Designing the Future: Inside Canva's AI Strategy with John Milinovich, GenAI Product Lead at Canva

**John Milinovich** (0:00)
At the highest level, there is automation and augmentation. What people want from automation is to remove the from something that's just super annoying to do. As a user, you know what you want the outcome to be, but you just kind of want it done for you. The other dimension here is augmentation, which is I am fundamentally in the driver's seat. I am working towards something that I can't quite see what it is in my head yet. And I want a set of tools or a suite of capabilities that help me take that fuzzy feeling and make it into something that is more concrete. One of the real original innovation at Canva was moving design from a world of pixels to a world of objects. When you look at what AI is doing, we believe it is moving to a world from object-level manipulation into a world of concept-level manipulation. I think generally our development flow is just like make it work, make it good, make it fast, and then make it cheap. I think about that really as the problem orientation versus the solution orientation. Oftentimes the outcome is so clear that we can see it, but being able to actually deliver on that is extremely difficult. If you're talking out of 81 and we know we need to get to 98, it probably means that we need to maintain the problem focus for social solution.

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Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is John Milinovich, Head of Generative AI Product at Canva. For anyone who's not already familiar, Canva is an online design platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything, which has scaled to serve now more than 200 million users globally with its highly accessible suite of design products. More recently, Canva has also become a leader in AI-powered design experiences, with a mix of point solution features like their excellent image background removal tool, more horizontal features like their magic write tool, which attempts to write in your brand's voice across their entire product suite, and AI superpower features like their new DreamLab text-to-image product, which was derived from their acquisition of Leonardo AI, reportedly, although this is not confirmed, for some $320 million. In this episode, John shares Canva's framework for thinking about task automation versus human augmentation, Canva's approach to testing and evaluating AI features, insights on fine-tuning foundation models, and a fascinating discussion on how AI might transform fields like architecture, where John began his career. We also dig into practical tips for AI engineering, with John emphasizing the importance of maintaining problem orientation, rather than getting too attached to any particular candidate's solution. This conversation was a super fun opportunity for me to trade notes with another generative AI product leader whose expertise has been demonstrated at global scale. I think there's huge value here for anyone who wants to level up their thinking about what sorts of experiences AI can unlock, and also how best to go about developing and deploying them. If you agree, we'd ask that you take just a second to share the show online, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just post a comment on YouTube. Of course, your feedback is always appreciated too. You can contact us via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at AI product development at scale. With John Milinovich of Canva. John Milinovich, Head of Gen. AI Product at Canva. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.