Latest news with #CliffObrecht
Fast Company
02-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
‘Creatives are going to be elevated': Canva's COO on how AI is transforming the artistic landscape
For over a decade, Canva has made design and publishing accessible to anyone. Now the company is wrestling with how to harness AI while staying true to its mission of empowering individual creators. Cofounder and COO Cliff Obrecht reveals how Canva is navigating this shift—and why the stakes are so high when it comes to AI adoption in the creative industry. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I wanted to ask you about AI. Everybody is talking about it. There's this—I don't want to say conflict—but there are creatives who are like, 'I want to create my stuff, thank you very much. The algorithm cannot do what I do.' And then there are folks, Canva among them, that say, 'No, technology can democratize access to creativity,' and some of the more pure creators might push back on that. How do you think about that issue? I've got a couple of strong thoughts, and I've got some evolved thinking on that as well. So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, 'Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design.' And then we kind of said back, 'Why is a designer, why is that professional, that skill set, defined by being able to use a set of really, really difficult tools?' And so over time—it didn't take long, within four years—designers didn't feel threatened by Canva. They saw it as actually a way to do the high-value work, and then essentially democratize their work throughout the rest of the organization, so they weren't stuck 80% of their time doing spell changes, or changing the name on a business card, or creating yet another social media post. They could do the high-value brand campaign stuff. We really see AI as just another step in that evolution. I mean, it's here and it's here to stay. What I really believe, though, is that the creatives that the models have been trained on really need to be compensated, and that model is still being figured out. We have our creators program at Canva, where we pay out well over $100 million a year in revenue to our template creators, and that's evolving into how we pay the creators that we train our models on. I think the industry at large is still figuring that out, though, and I don't think that creatives have got the full value of the corpus of work that these models have been trained on. But I do think creatives need to embrace this new technology. Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it's going. It seems folly. Yeah. You have to. I mean, I was talking with someone from Google yesterday about their Veo 3 tool. We integrated that into Canva like two days ago. It's amazing what it can do. Incredible. Now, it does make it feel like, oh, anybody can be an auteur, which of course is what we want, and maybe it opens things up, but it could also have people push back against it. Well, I think it's like, with AI, there's going to be a huge proliferation of content. And I think to cut through that noise, you're going to have to create something unique and different. And I think that's what creatives bring to the table, that's what designers bring to the table—that ability to stand above the pack. If everyone can create this, then a good creative can create something elevated. And I think it's going to lift the baseline, absolutely. But I think the best creatives are going to be elevated beyond that and celebrated even more. As we're talking, I'm reminded of a conversation I had several years back with Ben Affleck. I was asking him, 'Listen, so many people are watching the movies that you make on their phones. Do you start to think about creating them differently, because so many people are looking at them on a smaller screen?' And he was almost insulted at the idea . . . No, no, no—it's got to be for the big screen. But now I wonder whether you could. AI can do some of those things that make the big screen distinctive, without having to have the same budgets around it. It's going to be incredible. And we're about to start running competitions for student creatives. What can you create as a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old, and create your five-minute masterpiece? I think it's going to really evolve. I have a daughter, so how can we create her a beautiful custom story that features her doing all the things she loves? It's going to be creative, and what's currently movie-quality creative, down to the individual, which is really just going to see so much more creative, and I think it's a great thing. Also, I'm dyslexic, so I can read, but I don't read well. I read fast, but I blur things up. So I hate being a rote learner when it comes to reading text. I'm a very visual learner, and a learner that wants to learn by doing. I think what AI is doing is allowing, particularly when it comes to education, bifurcating the way people learn and giving them the method that they resonate with most. So for example, you can create a document in Canva, but you can say, 'Create this as a presentation,' or you can say, 'Create this as a movie,' or 'Create this as a podcast.' And then people can learn and people can consume the way they want to consume. Yeah, sometimes I think we pigeonhole people. You're either a creative or you're not. And some people are like, 'Oh, I'm not creative,' but we all are creative if we are given the tools that work for us, right? That's such a good comment, because when we launched Canva, the comment we would hear time and time again is, 'I don't have a creative bone in my body.' That's because the tools were so difficult to use. That's why we worked so hard and so long on the product, because it couldn't be daunting. It had to be simple, and we had to make it a game. So our first onboarding, we had a monkey in the canvas, and the first command in onboarding was, 'Put a hat on the monkey.' So you had to search for a hat and put it on the monkey, and then you had to add some text. And all of a sudden, you'd just done something that you never thought you'd be able to do, but you had fun doing it. And that just unlocks a whole new mental paradigm. And I think, Yeah, AI is going to do that on steroids. But it needs that interface to be able to— Yeah. And that's why Canva Code, for example, people are scared by even these AR coding tools that make creating a website so easy, but people find the Canva interface very approachable. So we launched Canva Code because it's really hitting that, not the first movers, but the masses that are already using Canva. And we can take them on that journey and unlock a whole new level of opportunity for them.
Business Insider
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Canva's cofounder says creatives are making a mistake by not embracing AI in their work
Canva's cofounder said creatives should embrace AI, and it'd be foolish not to do so. Cliff Obrecht said designers are reacting to AI as they did to Canva in its early days. But Canva helped free designers' time for more "high-value work," he said. Cliff Obrecht, who cofounded the design software company with his wife Melanie Perkins, said designers are reacting to AI like they did to Canva in its early days. "So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, 'Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design,'" Obrecht said on a Tuesday podcast episode of Masters of Scale. "And so over time, it didn't take long, within four years, designers didn't feel threatened by Canva," he said, adding that Canva's tools helped designers free up time for "high-value work." He said he sees "AI as just another step in that evolution," and that it's time for creatives to embrace the new technology. "Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it's going. It seems folly," he said to the podcast's host, Bob Safian. Canva first launched AI-powered tools in 2023, with its "Magic" branded tools, which assisted in copywriting and designing. In April, it launched its Visual Suite 2.0, which integrated tools for design, writing, coding, and data visualization. This comes as creatives from various industries have raised concerns over the last few years about AI killing their jobs. In 2023, Adobe employees slammed the company after it launched Firefly, an extensive suite of generative AI tools. Adobe employees, whose customer base consists of creatives, said the tool would kill the jobs of some of its customers. There were also concerns that Adobe could use creators' content to train its AI models, something the company denied in a blog post in 2024. The AI debate has reached Hollywood. In 2023, more than 11,000 Hollywood film and TV screenwriters went on strike to criticize the use of AI in the film industry and demand more regulation in the field. However, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the cofounder of DreamWorks, said in an AI conference in December that top Hollywood showrunners and creators are embracing AI and seeing it as a useful resource to their creative processes. In June, former Disney exec Kevin Mayer said in an Opening Bid podcast that AI could make video and storyline creation more efficient for creatives.
Business Insider
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Canva's cofounder says creatives are making a mistake by not embracing AI in their work
Canva 's cofounder and chief operating officer says it's foolish for creatives not to embrace AI. Cliff Obrecht, who cofounded the design software company with his wife Melanie Perkins, said designers are reacting to AI like they did to Canva in its early days. "So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, 'Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design,'" Obrecht said on a Tuesday podcast episode of Masters of Scale. "And so over time, it didn't take long, within four years, designers didn't feel threatened by Canva," he said, adding that Canva's tools helped designers free up time for "high-value work." He said he sees "AI as just another step in that evolution," and that it's time for creatives to embrace the new technology. "Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it's going. It seems folly," he said to the podcast's host, Bob Safian. Canva first launched AI-powered tools in 2023, with its "Magic" branded tools, which assisted in copywriting and designing. In April, it launched its Visual Suite 2.0, which integrated tools for design, writing, coding, and data visualization. This comes as creatives from various industries have raised concerns over the last few years about AI killing their jobs. In 2023, Adobe employees slammed the company after it launched Firefly, an extensive suite of generative AI tools. Adobe employees, whose customer base consists of creatives, said the tool would kill the jobs of some of its customers. There were also concerns that Adobe could use creators' content to train its AI models, something the company denied in a blog post in 2024. The AI debate has reached Hollywood. In 2023, more than 11,000 Hollywood film and TV screenwriters went on strike to criticize the use of AI in the film industry and demand more regulation in the field. However, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the cofounder of DreamWorks, said in an AI conference in December that top Hollywood showrunners and creators are embracing AI and seeing it as a useful resource to their creative processes. In June, former Disney exec Kevin Mayer said in an Opening Bid podcast that AI could make video and storyline creation more efficient for creatives.
West Australian
18-06-2025
- Business
- West Australian
Tech unicorn Canva picks up Sydney startup MagicBrief
Perth-founded tech unicorn Canva is buying an Australian AI-powered creative intelligence startup as it pushes deeper into the enterprise and marketing sector. Canva said the acquisition of Sydney-based MagicBrief would build out its Visual Suite offering for marketing and creative teams. MagicBrief was founded in 2022. Its creative analytics and research platform uses AI to help marketers better understand and respond to their advertising content strategies, formats, and messages that perform best with audiences. The tools are already being used by thousands of global brands, marketers and agencies to analyse and inform creative development and have to date analysed more than $6 billion in ad spending. The purchase price was not disclosed. Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht said the deal marked a major expansion of the company — which bills itself as 'the world's only all-in-one visual communication platform' — and introduces a 'powerful' new layer of creative intelligence to its recently upgraded Visual Suite. 'We've spent the last decade empowering millions of teams to create impactful and engaging visual content,' Mr Obrecht said. 'Now, with MagicBrief joining Canva, we're entering the next frontier by powering the entire content and marketing workflow, from ideation and creation to deployment, measurement, and now analysis and optimisation. 'In today's visual economy, winning brands are those that know exactly what creative works, where it works, and why. By combining MagicBrief's AI-powered insights with Canva's Visual Suite, we're giving every team the tools to not just create great content, but drive stronger results.' George Howes, co-founder and chief executive of MagicBrief, said the startup would continue to operate independently while its technology and team integrate into Canva. 'We started MagicBrief to give creative teams smarter tools to move faster and make better work,' Mr Howes said. 'Joining Canva takes that vision to the next level — helping us reach more marketers and turn great ideas into high performing creative.' Canva was launched from a Dianella loungeroom in 2013 by Mr Obrecht and now wife Melanie Perkins, who met while she was studying at the University of Western Australia. Now based in Sydney, the private company which has been backed by some of the world top tech investors, has enjoyed exponential growth to more than 240 million monthly users across 190 countries, with annualised revenue of $US3 billion ($4.6b). The company is now reportedly worth almost $49b — putting it ahead of the market capitalisation of big names such as Rio Tinto, Fortescue, Woolworths and Coles. But its founders has remained tight-lipped on a time frame for long-running rumours of a float in the US. A listing would likely bring in fresh capital that could be used for product development and further acquisitions. Mr Obrecht and Ms Perkins were recently placed sixth on the Australian Financial Review's annual list of Australia's richest people, with an estimated combine et worth of $14.1b.
AU Financial Review
17-06-2025
- Business
- AU Financial Review
Canva's IPO has been discussed for 10 years. What if it never happens?
Give Canva points for consistency – another acquisition, another set of impressive growth numbers, more gentle pushback on the idea that an initial public offering is around the corner. Canva's founders, Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, have been deflecting speculation about a company float for a decade now. Adams was at it again after announcing the tech giant would buy AI marketing tool Magic Brief for an undisclosed amount, telling The Australian Financial Review that while Canva has long been IPO ready, it's no closer to pressing the button on what would be a seismic event for Australia's venture capital sector.
