Canva’s CMO on new AI tools and what they mean for marketers

Canva, the graphic design platform used by brands from DocuSign to Disney, is revamping its creative suite with new AI functionality focused on helping marketers and other customers develop numerous, ready-to-publish visual materials simultaneously. These features include a photo editor for quickly generating multiple backgrounds and a spreadsheet tool that can translate and produce campaign copy. The product launch was announced Thursday at the company’s annual Canva Create conference, where executives shared the stage with celebrities and tech leaders, including Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of AI startup Anthropic. The presence of Anthropic, alongside Canva’s new AI integrations, signals the deepening relationship between creative marketing tools and the most cutting-edge AI technology. Last month, WPP made a minority investment in the company behind image generator Stable Diffusion, in large part to develop enterprise marketing solutions for the agency’s clients. Adobe also recently rolled out a new product for brands to deploy AI agents, or autonomous assistants, in their digital ad strategies. Ahead of the Create conference, Ad Age sat down with Zach Kitschke, Canva’s chief marketing officer, to understand how Canva is rethinking design tools in an AI-powered world, and how marketers can leverage its offerings—from consolidating disparate project materials into one place to instantly translating campaign audio into multiple languages. Kitschke also weighed in on Canva’s approach to satisfying creatives amid tension between the community and AI tools, as well as the importance of indemnifying AI usage for customers. This latter issue may only become more relevant for brands publishing AI-generated work as AI providers demand access to train their models on copyrighted material. What are the highlights of Canva’s new product launch? The Visual Suite 2.0 will enable people to have any combination of designs in one file, which means literally one link. For example, you could have a file that includes presentation slides, a document, a spreadsheet, video content. And so for marketers, you’ve got asset matrixes, content toolkits and team brainstorm briefings, and it’s such a huge burden having that all over the place. Being able to have everything in one file is sort of a huge change. The launch includes numerous AI announcements—can you explain what AI will enable Canva users to do that previously they could not? The current workflow in Canva is people edit and create content one design at a time. But with our launch, what you’re going to be able to do is generate hundreds of designs and translate hundreds of pieces of content at the same time. For example, we’ve launched our Sheets product, where you can use AI tools within spreadsheets to generate copy and inspiration, translation and so on for hundreds of design variants. Our suite of AI products is called Magic Studio, and when we launched it a few years ago, the intention was really to find those pain points along the design process, such as translation—constantly delivering campaigns in different languages. So Magic Translate replaced what was previously an intensive process with being able to have an asset in English and, with a click of a button, turn it into 100 languages. Magic Write is another—being able to generate copy and inspiration or refine a draft that you’ve written. Background remover has been one of our most popular features, being able to remove the background of an image with a click. That was something that, just a few years ago, would take hours and hours for a professional designer. So I think what we are doing with the new AI launches—called Magic Studio at Scale—is reimagining those AI tools to not just do one design at a time, but to create many, many variants as well. How have brands used Canva’s AI tools? DocuSign used Canva’s AI to scale its global rebrand. They had their new brand system in Canva templates, which the whole team could use, and it saved over $300,000 in creative design and about 500 hours of creative team capacity. Disney is another: it’s been using AI for Disney+, and one of the features that it has really leveraged is Bulk Create, which generates lots of variants of content in different languages and for different purposes. Generative AI has historically been bad at recreating brand logos and signage—how is Canva trying to solve this issue? Canva is in a unique position because we’re the platform where people have their brand kit, their brand guidelines—it’s where the content creation is happening. But the way you interact with Canva is through the editing experience. You are very much the approval layer for anything you’re actually publishing or creating. People want to be able to do things faster, quicker at scale. But we hear that they also want control. This is where Canva is uniquely placed as a platform. It’s that design destination where you can definitely generate content, but then you come into the editor to make those final changes, to collaborate with people and actually to publish to the platforms as well. And being that sort of full workflow is a really important part of what we’re doing. [Also read: Why AI still can’t recreate brand logos or products—and how that’s changing] There’s been a lot of tension between creatives and AI technology. How is Canva navigating this? Canva was born during a technology shift. The moment we launched was only possible because of high-speed broadband, HTML5 and tablets, which allowed us to reimagine what design software could look like if it was web-based. And the way that we view AI is that it’s another technology shift that helps us continue to work towards that vision, which is really empowering people to design. And that means essentially going from having an idea to having your presentation, your social post, your video, in order to achieve the goal that you have. AI is a technology that can help us improve that workflow to make designing even easier. But the friction felt by the creative community is particularly high, such as last week’s firestorm that erupted when a director used AI to create a fake commercial that ultimately ripped off someone else’s commercial. How do you view this tension? Look, I think every technology brings about change and new issues to grapple with, and I think things are obviously moving so fast in this space. We’ve always put our community at the center of what we’re building. We’ve taken a responsible approach to what we are building and launching. We’ve invested a lot in trust and safety in that regard. So it’s very, very important to us that we’re empowering. [More: How a fake AI-generated KFC ad provoked creatives and fueled an industry debate] Can you explain Canvas Shield and how that fits into this approach? Canvas Shield is our program to indemnify our enterprise customers. Indemnification around AI is something that’s really important to our enterprise customers, and the approach that we’ve taken is that different customers have different needs and tolerances in terms of access to AI tools and technology. So in Canva, you can choose what you use as an enterprise user, and if you do use the tools, we indemnify for usage of AI. Is that indemnification for not just creating work with AI, but also publishing it? Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that I’d say we’ve done is the opt-in program for creators. A huge part of our community is actually designers, content creators and illustrators that contribute to Canvas’ content library. And if people do want to participate, they can opt-in and share in a royalty pool for that as well. What AI models can marketers expect to use within Canva? Firstly, we’re building our own models. We’ve acquired a number of companies over the years, starting [in 2021] with Kaleido out of Austria, which became the technology that powers Background Remover. Last year, we acquired Leonardo, an Australian company that has a world-leading image generation model. We have our app store, where developers can come and build into the Canva ecosystem as well. And then we partner with a range of different models for different components of our suite.

Canva’s CMO on new AI tools and what they mean for marketers

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