Today, I’m talking with Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva, a popular online 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 worlds of art and design.

At the time, Canva had escaped a lot of the criticism being leveled at its competitors for adding AI tools. Melanie attributed that both to how much Canva users love the product and also the huge inroads it was making into the business world. Canva is a tool that empowers non-designers to design, and that group of people was just trying to get work done.

They didn’t seem nearly as threatened by AI as professionals using other creative software — they may have even felt empowered. It’s been two years, and it’s safe to say that AI is all over design software now — and a lot more people have 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 — having the output of the AI system be in a format you can edit, so that you can refine it, is a big deal.

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You can sign up here. The idea here, as Canva says, is to move “from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.” I’ll let you all sit with that for a moment. Obviously I dug into that with Melanie, as well as how she’s thinking about Canva’s relationship to the AI model providers, the cost of the tokens 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 that’s the same idea as a lot of other big AI players aiming for corporate dollars, and so 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.

Of course, I also asked Melanie for an updated vibe check on AI and design. 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 doesn’t require creatives anymore. Melanie had some 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 her to 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. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Melanie Perkins, you are the founder and CEO of Canva!

Welcome back to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here. I am very excited to talk to you again.

It’s been a couple years. You were last on the show in 2024. We talked about AI and design and the feelings people have about AI and design.

And I was looking at that interview again just to prepare for this one. And a lot of the themes are all the same. And then the facts surrounding those themes have changed so dramatically in the past two years.

And on top of it, you have big news that I really want to dig into. So let’s just start at the start. The last time you were on the show, I said, “What is Canva?” And you said, “Canva is an online design platform.” And your news this week is, I believe, that the company is changing its own conception of itself.

Tell us about that change and what led into it. There are some things that are changing and there are many things that remain the same. So our mission is still to empower the world to design, and we’re going to be doing that very much over the years to come.

But something that we’ve always believed is that we should take the latest and greatest technology. We should build the latest and greatest technology and put that into our community’s hands and enable them to achieve their goals. And what is the latest and greatest technology has certainly changed over the last few years.

And so obviously AI is at the center of that change. And so we’re really excited to be bringing the best of technology and putting that into our customers’ hands as we’ve done for the last decade. But obviously the latest and greatest technology today is AI. And so we’re really excited to be doubling d