Artificial Intelligence has democratised and accelerated design and visual creativity over the past year. Now with visual communication platform Canva’s new AI-powered Magic Studio platform, creating a new design for your marketing campaign or a new social media post for your company has become as simple as a one-line prompt.
Cliff Obrecht, COO and Co-founder of Canva, is convinced AI will “supercharge” what creators are doing on Canva. “We have had our AI products used over 3 billion times and we have learned so much,” he told indianexpress.com in an interview, adding that now it is all about making this technology “the workhorse that powers Canva”.
Obrecht explained that one of the most important things about Magic Studio is its interoperability across different document types. “For example, if you create a whiteboard, you can turn it into an email or a blog post or even a presentation… we intersect all our document types with AI, that’s the true power.” Canva calls this feature Magic Switch and touts it as an industry first.
“Our customers don’t wake up in the morning saying I want to use AI. They wake up in the morning with a job to be done… so we really see AI as an enabler to help people get their job done faster, smarter and helping them achieve their goals,” added Obrecht, who started Canva in 2013 with Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams. The platform now boasts 150 million active users a month.
With Magic Studio, Canva users will also get access to Magic Media, a text-to-image and text-to-video functionality. Then there will be Magic Design which will turn any prompt or own media into fully designed videos or presentations. Brand Voice will make it easier to write in your brand’s tone in any design or document by adding guidelines. Magic Morph, meanwhile, will instantly transform words and shapes with a simple prompt.
Explaining how AI makes things happen much faster than before, Obrecht said earlier, to create a presentation, a user would layout the pages, choose a template, and click a button for each page. “Now you can just say create a presentation and it will do that. That’s a great starting point. Then you can apply brand colours and fonts. So what would have taken maybe an hour to do can be done in seconds.”
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But Obrecht does not think this will be the end of designers. “I think they set the taste and you will always need designers. Design has always been done by really creative people who have access to professional design tools. What Canva does is puts that power in everyone’s hands and enable them to create beautiful things,” he reasons.
Since enterprise adoption is an important part of Canva at the moment, Obrecht said they have apps that can plug into any digital asset management system and you can plug in any content source and generate designs from them. “We have over a thousand different applications now ranging from consumer all the way to business,” he added.
India is among the top markets for Canva at the moment. “We have a lot of Indian enterprises and businesses using Canva. The propensity to pay amongst knowledge workers in large companies is definitely there and we are monetising that,” he said. However, Obrecht was quick to add that they do take a long-term approach and want to invest for the long term in a market like India. “So for us, it’s not about the ratio of free to paid users… We have always had a philosophy if you provide a great product to all customers that drives growth and then inevitably that drives revenues too.”
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First published on: 04-10-2023 at 18:30 IST
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