Canva CEO Melanie Perkins sees one major problem with A.I. right now

“The whole A.I. Landscape is very fragmented today,” she says. There’s A.I. For writing and research, like ChatGPT. There are A.I.-powered tools for videos, for images, for coding, and for audio. There’s not a mainstream consumer product that can do all of the above—yet.

Perkins runs Canva, the visual communications platform, from the startup’s home base in Sydney. Earlier this year, she and her executive team spent several weeks traveling throughout Europe and the U.S., opening new offices, meeting international teams, and hosting events. I caught up with Perkins during her San Francisco stop in June.

Courtesy of Canva

A.I. Was the topic of the day. And fragmentation was the top concern on Perkins’s mind—in part because she thinks Canva is poised to fix the issue. The startup, valued between $26 billion and $40 billion, is competing against giants like Adobe by consolidating different corners of the design industry, from social graphics to video editing, into one consumer-friendly platform.

She’s taking the same all-in-one approach to A.I., featuring several A.I.-aided tools on the platform. The company’s Canva Docs, a Google Docs rival, relies on OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) to power generative A.I. Writing. Canva’s video editing platform employs A.I. For its popular “background remover” feature that lets users erase backgrounds from their videos. And A.I.-generated images are also available to Canva users.

Canva continues to call its A.I. Tools “magic,” a marketing choice that plays into the startup’s approachable brand.

The startup may not be first in the A.I. Race, but Perkins sees a path forward for an A.I.-powered Canva ecosystem—one that’s inspired by its past. “It’s reminiscent of what we first set out to do with design,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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