Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software

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Your PDF files are no longer static. Instead, they're living documents that flex with you and your project's needs. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's ACID compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash build. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva, the popular 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 world of art and design. At the time, Canva had escaped a lot of the criticism leveled at competitors adding AI tools, something Melanie attributed both to how much Canva users love the product and also the fact that the company is making huge inroads into the business world. Canva is a tool that empowers non-designers to make design, and that group of people was just trying to get work done. They didn't seem nearly as threatened by AI as creative professionals using other creative software. Canva users may have even felt empowered. Well, now it's two years later, and it's safe to say that AI is all over modern design software, and a lot more people have had 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, that having the output of the Canva AI system be regular old Canva files is a big deal so that users can refine that work and make it what they actually need. The idea here, to borrow the company's tagline, is that Canva is, quote, moving from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. I'll let you all sit with that for a minute. Obviously, I dug into all of these ideas with Melanie and how she's thinking about Canva's relationship to the AI model providers, the cost of the token 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 of course, 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. I also asked Melanie for an updated vibe check on AI in design. Melanie is herself a designer, but 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 maybe doesn't require creatives anymore. Melanie had a lot of 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. 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 of 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 that, 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 that I believe the company is changing its own conception of itself. Tell us about that change and what led into it. 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. 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. 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. 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 can search our stock photography library, our illustration library. You could drag it onto the page. You could 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 Canvas 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. So I have to ask you, I'm looking at the presentation about all of this. 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? So 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 like to use it for all the fine-grained 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 sort of 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 turning it into the press release doc. And it's really great at helping to create like 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 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. Yeah, I'm curious about this. You know, I'm just looking at pictures of the interface. It looks like a chatbot. You can ask it all kinds of And for everyone's different accessibility needs, even accessibility needs on a day-to-day 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 hundred million plus stock photos and illustrations and drag and drop and design that. So, you know, really the huge opportunity is this end-to-end workflow. 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. So I used Canva this week. Yeah. My daughter's having a detective-themed birthday party. Cool. And so we took photos of all our friends and we're going to make wanted posters. And so I'm like, 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 weedy tech support questions. And it, 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, like, 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, like, 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've 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. And it means, 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 is out, we maybe we'll have to make a special exception because it will help me 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, like, 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. 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 this 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? 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, the way 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 a 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. You know, we've got, 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, the really important part is, you know, 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 the different tools to be able to assemble that. But from a user's 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, 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 it, 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, we have had a few breakthroughs that made this all possible. I, I, I understand. That's why I'm asking. The other thing that I'm very curious about is- You have good questions. I will give you that. That's, that's why everybody comes back. It's surprising. That's, but it turns out it's a fun game to play to see if I can get through the media training moment. 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 Anthropik 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. Cool. I'm happy to hear that. It, it, it's not like, and you know, Anthropik literally has in cloud, 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? Yeah. So we, you ask so many questions in that, in that very short space of time. Oh no, there's more, there's more to come. Don't, don't worry. 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, you know, 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, 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, great technology in that space. And then we've got a hundred 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, um, you get limited credits. And then in pro, we get much more generous. And then in our business package, 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 hundred dollar 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. Um, so we're really excited about to see how that is used and see where it takes them. Don't worry. We're going to, I want to come back to pricing because I have a lot of questions about it. But at first I just kind of want to understand the product a little bit more. Um, the last time you were on the show, you were making the inroads to enterprise, right? You would sort of 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 a hundred percent 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 center of work. Really brings things together. I think there are 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 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, we think is going to be a huge step change for the way work gets done. 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 makes that messier in my mind is 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 like, 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 like 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 like cutting down manual and busy work, which is kind of always the thing that we're doing for our customers. Like when we launched some years ago, like 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. And then again, like with this release, it's kind of the same sort of thing. It's like, 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 like 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 next, 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 sort of accessing one another independently? Or do you think it will naturally land on just one? I think there will be. 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. 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. You know, 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 that, we think we're pretty excited about what we're going to be able to bring out into the world. Yeah. How does it work for you? What's the dynamic inside of Canva? Like you're obviously on the bleeding edge of this technology and you obviously have your own tool. How does it work for you? In what sense? Sorry. 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? Oh, yeah. Since getting connected, like, so obviously Canva's always had all my designs and my presentations and my documents, but being able to get connected and being able to pull information has been pretty astonishing. So for example, being able to say, hey, like 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. I was like, there's a lot going on. And it told me I had a massage booked and I was really surprised about that because I didn't actually know it 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 had written it. The bug is it's booking self-care for you whenever it wants. And so I, 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 then 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. People talk about AI slop and I think that 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 it through Canva AI inside the editor itself and like to refine it to really be able to clearly articulate your idea. So we, we're pretty excited about the possibilities that it unlocks. We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from QO. Spring cleaning can take many forms. And if you're a business owner, it's the perfect time to clean up some of the, shall we say, messier parts of your business. Streamlining your communications can be one of the fastest and easiest ways to get your company back in shape. QO says they can help. 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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. You know, I use Canva code all the time. I used to do a lot of mockups, and now I create, 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 last time I asked you about structure, I asked, the other 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, that one's been around for a week. The cupcake and the icing is actually so applicable in so many different ways. These small empowered teams is really at the essence of how we get things done. 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. And we do like show and tells every week so everyone can share and get deep context on what's happening. I think that like goals has really been at the essence of how we've achieved anything over the last decade is like being able to rally around goals and have different team formations in order to achieve that. How many people is Canva now? Oh, latest stat, about 5,000. Okay, so you've been growing. 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. Like we're all doing this. Like 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 when you, 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 you can, 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. It's, 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 that the technical ability to do this has been, 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 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, like we'd been researching into this space for some years, with the foundational model, that was a huge step, the design foundational model, that was a huge key piece. And 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 realise 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 like a Canva deck being like, we're doing this now, decision made? How did that work? That is a great question. How do 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 be part of this orchestra. So yeah. I'm curious, like that part, that structure part seems really interesting to me, right? We have a software tool, you know, standard sort of deterministic software tool with a select box and a text area, 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? I think a little bit of both. Like once the team had this big breakthrough, then, and we all saw it in action, we were like, my goodness, this is the coolest thing ever. And then we had to figure out like, who could actually help from across the company? And I think that's the goal-oriented structure I was meaning before is that I was mentioning before is that when there's a goal, then you need to figure out like, who are the people that can help bring this to life? And then everyone, that's what then we were doing the weekly show and 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. And 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. And 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 going under 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 like talking and seeing what happens. And maybe that'll turn your brain to mush. Are you using as much cloud code or codex to make Canva as 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. So what you can do, like now, like right... I used to create mockups all the time. Like anytime I had an idea, I'd like 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. Yeah, 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 that's like 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 is, 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, you know, 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 like not selected a winner. We have just like 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 each one of our, every one of our systems. We need to be upskilling because like the way we build product is completely different today. The way we do QA is completely different today. The way we, you know, do actually every system and process inside the company has had to have like an AI native transformation. And so there's, and 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 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... 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. 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 a hundred 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. Right, but I think my question there is, it's more of the slot question, right? Like 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 buy TBPN because they think they have a marketing problem, right? 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 like racing in to be like, Canva is 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. I think, you know, there's going to be a plethora of opinions on any topic. What we always do is just put what our community want and need at the center 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 center of what we do. And that's exactly what drives these sorts of decisions. It's 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 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, you know, 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, you know, really enabling all of that. I think, you know, I can't speak for other companies out there in the world, but, you know, 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. And empowerment is like such a critical principle for us that is very much through everything that you'll hopefully be seeing and touching very soon. We've got to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for this show comes from Rippling. Too often, apps that call themselves all in one are far from it. Rippling is here to make things a whole lot simpler. It's the unified platform for global HR, payroll, IT, and finance. With Rippling, workflows that normally bounce between a handful of tools and departments actually do just happen in one place automatically. Here's an example. You have an employee getting promoted. Rippling can update their payroll taxes, manage any new app permissions, ship them any new device, issue a new corporate card, and assign trainings all in one platform. No jumping between apps. With Rippling, you can run your entire HR, IT, and finance operations as one. Or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps in your software stack. 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Wait, wait, wait, wait, the T-Mobile one says families saved over $3,700 versus the other big guys in the past five years. And their experience plans have Netflix included plus a year of DashPass by DoorDash. Hang on, let me see that. And a five-year price guarantee? Oh yeah, we're switching. That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or? I'm thinking high five. At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. Switch now at T-Mobile. Savings based on HarrisX billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT&T and Verizon, excluding discounts, credits, and optional charges. See harrisx.com slash T-Mobile. Price guarantee on talk, text, and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com. Welcome back. I'm talking with Canva 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 they describe goals and what people really want, we often realize you're talking about business software, right? And the 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 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, 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? I think you're right. Like 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. This implies that I have a good access to the database of the 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 you'll 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 platforms' own native capabilities that look a lot like what Canva is trying to make for marketers in particular? It's actually funny. It sounds like, 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 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 is 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. 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 got to make it in our tools. Right. 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 and 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, right? We're going to charge tolls. You want to connect to our system. You got it. 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. Like, hopefully the customer... That's very optimistic. Hopefully the customer is able to achieve their goals and, you know, use the tools that they want to use. And, you know, I guess at the end of the day, all of this is hopefully about, you know, why I've been so infatuated with design is like design is imagining the future and then willing it into existence. And design really radically helps that process. And so, you know, I guess, you know, you mentioned optimism. I think that's why I love design so much is because you kind of, you do have to imagine the future that you want, and then you can work to bring it into reality. Yeah, I just, I, the reality is Mark Zuckerberg exists and he's very, very, very competitive, right? Like, there's also that piece of it. And, you know, I think, from our experience, I love to have creative because creative is the blocker. Did you say they love money? I heard you. Well, I mean, it is like, I know a lot of social media people who take it as an article of faith. Let me give a little extra clarity on that. They like to be able, like, they're not going to stop advertising. Like 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, you know, 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. Okay, I'm curious how this one plays out because the other thing that I see it Meta doing is investing heavily in AI, like themselves. And they are every week, you know, Zuck has spent another $200 trillion hiring three AI researchers who are going to build in the best model. And like, 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 were 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. 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? Let's check back in a few years. Okay. 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 real targeting on GPUs. Yeah. I can't speak for them and their business model, 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 the, you know, what we've been specializing in, I'd say, for the last decade. And we've certainly been 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. Yeah. Do you, are there 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 that's, you know, 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 companies 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? 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 has been driven down radically. Like 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, are you like in the fight for GPUs or 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 a hundred 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. Does Magic Layers happen on your models or is that, or are you going out to... Yeah, no, that's certainly our models. That's really cool. When you're, 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. It is expensive. But like, for example, Magic Layers has had 8 million uses in the four weeks since launching and it just, it really hit a pain point that people had, which was that, you know, you generate something and you have to go and re-prompt the LLM over and over Very good. But it has to be subtle. Who do you want to take market share from and who might take market share from you? I don't know if 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 like such a pro. It's very good. It's incredible. I've never... I'm impressed. By the reason I'm asking about Adobe specifically... You can name. Who do you think? I'll let you say whoever you think. I do think it's Adobe. And I specifically, you know, 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 kind of graduate to the full suite. And I think we have talked about that journey for a lot of folks. And, you know, when I was young, getting my first legal Photoshop license was a marker. And like, I think that is still a marker for a lot of people. I think Premiere is a marker for a lot of creators, right? Being able to afford that software. And I think Adobe is a different kind of 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. And their products line up right with yours, right? 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, that is the best business database that has ever existed in the history of the world, and they're going to line it all up. Like, 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. And I think that on balance is true. I'm very curious to see how that goes once you put AI in front of everybody. Like I'm saying, I think that there's some risk there. And in general, people are really mad at Adobe all the time, right? That is just the nature of those two companies, the way they're situated right now. So I got to ask you, Jonathan Ryan 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? I definitely can't comment on that. Should it be you? No, definitely not. Maybe you can, but then we would. No, nobody wants me to be in charge of PDFs in the world. Like you don't want that at all. But I'm asking, like if you're looking at this, there's a leadership change coming. Do you see that as an opportunity? Do you see that as your, I will say your competitor, retrenching? But I'm just, I'm curious how you are perceiving that change over there. Honestly, like we really have been pretty busy just focusing on our quarter of a billion users to try to make sure that we're putting great products into their hands. And I just genuinely haven't given that like any consideration. Really? No one sent you a text? Like he's leaving? I was aware of it, but it's like, it's not where my mind is focused. Here, I'll give you the way I think about the world. It's like, I always think it's like internal locus of control and external locus of control. Things that you can control that actually like have an impact and then things that are like completely outside your control. I really focus on the things that are like within our control and like that's delivering a great product to our customers. That is like helping to close our community's wishes. And then the things that are outside of our 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, you know, their pricing goes up. They change the plans. They charge for more. Features 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 removed the button. Like 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 that might fundamentally threaten their jobs or how they work? I think, you know, 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 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, you know, make complex things simple, even from the perspective of like 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 have 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 like 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 like 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 an absolutely key commitment. Just checking. I feel like every time I talk to you, someone's like, make sure you ask her if affinity is going to stay free. I can, I can very much say affinity is going to be staying free. It's a critical thing. You know, 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 that affinity is free and will be. That's great. Canva 2.0 is basically in beta, right? You announced it, but it's in a small beta. Yeah, research preview. When does it go big? At Canva Create, we gave 1 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 and thanks for your great questions. I'd like to thank Melanie Perkins for taking the time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. To let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or BlueSky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have an Instagram and a TikTok. They're also at DecoderPod and they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Yay to Bruce, the streaming king. With quantum fiber internet, he's gonna binge. He wants more. He's got to have more. More bedtime true crime. More podcasts in the shower. Quantum fiber Wi-Fi has the power. More, more, more. Fast internet speeds. He's got the gift to go big. Bring him the game right now. And his royal wings. More sports nonstop. His quantum fiber is on top. Switch today at quantumfiber.com. Limited availability, service and speed in select locations only.