slack and email to build presentations, documents, and other design materials. Those projects arrive as regular old Canva files, which you can edit at will. You’ll hear Melanie come back to that idea several times — having the output of the AI system be in a format you can edit, so that you can refine it, is a big deal.
The idea here, as Canva says, is to move “from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.”
I’ll let you all sit with that for a moment.
Obviously I dug into that with Melanie, as well as how she’s thinking about Canva’s relationship to the AI model providers, the cost of the tokens required to automate an app like Canva in this way, and the kinds of pricing that might lead to for users. These new AI tools are still in beta, so there’s a lot to be worked out, but you’ll hear Melanie say she’s confident that Canva’s growth in enterprise will continue to accelerate as more and more companies look for tools that automate tasks like making presentations.
But that’s the same idea as a lot of other big AI players aiming for corporate dollars, and so Melanie and I talked a lot about whether Canva is the right platform to bring everything all together. Unsurprisingly, she thinks it is — not least because she runs Canva using Canva.
Of course, I also asked Melanie for an updated vibe check on AI and design. Poll after poll shows that people really do not like AI right now, and the fears around job displacement and being overrun by slop all come to a head in a piece of creative software that doesn’t require creatives anymore. Melanie had some thoughts here as well — and I did my best to get her to talk about Adobe, which is also adding AI tools and raising prices, a deadly combination for the biggest player in the space. You tell me if I got her to bite.
There’s a lot in this one — like I said, I always enjoy talking to Melanie.
Okay: Canva CEO Melanie Perkins. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Perkins, you are the founder and CEO of Canva! Welcome back to Decoder.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
I am very excited to talk to you again. It’s been a couple years. You were last on the show in 2024. We talked about AI and design and the feelings people have about AI and design. And I was looking at that interview again just to prepare for this one. And a lot of the themes are all the same. And then the facts surrounding those themes have changed so dramatically in the past two years. And on top of it, you have big news that I really want to dig into.
So let’s just start at the start. 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, I believe, that the company is changing its own conception of itself. Tell us about that change and what led into it.
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. And so we’re really excited to be bringing the best of technology and putting that into our customers’ hands as we’ve done for the last decade. But obviously the latest and greatest technology today is AI. And so we’re really excited to be doubling down into that space.
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. It seems like a rethinking of what Canva’s product is. Unpack that a little bit for me.
Let’s get into it. So when we launched Canva for the very first time, 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 becoming the system where work happens end to end. But still very importantly with design at its core, being able to take it … I was going deep the other day into the definition of design and to design is to mock an idea. And really to mock 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.
I have to ask you: I’m looking at the presentation about all of this. And it was obviously made in Canva. I know you told me last time that the whole company works in Canva. Did you automate the creation of your own deck announcing the AI tools or did you make it all by hand?
What’s really cool about this new product release, it can be one shot generation and that is awesome, but the really exciting thing is it’s actually also iterative. So it can lay out pages. So for example, you can take huge passages of text and then you can just lay that out with Canva AI. So you can actually be your companion, your creative partner as you’re going through the process. So we didn’t do it to just one shot generation for the entire deck, I have to say. But what we were able to do is use it for all the fine grain edits, the laying out of boxes and that sort of thing. So it really, it helped with the deck.
But I think that’s the exciting thing is that I think one shot generation is like AI 1.0 and being able to do iterative, agentic orchestration is really 2.0. So we’re really excited about that. And then turn it into the press release doc. And it’s really great at helping to create that first draft for us. And then we can use that to iterate, to collaborate because I think we both certainly know and everyone knows that that one shot generation might be a helpful starting point, but that really is the draft to then be able to iterate and refine from there.
I’m curious for this. I’m just looking at pictures of the interface. It looks like a chatbot. 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 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 end text box as the end all, be all of AI?
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 in a chat and you go backwards and forwards asking for the same thing and it will regenerate the entire thing over and over again. It’s annoying. But with Canva AI, you’ve got the ability to have 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.
You’ll see in the interfaces, Canva AI, it’s 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’ll 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. So after a lot of experimentation, that was where we landed, that it’s so powerful to be able to dictate for everyone’s different accessibility needs, even accessibility needs on a day to day basis. Sometimes now I can just be 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 hundred million plus stock photos and illustrations and drag and drop and design that. So really, the huge opportunity is this end to end workflow of being able to take an idea and turn that into a finished, usable work in one seamless platform. Yeah.
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.
Yeah, go for it!
So I used Canva this week. My daughter’s having a detective themed birthday party. And so we took photos of all her 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.” 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. 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, not the other. I couldn’t look at my finished layout and say, “Actually, can you just go ahead and remove the background from this photo?” 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?
You hit the nail on the head with what we were doing with Canva AI 2.0. 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, because it’ll help you 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’s standard format.
I think I understand how the user will see it. Architecturally, I’m very curious how you build the product that way, because it doesn’t seem like there’s some industry standard way of saying, “Now you can use this software.” About half of the attempts I see are just taking screenshots of everything and very slowly clicking 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?
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 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 use 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.
I’m just curious what bet you made there, because it feels like the industry is not coalesced on a strategy. So is it actually clicking around Canva or is there some other way of the AI addressing the tools?
I won’t go into technical detail there, because I think that we have had a few breakthroughs that made this all possible.
The other question I have is who the model providers that you have doing this are. Because we are hearing every single day that token use rates for agentic software through the roof, or 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.
I’m happy to hear that.
And Anthropic literally has, in Claude, there’s a usage meter and it will tell you, “You’re done now or pay us more money.” Are you going to have a token usage meter in Canva in the same way?
You asked so many questions in that very short space of time.
There’s more to come, don’t worry.
We have been investing in the areas that we really need to. 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 specialize 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 limited credits and then in pro, we get much more generous. And then in our business package, you get far more generous, then enterprise even 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 of these new products. So we’re really excited to see how that is used and see where it takes them.
I want to come back to pricing, because I have a lot of questions about it, but first I just want to understand the product a little bit more. The last time you were on the show, you were making the inroads to enterprise. You would relaunch 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?
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 with Canva AI 2.0, we’ll radically change that. It will be a huge step change again, and become the system at the center of work and really bring things together.
I think a lot of people can relate right now. It feels like there are a lot of fragmented systems, things that are in lots of different places. We think being able to have that all on one platform, all of the work and all of 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, is going to be a huge step change for the way work gets done.
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 the AI thesis in general. You hear it all over the place. I work with a bunch of cranky reporters. I don’t think they put all their ideas in the databases, but I get it. 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? You’re right up against Claude. Or you’re right up against, I don’t know, Oracle, whatever 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.
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 had my own experience of this the other day, which blew my mind. I had to answer a whole bunch of questions that were going into 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 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 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.
I think that the thing I’m curious about is where the primary interface for that lives. And you’re obviously making the case that it should be Canva. For the CEO of Canva, it clearly is inside of Canva, but I could bring the CEO of Slack on here and they would happily tell you that that is Slack. Or I don’t know, Microsoft will tell you that they’re going to force-feed Copilot to you wherever you are, using a Microsoft product and that’s where that should be. There are a lot of ideas about this.
One of the things that makes that messy, in my mind, is that all of these products can now talk to each other in very specific ways. So Canva itself is a plugin for the other chatbots and it seems like the usage of that plugin is very high. How do you think about who owns the interface in a world where the core tool set might be usable somewhere else entirely that also has access to all that data and all that information that the company might have generated?
The key focus for us is always: How do we empower our community the most? How do we help them to achieve their goals? So we’re already embedded in organizations and businesses all around the world. And when they’re creating a design today in Canva, it’s quite a manual process. You have to go to all these different fragmented tools, collect all the information. And so being able to have that just inside the design tools, we think, will make a great deal of sense because it means that you’re not… It’s just cutting down manual and busy work, which is always the thing that we’re doing for our customers. Like in 2019, we launched background remover and the whole point of that was you click the background remove button and then the background was removed, and that reduced a lot of manual work.
Again, with this release, it’s the same thing. There’s a lot of manual work to go and collect all the information, collect all of the context, all in different places. And so having that just there where you’re designing, we think, makes a lot of sense, where you’ve already got huge repositories of your images across your company, where you’ve already got all your brand templates, where you’re already doing the collaboration. We think that makes a lot of sense. But really, we just want to be putting the tools that help to reduce busy work in the hands of our community and helping them to achieve their goals with less clicks.
A few weeks ago, we had the CEO of Okta on the show, Todd McKinnon, and he was like, “The future of Okta is managing agent permissions because this is a security nightmare and I will sell kill switches to every enterprise that has agents running rampant over its networks and databases.” And so I hear what you’re saying. It’s like, okay, Slack is going to have a bunch of agents that can go talk to Canva’s database of images. Canva will have a bunch of agents that can go talk to Slack’s database of conversations, something else is going to happen over here. Does that seem like a workable picture of a company of the future, where all of these tools are accessing one another independently or do you think it will naturally land on just one?
I think the cool thing is, for consumers, there’s going to be choice about how they want to have their work stack set up. And I think it’s a really exciting time in technology because there’s just so many new possibilities for the way work gets done to reduce fragmentation. We’ve got a quarter of a billion people using Canva today, so we think there’s a huge opportunity to make AI simple and accessible, just like we did with design, but very importantly, helping to empower people to achieve their goals and to communicate their ideas. So we think we’re pretty excited about what we’re going to be able to bring out into the world.
How does it work for you? What’s the dynamic inside of Canva? Obviously you’re on the bleeding edge of this technology and you obviously have your own tool. How does it work for you? 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?
Obviously Canva’s always had all my designs and my presentations and my documents, but being able to get connectors and being able to pull in 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 it 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.” It told me I had a massage booked 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 a bug here,” and then I realized that my partner had organized that.
The bug is, it’s booking self-care for you whenever it wants.
And so I think it’s really cool because there’s a lot of things that would be very manual, like going and doing a calendar audit, and that all of a sudden can actually just happen inside the one thing and it can actually create the presentation or it can create the document and then you can have people collaborating on that as you go.
People talk about AI slop, and I think the AI slop is often one shot generation, you just take that and you put it somewhere else. I think what’s really exciting with Canva is that that’s really just the draft. That’s the starting point. And then you can use it to iterate, you can use that 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.
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?
That is still the process. Prototyping has become a very key part of it. So often now there’s 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.
No, this is new.
Okay. Well, this, for anyone that needs to make complex decisions, I find this extremely helpful plitting 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 now we have a template inside Canva, which is the complex decision making framework doc. And you can 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 you can take your ideas and 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.
If you think about design in the sense that previously, design can sometimes be thought of as 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 mockups 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.
The other Decoder question is how the companies are structured. Last time, you were about 4,500 people and you described your structure as a very centralized product team and then lots and lots of local teams. And the metaphor you used was a cupcake and you said, “We work on the cupcake and we make the cupcake bigger and all the local teams work on the icing.” Is that still the metaphor?
Yeah, that’s a fair metaphor. That one’s been around for… The cupcake and the icing is actually so applicable in so many different ways. Small empowered teams are really the essence of how we get things done. And we’re very much a goal-oriented structure.
So for example, with Canva AI 2.0, we really brought everyone together across the company to achieve that goal and bring Canva AI 2.0 out into the world. We do show and tells every week so everyone can share and get deep context on what’s happening. I think that “goal” has really been the essence of how we’ve achieved anything over the last decade, being able to rally around goals and have different team formations in order to achieve that.
How many people is Canva now?
Latest stat, about 5,000.
So you’ve been growing. I’m really curious about, 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.” 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 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. So I’m going to take us back to 2011 and to a deck that we had, which was called Canva’s Chef, before Canva was even called Canva. And the first slide, when you go onto 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 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 shared it with you after this, you’d see it’s 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, it’ll 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 this space for some years with 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 realize that that technology needed to be pushed as far as it could go, which is what we’re launching today.
Did you send out an email? Did you send out a Canva deck saying, “We’re doing this now, decision made?” How did that work?
That is a great question. So there was a team working on it already, and then we really bolstered up that team. So then we said, “Okay, we need to get every single person that can possibly help bring this to life onto the project.” We started the weekly show-and-tell’s, and we turned it into a more of a centralized AI team with hundreds of people. It went from a smaller team to then many hundreds of people to bring it to life, with everyone working on the different parts that needed to become part of this orchestra.
I’m curious. That structure part seems really interesting to me: “We have a software tool, a standard deterministic software tool with a select box and 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 the team that was working on that part larger?
I think a little bit of both. Once the team had this big breakthrough, and we all saw it in action, we said, “My goodness, this is the coolest thing ever.” We then had to figure out who could actually help from across the company. I think that’s the goal-oriented structure I was mentioning before: when there’s a goal, you need to figure out who are the people that can help bring this to life. And then we were doing a weekly show-and-tell so everyone could get a really clear understanding of where everything was at and all the pieces that needed to be orchestrated to come together.
I think Canva already being interoperable meant that there were 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 often a goal and then all the pieces that need to be worked on independently to be able to bring that to life. That was exactly what we had at the center of this project again.
You’re fundamentally a software CEO. I think that’s a fair description. I think you make software. The nature of software development itself seems to be undergoing some kind of existential crisis. One of our designers here at The Verge and Vox Media described all software development now as calibrating yourself to a database and just talking and seeing what happens and maybe that’ll turn your brain to mush.
Are you using as much Claude Code or Codex to make Canva, as it seems like every other company is racing to do?
Yeah, I use Canva Code really extensively from the perspective of–
When you say Canva Code, that’s your own coding product? You’re not using Claude Code or Codex?
Yeah, because it’s so cool. I used to create mockups all the time. Anytime I had an idea, I would create a mockup. 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 code 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.
Yeah, I think the question I’m asking is more about those folks and how you think about the costs associated with those folks. The nature of software engineering is changing in some big, meaningful way due, in particular, to the coding tools that are available.
Are you rethinking how that works inside of Canva, as you ship new versions of Canva? Because for 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.
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 [quality assurance] is completely different today. The way we do actually every system and process inside the companies had to have 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, and 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.
There’s some 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?
I think we’re all here to build the best experience we can. I think having really solid expertise has never been the best way to build product. In fact, great PMs often think about things from a design perspective. Great engineers often think about things from a design perspective. So really, it’s about the team that is there to just create the best thing possible. And having people in their separate siloed, isolated lanes and saying, “That’s my territory,” was never a great way to build product.
With AI, it’s really leaning further into that. It’s everyone thinking about 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 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.
So I understand this positive case for AI, and 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 branding.
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 polling under ICE in terms of favorability and just above the war in Iran. That’s not a great place for AI to be.
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 layoffs that are being blamed on AI across the board.
You’re leaning into AI with Canva. 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.”
I think it’s 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.
Wait, can it do that? I’m actually not so certain about the student thing.
We launched something called LearnGrid and LearnGrid enables, across many countries, to be able to have the curriculum aligned content created. That can be worksheets and immediate feedback. 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. So we’re really excited about being able to bring that accessibility to students around the world.
Right. But I think my question is more about slop, 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. 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 wondering how you’re thinking about communicating this is an AI product because, to me, it feels like it comes with all kinds of baggage. I’m watching OpenAI buy TBPN because they think they have a marketing problem. I’m watching all the venture capitalists say, “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.” I think you know that a bunch of designers are going to be very unhappy about this. There’re some people who are going to just say, “This is bad. They’re ruining the product.” I’m just wondering how you are thinking about navigating that balance.
I think there’s going to be a plethora of opinions on any topic. What we always do is just put what our community wants and needs at the center of it. So we’ve had a lot of people asking, even yourself quite specifically, 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?” So helping people to achieve their goals is always going to be at the center of what we do and that’s exactly what drives these sorts of decisions.
It is about being able to take out a lot of the manual work from being able to create and lay things out. So I really believe that AI should accelerate your vision and creativity, not override it. I think that it’s really important that AI is just another tool in our toolkit and it will help achieve our goals, if we choose to use it. 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 creating things from scratch, that’s totally fine. That’s totally cool.
But if you want to be able to express an idea just by dictation or through typing, you can do that too. So I think it’s really important that we understand that every one of our community members is at different stages and different scales of comfort with AI. We want to be making sure that we’re helping to facilitate that. So I think this is 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 it’s about really enabling all of that.
I can’t speak for other companies out there in the world. But Canva has benefited greatly from an incredible community. We’ve got a quarter billion people that use Canva each month. There’s a lot of love for our product. 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. We take that extremely seriously. So with all of these product developments, we are continuing to keep that at our core and empowerment is such a critical principle for us that is very much through everything that you’ll hopefully be seeing and touching very soon.
Let me ask you about the competition because you’re describing goals and when I talk to executives and they describe goals and what people really want, you often realize you’re talking about business software. Your enterprise is growing for you and this very much feels like an enterprise offering to me. 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 Canva 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, I don’t think that people yearn for automation in their personal lives. 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?
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 wanting it to connect to that.
This implies that I have good access to the database of the eight-year-old girls coming to my house next weekend, but I’ll grant you that.
But yeah, it often will be about work and 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 we’ve shifted away from broadcast communication, where everything is one to many, to maybe having a hairdresser be able to send out a campaign on someone’s birthday to say, “Here’s a special voucher for your birthday. We have that particular thing that you like.” Being able to have that much more personal communication, I think is another aspect.
It does feel to me like the cutting edge of social media marketing in particular is automation in this way. I probably watched more TikToks and Instagram Reels of social media managers explaining how they have built incredible dashboards using AI tools, and automated entire workflows and 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 and YouTube, which are all working on tools exactly like this. Mark Zuckerberg last year — I’m just going to read you this quote — 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. You expect to be able to read the results that we spit out.”
That’s a redefinition of advertising. They’re describing, to some extent, your product. 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’s trying to make for marketers?
It’s actually funny. Back in 2012, we had this pitch and we called it the design engine. And we said all these other platforms are going to have tools and they did. Lots of companies have lots of different tools for a specific platform, but it’s 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.
So Canva is 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.
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 have 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 bites of the apple on token pricing.”
I’ve heard this from a bunch of AI CEOs, that database access in general is going to become a new pricing vector. We’re going to charge for tools. If 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?
I’d say, A, it’s too early, but B, I think that hopefully the customer wins out of all of this.
That’s very optimistic.
Hopefully the customer is able to achieve their goals and use the tools that they want to use. I guess at the end of the day, why I’ve been so infatuated with design is that design is imagining the future and then willing it into existence. And so, design really radically helps that process. You mentioned optimism. I think that’s why I love design so much is because you do have to imagine the future that you want and then you can work to bring it into reality.
The reality is Mark Zuckerberg exists and he’s very, very, very competitive. There’s also that piece of it.
I think they also like money. I think from our experience, they love to have creative because creative is the blocker.
[Laughs] Did you say they like money? I heard you. Well, I mean, look… I know a lot of social media people who take it as an article of faith–
[Laughs] Let me give a little clarity on that. They’re not going to stop advertising. Their company is built on advertising, so they’re going to want to take creative from wherever to have it on their platform. In fact, the lack of companies being able to create great advertising materials has been a huge blocker from people being able to advertise on their platform. And so I don’t think they’re going to be sad about creating it in Canva.
I’m curious how this one plays out because the other thing that I see at Meta doing is investing heavily in AI themselves. Every week, Zuck has spent another $200 trillion hiring three AI researchers who are going to build him the best model. 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 Zuckerberg 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.”
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 the videos, even if they’re just feeding it through to get whatever little metadata that says “Edits.”
Maybe that’s true and 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?
Let’s check back in a few years.
Okay. I thought that’s what you would say, but I just see it coming. Especially for Meta, which has to find some way to make money with the models they’re building. As of yet, I don’t know what it is except for maybe they’re doing Reels targeting on GPUs.
I can’t speak for them and their business model, but I can certainly say, 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 is what we’ve been specializing in for, I’d say, 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’re able to have all these people that can do their marketing on those platforms.
The last time we talked to your model provider was OpenAI, I believe. Is that still the primary partner?
We partner with OpenAI and Anthropic and then, of course, our own internal models. We love to collaborate with everyone.
Are their models interchangeable? Or do you use them for specific tasks inside of Canva AI?
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 Anthropic and OpenAI.
My sense of the situation is that every token costs the big company’s money, that they’re all subsidizing token use. At some point that’s going to turn, right? They’re going to want to make a penny of profit on every token. What does that do to your pricing when that happens?
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. And the price is being driven down radically. If you look at the price of LLM queries, it’s gone 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.
When you say your own models, actually, are you in the fight for GPUs? Are you training them on someone else’s cloud? How’s that working?
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. 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 where 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 lets 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, which is pretty exciting.
Does Magic Layers happen on your models or are you going out?
Yeah, that’s certainly our models.
That’s really cool. When you’ve made the decisions to invest in your own models versus going out to other providers, is there a cost performance ratio? How do you make that decision? Because investing in your own models is expensive.
It is expensive, but for example, Magic Layers has had eight million uses in the four weeks since launching. It really hit a pain point that people had, which was that you generate something and you have to go and reprompt the LLM over and over again to be able to do it. So being able to just go in and make that tiny little text tweak or 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 about “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.
You said you don’t want to talk about your competitors, but I want to wrap up by talking about your biggest competitor. We spent some time on it the last time you were on the show.
I’m actually curious, I don’t even know who you’re going to name. Who’s our biggest competitor?
I think it’s Adobe. I think in the world of creative software for professionals, it’s obviously Adobe. And maybe Canva’s more consumer than that. Who do you think your biggest competitor is?
I shouldn’t have opened that question up, should I? I should have let you go on–
[Laughs] You walked right into this.
I know, I know. When we set out years ago, we were like, there’s this huge gap in the market. There weren’t tools that enabled easy design and that were rapid and enabled creative freedom. And I think that that’s exactly what we want to do, with Canva AI 2.0 bringing creativity and productivity together, being this place where you can get all of your work done in one place.
I don’t really think of them as competitors. There are our community of a quarter billion people that we need to satisfy and help them achieve their goals. We really focus on running our own race and filling the gap in the market.
No, but you have to answer. Who’s your biggest competitor?
Who’s our biggest competitor?
You can’t say no one. You can’t be a $4 billion company with no competitors. That’s not a choice.
I think the way we think about it, it would be actually a bad business decision to be like, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go and create this product that another company has created.” That wouldn’t make any sense. We literally go in and we say, “Where is the gap in the market? Where are users currently having friction?”
I like what you’re doing, and I appreciate it and it’s very good, but it has to be someone. Who do you want to take market share from and who might take market share from you?
I don’t know that I have a great answer for you. I think there’s a lot of fragmented tools right now and having that in one place, I think, is going to be the gap in the market that we fill.
Were you born this way? You’re such a pro. It’s very good. It’s incredible. I’m impressed.
You can name some. Who do you think? I’ll let you say whoever you think.
I do think it’s Adobe. And specifically, when I think about the Canva community, it’s a lot of people who need to make something as consumers or as a one-off at their company and they graduate to the full suite. I think we have talked about that journey for a lot of folks. And when I was young, getting my first legal Photoshop license was a marker. And I think that is still a marker for a lot of people. I think Premier is a marker for a lot of creators, being able to afford that software.
I think Adobe is a different company, and maybe you don’t think they’re a competitor, but they occupy the same space for a lot of creatives, in a lot of ways. Their products line up right with yours. You can prompt Photoshop in exactly the way that you were talking about prompting Canva, and Adobe will tell you that its PDF business is the best business database that has ever existed in the history of the world, and they’re going to line it all up. I know what they’re going to do.
One of the things that I think is the most interesting, when I line up these two companies, is, in general, people love Canva. I think that, on balance, is true. I’m very curious to see how that goes once you put AI in front of everybody. I think that there’s some risk there, and in general, people are really mad at Adobe all the time. That is just the nature of those two companies, the way they’re situated right now.
So I’ve got to ask you this. Shantanu Narayen is leaving Adobe. He announced he’s going. We don’t know who the new CEO is going to be. Who do you think the next CEO of Adobe should be?
[Laughs] I definitely can’t comment on that.
Yeah you can. Should it be you?
No, definitely not. Maybe you can, but then we-
No. Nobody wants me to be in charge of PDFs in the world. You don’t want that at all. But I’m asking, if you’re looking at this, there’s a leadership change coming. Do you see that as an opportunity? Do you see that as, I will say, your competitor, retrenching? But I’m curious how you are perceiving that changeover there.
Honestly, we really have been pretty busy just focusing on our quarter billion users to try to make sure that we’re putting great products in their hands.
Very good.
I just genuinely haven’t given that any consideration.
Really? No one sent you a text, like, “He’s leaving”?
I was aware of it, but it’s not where my mind is focused. I’ll give you the way I think about the world. I always think it’s an internal locus of control and external locus of control. Things that you can control, that actually have an impact and then things that are completely outside your control. I really focus on the things that are within our control and that’s delivering a great product to our customers that is helping to close our community’s wishes. And then the things that are outside of my control, I literally just don’t focus my time and energy on because there’s quite a bit inside the internal locus of control.
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, and features go away. You’re at a scale with Canva now where you have what I would call the Microsoft Word problem, where the toolbar has to have every button in it because you’re so big that even if it’s only 1 percent of users who use the button, it’s still millions of people and you can’t have millions of people mad at you because you remove the button.
That feels like Canva’s 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 and stay happy with you, even as you roll out these products that might fundamentally threaten their jobs or how they work?
I think all of those considerations you said are absolutely very much something we focus greatly on. So for example, when we launched Canva AI, what we’re really excited about is there’s so much breadth and depth in Canva’s product now that 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 could just say whatever it is that you want and you might not know the specific tools that 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, and 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. We get more than one million wishes a year from our community and so we have actually just granted 40 of them at Canva Create.
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. I need to ask you one very important question right at the end.
Sure.
Do you promise to keep Affinity free?
Yes, absolutely. We’ve made that absolutely key commitment.
Just checking. I feel like every time I talk to you, someone tells me, “Make sure you ask her if Affinity’s going to stay free.”
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 — 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. Affinity is free and will be.
That’s great. Canva 2.0 is basically in beta, right? You’ve announced it, but it’s in a small beta.
Yeah, in a research preview.
When does it go big?
At Canva Create, we gave one million people access to Canva AI 2.0. And so we’re really excited to be watching how everyone is using it and how it’s helping them to achieve their goals.
Great. Well, I look forward to getting secret access to it so I can make even more silly posters for birthday parties. Melanie, it’s always so much fun talking to you. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for your great questions.
Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
]]>
