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

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**Nilay Patel** (1:49)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay 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 level that 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 AIs, 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 in to 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. 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 and 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 a good 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.