GoKawiilToday, 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.
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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.
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