Canva designs new AI tools aimed at blue-chip giants — and small charities
Canva, the graphic design powerhouse, is trying to entice large businesses with a new arsenal of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Duncan Clark, head of Canva in Europe, revealed that the Australian firm has witnessed “astronomic growth” across companies of all sizes, including blue-chip giants.
Canva brought in revenues of $1.7bn (£1.4bn) in the past year, with an 80 per cent rise in usage by organisations of more than 1,000 employees.
Its latest artificial intelligence (AI) offering, Magic Studio, is a suite of tools crafted to cater for corporate behemoths such as Zoom, Salesforce and FedEx, all of which already rely on Canva for their visual content needs.
“What we find is that their pain points are really identical to the pain points of an SME or a not-for-profit or even an individual,” explained Clark, who employs a team of more than 100 in London.
“What they want to do is to cut out the repetitive manual tasks and they want to get to their visual communication aim faster.
“So it doesn’t matter if you’re in the biggest company in the world or if you’re in a small charity, that power the AI gives you to get to value quicker is universal,” he added.
The new AI features allow users to switch the language of a design or presentation with a single click, generate text that mimics their brand’s voice and an image tool can auto-fill empty background spaces.
However, companies are increasingly grappling with the murky realm of AI-generated images and copyright concerns.
Earlier this year, several visual artists filed a class-action lawsuit against the companies behind AI image generators Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Dreamup, alleging that they violated copyright laws.
Canva — valued at $25.6bn (£21bn) in August, down from its 2022 valuation of $40bn — is reassuring companies through Canva Shield, providing customers with indemnity against potential legal claims stemming from use of the platform.
“We indemnify our users to make sure that any way that they use the images or the content that we serve up, we’ve completely got their back so they can have complete confidence in that aspect of the product,” said Clark.