Canva resists mandatory AI tool use

Canva cofounder Cameron Adams says forcing employees to use a specific AI tool is a sure way to get them to stop caring about AI. In a recent interview, Adams stated that his staff can choose whichever AI tool they want, giving them the freedom to experiment.

Adams noted that employees have their own AI budgets to try out tools, figure out workflows and processes, and tackle the problems they face.

By giving staff the freedom to choose the tools they use, staff feel more comfortable experimenting, Adams said. He also mentioned that giving staff time off from their other responsibilities to play around with AI during Canva’s AI Discovery Week is another way to encourage AI experimentation.

“The whole week, we said to people, ‘Please don’t do your normal work. We want you to think of the problems that you have, the tools that you’ve heard about, the opportunities that you’ve heard from colleagues in other industries, and we want you to try those out for the entire week,” Adams said.

The design company has made AI a core focus of its business. In April, it launched Canva AI 2.0, a conversational platform that lets users turn simple prompts into designs.

Business Insider previously compared Canva 2.0 to Claude Design to build the same slide deck and found that Canva 2.0‘s final product was comparable to Claude’s.

Getting employees to adopt AI into their workflows has been a challenge for many companies. Some, like Duolingo, added employee AI use as a performance metric.

One cost-saving tactic that has emerged is using different AI models and tools for different tasks, rather than being loyal to a single AI provider. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that this tactic prevents excessive AI tokens from being burned on simple tasks.

Cloud platform Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch, said in an interview earlier this month that companies are now becoming smarter about how to use different AI tools across their AI stack, including the model, harness, data platform, sandbox, and gateway.

This approach allows companies to spend less without throttling their employees’ AI ambitions.

It is a key part of their business.