We're now an AI company, not a design one, says Canva cofounder

Canva cofounder and chief product officer Cameron Adams has a new way of describing his company: an AI company that happens to do design, not the other way around. He laid out the shift in a Rapid Response interview recorded live at the Cannes Lions festival, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian.

Canva’s approach to AI development is more like a marathon that the firm is now racing through. The year that passed was "interesting", according to Adams, in terms of the company's long-term strategies.

He attributed the "interestingness" of its AI to a strong bench of internal AI researchers and machine learning engineers at Canva that enabled them to develop their own proprietary tech stack.

From one giant ship to a fleet of speedboats

The company has also changed how it ships products, moving away from slower, company-wide rollouts and toward smaller, faster releases tested internally before reaching customers.

Adams said Canva now pushes new features to its own 6,000-person team constantly, using employee feedback to refine quality before anything reaches the roughly quarter-billion people who use Canva monthly.

Unlike other companies that compel their employees to work using a single platform, Canva allows its workers flexibility in choosing whatever platform they would wish to use within a given budget.

That thinking is why Canva launched its version of 'AI Discovery Week', where workers get to stop everything they do and focus on working with new AI methods. In the end, 400 to 500 internal projects got to be presented by Canva's team members, including the law and financial teams.

Adams rejected the notion of "SaaSpocalypse", which entails the extinction of software products through AI models, by arguing that no single AI application will at any point perform every individual's job. Adams believes that task-orientated platforms, such as Canva, that specialise in creating visual content will always outperform other applications.