YouSaid · the spoken record

Cameron Adams

lines on the record: 71
first: 2026-04-20
most recent: 2026-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 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. Affinity is free and will be.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really hopes to refine the products before we're getting them out the door and into our community's hands. And then we get more than one million wishes a year from our community. And so we're actually, we've 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 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think all of those considerations you said is absolutely very much something we focus greatly on. So for example, when we launch Canva AI, what we're really excited about is there's like so much breadth and depth in Canvas product now that like 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. 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 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 like being able to create your first design in Canva. We also do an extraordinarily amount of user testing and we do that with existing Canva community members with new users.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 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. helping to close our community's wishes. And then the things that are outside 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 into their hands. I just genuinely haven't given that. Any consideration. Really? No one”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 curious how you are perceiving that change over”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 was 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 and Ryan is leaving Adobe. He knows 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 kind of graduate to the full suite, right? 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 like.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't be a $4 bill And I think that 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 these products that another company has created that wouldn't make any sense. We literally go in and we say, like, where is the gap in the market? Where are you just? I like what you're doing and”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really think of it as competitors. They're 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I shouldn't have opened that question, or should I? I should have let you just go. 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 wasn't tools that enabled easy design that was rapid and enabled creative freedom. And I think that that's exactly, you know, with Canada AI 2.0, bring creativity and productivity together, being this place where you can get all of your work done in one place.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is expensive, but for example, Magic Lasers has had 8 million uses in the four weeks since launching. And it just 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 like just go in and make that tiny little text tweak or, you know, 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 like, 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 the 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, and the price is being driven down radically. Like if you look at the price of LLM queries, it's growing 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 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, it's the, you know, what we've been specializing in, I'd say, for the last decade. And certainly being able to take that to other platforms has... Great for our customers, but then also great for the other platforms because then they are able to have all these people that can do their marketing on those platforms.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say A is too early, but B, I think that hopefully the customer wins out of all of this. Like, hopefully the customer will achieve their goals and use the tools that they want to use. And I guess at the end of the day, all of this is hopefully about 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 I guess 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 have tools and they did 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, it's 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little girls coming to my house next weekend. 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 the marketing collateral created. I think we've gone from broadcast communication where everything is like one to many to being able to have like a hairdresser being able to send out a”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 wanting that to kind of.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of love for our product. And I think 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can use that. If you come in and 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 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 This is like 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 really enabling all of that. I think 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think 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 to achieve their goals is always going to be at the center of what we do. That's exactly what drives these sorts of decisions is like being able to like take out a lot of the manual work from being able to 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So certain about the student thing. We launched something called LearnGrid, and Learn Grid 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 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. And so we're really excited about being able to bring that accessibility to students around the world.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 can...”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're all here to build the best experience we can. And I think having really solid expertise is, it's never been the best way to build product. In fact, great PMs often think about the design perspective, great engineers often think about things from a design perspective. So really it's about the team that are like there to just create the best thing possible. And having people in their separate siloed, isolated lanes and say like, that's my territory was never a great way to build product. And so I think that with AI, it's a really leaning further into that. It's like 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 of 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 spot where the best idea should be winning and everyone should be collaborating to create the best outcome that they possibly can for our community.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 each one of our systems. We need to be upskilling because the way we build product is completely different today. The way we do QA is completely different today. The way we do actually every system and process inside the companies had to have like an AI native transformation. And so there's every specialty inside the company has 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using cloud code because it's so cool. So, what you can do now, like rather I used to create mockups all the time. Like anytime I had an idea, I'd like create a mock-up. 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fundamentally, as 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 VirginBox 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 codecs to make Canva as It seems like every other company is racing to do?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a little bit of both. Once the team had this big breakthrough and we all saw in action, we were like, my goodness, this is the coolest thing ever. And then we had to figure out 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 who are the people that can help bring this to life. And then everyone, 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. We do something called the Canva jigsaw. We've been doing different variations of the Cava jigsaw since the earliest days, which is like, it's often a goal and then all the pieces.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 into a more of a centralized AI team with then hundreds of people that 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 become part of this orchestra.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to take us back to 2011 and to a deck that we had, which was called Kansas Chef before Canva was even called Canva. And 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 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 2.08 out into the world. We do like show and tells every week so everyone can share and get deep contacts on what's happening. I think that goals has really been at the essence of how we've achieved anything over the last decade is being able to rally around goals and have different team formations in order to achieve that.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last time I asked you about structure, I asked the other Dakota question is how the companies are structured. Last time you were about 4,500 people and you described a 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, this for anyone that needs to make complex decisions, I find this extremely helpful is like splitting 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 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 of like how 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. Like if you think about design in the sense of it previously, 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. Use kind of a code all the time. I used to do a lot of mock-ups and now I create use of a code.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is still the process. Prototyping has become a very key part of it. So often now there's like 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back. Welcome back. I'm talking with Canvas CEO Melanie Perkins, and I had to know has Canvas Big AI push changed how she makes decisions? I feel like it's time for the Dakota 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whenever it wants. And so I think it's really cool because there's a lot of things that would be very, 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. People talk about AI slop and I think the AI slop is often 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 through manual editing or you can use that through being able to iteratively edit through Canva AI inside the editor itself and like to refine it to really be able to clearly articulate your idea.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Since getting connectors, so obviously Canvas always had all my designs and my presentations and my documents, but being able to get connectors 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. It was like there's a lot going on and it told me I had a massage book 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 those are like a bug here and then I realized that my partner.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 stacked 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. 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're pretty excited about what we're going to be able to bring out into the world.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Canvas 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 organisations 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. 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 contexts all in different places. And so having that.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think 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. It clearly is for the CEO of Canva 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's a lot of ideas about this. And one of the things that makes that messy 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, design, as we've just talked about before, is I bring creativity and productivity together. And being able to do that in a way that we think is pretty extraordinarily powerful. I mean, I had my own experience of this, of having the other day, which I was like actually blew my mind. I was like, I had to answer a whole bunch of questions. And I was like, they were going into like 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 like construct answers based on all of my designs and all of my documents from the last decade. And it kind of blew my mind that like 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 kind of end up in a design.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 like I get it, right? 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? Right? You're kind of like right up against Claude or you're right up against, I don't know, like Oracle, whatever, like 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 bring things together. I think 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 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.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worry, I want to come back to pricing because I have a lot of questions about it, but first I just kind of want to understand the product a little bit more. The last time you're 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 for enterprise was not necessarily product focus, but just workfocused. You needed user authentication systems and management systems and dashboards and all that stuff, and you'd 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?”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though 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. So we're really excited about to see how that is used and see where it takes them.”
2026-04-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT