Q&A: Canva’s chief product officer on Filipino users, role of AI

The popular graphic design platform Canva celebrated the 10th year of its Philippine headquarters back in August 2024. 

Birthed in Australia in 2013, the company would, one year later, establish its Philippine office, starting with a small team of 8, which has now grown to 900 people — growth spurred by over 100,000 users who are business owners and freelancers. The company said, “With the Filipinos’ natural love for creating and collaborating, the Philippines became one of Canva’s fastest-growing markets globally.”

About 1 in 7 internet users in the Philippines is a Canva user, the company said. 

In light of this, Cameron Adams, Canva’s chief product officer and co-founder, took the time for a quick online interview with Rappler to talk about the Philippines, and the company’s global growth, especially in the age of AI. 

Cameron, it’s been a decade and a year since Canva came about, and it’s gained popularity recently. To what do you credit its growth? 

Cameron: The first wave of growth that we saw was really around having a great product that really connected with people so we focused a lot on the user experience from day one, and making sure that it not only met some needs that people had. So at the time, a lot of social media managers were using Canva and Canva enabled them to do things, which they just couldn’t do before. So that was one aspect of why people were really passionate about it. 

Second aspect was just the kind of delightful nature of the product as well. We wanted people to know that humans made this product, that we had humor, that we had character, that we had personality and we wanted to bring that to everyone that used the product as well. 

You have a global user base of 190 million people but you said you also make efforts to localize the product. How has this benefited growth? 

One aspect that’s quite important here in the Philippines is a focus on internationalization and localization and I’d say this has been one of the biggest growth levers that we’ve had — the ability for anyone anywhere in the world to use Canva as if it was a product built locally. 

So we started this focus in 2016, and we got Canva into five different languages that year.

In 2017 we stepped up our goal a bit more and said we want to be in a hundred different languages by the end of the year and the team did amazing work to make that happen, and by the end of 2017, Canva was available in 100 different languages. 

Since then it has encompassed not just the product, the language that you see on the application, but also the content that is available as well. This is extremely important here in the Philippines, having content that is Filipino, that’s translated into Tagalog.

Actually here in the Philippines one in seven internet users uses Canva. So that’s an amazing penetration. We’re hoping to get that to one in one but that’ll be the next phase of growth for us here in the Philippines.

Can you talk about the Filipino user more?

They will use it for everything from physical store signage through to online marketing, social media, etc. But, we’ve also seen massive education growth in the Philippines.

We have over 150,000 teachers in our education community here in the Philippines. And we actually give Canva away free to any teacher or student anywhere in the world, which applies exactly the same here in the Philippines.

And we’re actually working quite closely with the Department of Education to roll out that Canva for Education program across all schools and districts in the Philippines. So I think that’ll be really coming to fruition in the next couple of months and driving an incredible amount of growth here in PH. 

Let’s talk about AI. There’s still a lot of unresolved ethical issues when it comes to the usage of AI-assisted tools. And one of the constant questions is, are the creative works of people being properly compensated in the training of LLMs? So in light of that, what guiding principles does Canva have when it comes to these issues? 

Yeah, so the north star is that we see AI as being a fantastic creative partner for people of all sorts, non-designers and designers. And we’re very active in building the products and the tools that people need to work together with AI to produce amazing creative ideas. 

But we also realize that AI is not a magic box that produces content itself, and it also needs content to be able to train on, and understand, and we’re very dedicated to giving people a choice on whether their content gets used and compensation for when their content does get used.

So on the choice front, we give everyone inside Canva, every single user, every organization and enterprise, the ability to tell us whether they want their content to be used inside AI or not. And it’s very easily accessible through our settings. They can put the switch on or off. By default we have the switch off so your content will not be used in AI training but if you would like to get the benefits of having AI trained on your content you can switch it on for our content creators.

We have hundreds of millions of photos and illustrations and templates inside our content library and each of the creators is able to participate in something that we call the creator fund. The creator fund is $200 million that we’ve assigned to create a compensation and we have a whole AI stream in there so the people who will allow us to train AI on their content, we compensate them for that. 

It’s an optional program that they can opt in or out of. And if they do opt in, then they will get compensated for every use of their content inside AI.

What do you think overall of the industry’s direction? Not just Canva. What are the shortcomings that you’re seeing in terms of dealing with these kinds of issues between creative, original creative content and then AI LLMs using them?

I think we’re seeing really positive steps in it. There’s a lot to be figured out on the technology side. There’s still a lot of technology that has to be built and a lot of research done to be able to attribute content creators, and attribute the data that’s gone into a model etc., so there’s still a lot of engineering work that needs to be figured out to properly do that.

In a few years time, I can see a time where we have full understanding of where data and content has come from when you’re using an AI model, and we can attribute that appropriately for compensation for any creator that wants to put their data in there. 

Let’s talk about your recent acquisition, Leonardo AI. How does Leonardo figure in your plans and what will the benefits be for the end user as far as this acquisition goes?

So we’ve been watching Leonardo for a while. They’re a great Australian company and based quite close to us in Sydney. And we’ve been chatting to them for a little while, just kind of understanding each other, sharing what each of us are up to and where we see AI heading. And in the last couple of months, they made some real leaps forward in terms of what they were able to build and the types of products that they were delivering to their customers.

One of those was their foundational image model called Phoenix, which we ran through a bunch of benchmarks and it came out on top compared to every other image generator that that we’d seen on the market. So their ability to produce that, do the deep research that’s needed to create a foundational model, really impressed us and we wanted to accelerate that. So making an acquisition just made sense because it enabled us to bring them into the Canva family, provide them with resources and funding to be able to deepen their research and improve their model,  and also give us access to be able to integrate it into Canva. 

Leonardo is staying an independent company. We want them to continue developing their technology and their product, but we also want to get the benefits of that inside Canva. 

And fortunately, they had already set up an amazing API for their B2B business. So it’s very easy for us to integrate something like Phoenix into Canva without too many hurdles. I personally love also the innovation that Leonardo is bringing to AI as a creative partner.

It’s a very complete AI generation experience. And it’s one that I really enjoy using. It does service a slightly different part of the market. It’s not exactly the same audience that Canva has, although we can really share a lot of our learnings and product between each other. But Leonardo has a bit more of a fine-tuned, crafted experience as opposed to Canva, which is more about bringing design at scale to hundreds of millions of people. – Rappler.com