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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 shiftand why the stakes are so high when it comes to AI-adoptation in the creative industry. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays 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 thisI don’t want to say conflictbut 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. I mean, it’s amazing, though, 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. Yeah. As we’re talking, Im reminded, I had a conversation, this is several years back, with Ben Affleck. And 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 that, no, no, no. It’s got to be for the big screen. 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 to, 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 really, it’s 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, too, 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. Yeah. 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, notthe 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.
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Tripadvisor is hoping a brighter green and accompanying brand refresh will inspire more travelers to turn to the company for experiential vacation bookings. The online travel company, which announced 1% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth in May, traded its almost-pharmaceutical turquoise green for a more vibrant electric lime as part of a brand refresh with creative agency Koto Studio. The company’s logo, an owl named Ollie, remains, but he’s now animated with moving eyes. [Image: Tripadvisor] The last time Tripadvisor launched a meaningful brand refresh was in 2020. The timing, of course, couldn’t have been worse. “We have the new assets of that brand refresh for the first time in airports in April of 2020 [when] there’s like 18 people walking through the airport seeing this thing,” Matt Dacey, Tripadvisors chief marketing officer, recalls to Fast Company. But five years later, it’s trying againwith new lessons about how people travel today. The pandemic “fundamentally changed how people thought about travel,” Dacey says. Tripadvisor has seen a rise in bookings of vacations associated with sports and other events, with customers often speaking highly about tour guides they had on their trips. The emphasis on standout tour guides could mean that today’s travelers are looking for human connections and local experiences. Tripadvisor seeks to capture that sentiment by making user-generated content (UGC) central to its brand. [Image: Tripadvisor] Tripadvisor is also leaning into UGC for a new campaign. The assets are images like a selfie taken by a monkey or a shot of a kayak tipped in the water, and the result is creative storytelling from the point of view of the traveler, not the creative agency. That makes strategic sense, considering how much consumers rely on reviews while planning their travels. In a 2019 TripAdvisor study, 72% of surveyed respondents said they always or frequently read reviews before making decisions about where to stay and eat or what to do while visiting a destination. “People trust people,” the report noted. Who better to tell a story than the person who was actually there? “We just kept seeing image after image that people were actually putting on the platform that was far cooler than probably anything we could have come up with,” Dacey says. Arthur Foliard, a brand designer and executive creative director for Koto, tells Fast Company that user-generated content also provided the inspiration for the brand’s refreshed and expansive secondary color palette. The agency used an internal tool to upload photos, pull out the three most important colors, then simplify those colors into flexible palettes that can be used for different travel locations and seasons. [Image: Tripadvisor] “We liked this idea that if you were in Tokyo during cherry blossom season, then you would have a completely different color, or the vibe of the brand would be very different than if you come here to New York right now,” Foliard says. The brand refresh is just one outward sign of a larger company effort. Tripadvisor has refreshed its app, is fine-tuning its use of AI, and, Dacey says, will launch the largest global travel membership program in the world in the third quarter of 2025.
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E-Commerce
To a certain brand of policy wonk, January 31, 2025, is a day that will live in infamy. It had been nearly two weeks since President Donald Trump took office for the second timedays that passed in a swirl of executive orders to cut federal spending and rid the government of now-forbidden ideaswhen suddenly, vast troves of government data began to disappear in a single day. My inbox exploded, and it was just people emailing saying, Hey, do you know where this dataset went? says Meeta Anand, senior director of census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. By The New York Timess count, more than 8,000 web pages housing information on topics like vaccines, hate crimes, Alzheimers disease, and environmental policy simply went poof in a matter of hours. While most of those websites quickly came back online, there was no telling whether or how they had changed while they were dark. This was the moment Chris Dick and Denice Ross had been fearingand the one theyd been preparing for. After the November 2024 election, Ross (who was, until January of this year, President Bidens chief data scientist) began thinking about how to protect the data that underpins policies Trump was promising to undo. She reached out to Dick, previously an Obama-era Census Bureau official, to come up with a plan. When I’m worried about data, Chris is the person I call, Ross, who is now a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, says. For years, experts feared that a president known for pushing alternative facts would try to alter or erase fundamental knowledge. When Trump first took office in 2017, researchers raced to archive climate data and other government resources that looked vulnerable. After the 2024 election, archivists sprung into action once more, with a group called Data Rescue Project becoming a clearinghouse for the many simultaneous efforts to preserve government information. That was vital, but in many ways Ross and Dick saw it as a first step. What the country needed wasnt just a snapshot of data from January 2025, but a way to keep that data flowingand a way to know what data might soon be at risk. The result of their collaboration is a new project called Americas Data Index, which Dick describes as a sort of weather forecast for government datasets. Using a combination of automation and human review, the site is tracking roughly two dozen widely used datasetsfrom the National Crime Victimization Survey to the Census of Agricultureto identify in real time any changes that are being made to the websites that host them. “There are more changes to the federal statistical system and the federal government overall than we have seen at least in my lifetime, says Dick, who now runs his own data firm, Demographic Analytics Advisors. Keeping tabs on how these changes are impacting people is more important now than it ever has been, he says. The White House did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment. The Data Index also monitors other signs that data might be at risk of disappearing. Federal law, for instance, requires agencies collecting data on people to seek new approval every three years. The Index monitors which datasets are set to expire and whether the White House has moved to renew them. Another signal of potential change comes in the form of legal requests the White House must submit each time it wants to change how data about people is collected. In some cases, the public has a chance to comment on those changes, known as Information Collection Requests; in others, where those changes are deemed minor, it doesnt. The goal, Dick says, is to alert anyone who might rely on that databe it legal advocates, healthcare systems, journalists, or businessesso they can respond before a crisis hits. Weather forecasts are useful both in blue skies as well as in storms, Dick says, but they’re more useful before storms. To come up with an initial list of datasets worth monitoring, Dick and Ross worked with groups like the Leadership Conference to find out what data civil rights leaders were most concerned about losing. Anand says she viewed the Data Index as, in some ways, even more critical than an archive. It’s one thing to preserve the data that’s already been collected, but you can’t manufacture data that was never collected at all, she tells Fast Company. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of change requests have related to executive orders the president has signedmost notably a January 20 order that, among other things, instructed government agencies to remove all statements, forms, and other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology. As public reporting has shown, that order and others triggered a widespread purge across the federal government of terms like gender ideology, nonbinary, transgender, and more than 100 other words and phrases. But the change requests reveal exactly where and how that censorship is being carried out. In just a three-week period in May, for example, the White House Office of Management and Budget submitted 62 change requests related to the gender executive order. Those changes include, for instance, removing a question from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey asking young people if theyre transgender. Another request proposed altering questions about gender identity and hate crimes in the National Crime Victimization Survey. In many cases, these changes were submitted as non-substantive, which means they can slide under the radar, without allowing for public comment. Yet these changes stand to wildly distort what we know about the country, by, say, pretending entire populations of people simply dont exist. Peoples lived experiences need to be reflected in the data so that we are able to have a democracy responsive to people’s needs, Anand says. It can be difficult, of course, to get anyone worked up about protecting data at a time when so many other rights and institutions are being toppled. Who’s going to march in the streets to save NOAAs [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] vegetation health index data? Ross says. But part of what Dick and Ross are trying to do is help a wider circle of people, beyond their fellow data nerds, understand how their lives are impacted by government data. As part of this project, theyve launched another site, called Americas Essential Data, which is collecting individual stories of heroic uses of data. Already, theyve amassed accounts of government data being used to deliver tornado warnings in languages that local refugee communities can understand, businesses designing new products based on demographic data, and, yes, farmers using NOAAs vegetation health index data to seek out tax relief during droughts. Dick and Ross may not be able to stop the Trump administration from dismantling government data, but they can at least help us see th damage more clearly.
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