Canva won't make you use its new AI

CEO Melanie Perkins joins the podcast this week. Also: OpenAI teases its super app, Anthropic's plan for Claude, some interesting new startups, and more.

Apr 17, 2026

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I’m in San Francisco for a couple of days, the weather is beautiful, and for the first time in years, I’m not here for work. Today I have a fascinating conversation with Canva’s CEO, and keep reading for a roundup of other notable AI news.

Canva CEO Melanie Perkins is taking a different approach with what she’s calling the biggest product shift in the company’s history. Unlike a lot of massive AI overhauls software companies are making, Canva’s changes are not being forced upon people. If you hate AI, you can still use the design platform “exactly the way you always use it.”

That might sound like a strange way to introduce what the company is calling Canva AI 2.0, announced today at its annual Create event in Los Angeles. But Perkins is building for a user base that most AI-native startups would kill for and cannot reach: more than a quarter billion monthly active users, the vast majority of whom are not technologists. They’re teachers. Small business owners. Sales teams. People who are not waking up every morning thinking about agentic orchestration and foundation models.

Canva’s answer to the AI wave is to make its most ambitious product optional, rather than replacing its main interface entirely. It’s a bet that, for a company at Canva’s scale, the gentler path is the better one.

Melanie joins this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:

What makes Canva's position unusual in the AI landscape is that Perkins doesn't have to play the game that's consuming her competitors. She's not (yet) a public company CEO trying to explain to Wall Street why AI won't cannibalize her business. Canva has been profitable for nine years. It has the kind of mainstream, non-technical user base that provides real-world signals about what people actually want from AI tools, rather than what demo culture on X suggests they want.

What Canva is hearing, clearly, is that people want AI to be useful without being overwhelming. The Australia-based company's pitch is that you can now type or talk to Canva like you would to ChatGPT. But if you want to ignore its AI and drag and drop like you always have, that's fine too.

Three things that stood out from the conversation with Melanie:

The rise of the "brand system designer.” She predicted that AI will create a new class of design role, which she called the "brand system designer" — someone who builds the templates, brand rules, and design systems that AI then executes across an entire organization.
Canva built an in-house foundation model. The company trained its own proprietary model with a research team of more than 100 people (part of a broader 300-person AI research org). Perkins said the team had a critical “breakthrough” in October on how to generate designs in a fully editable, layered format rather than flat images. The model understands design structure, and Canva spent a decade building an interoperable format across all its product types (presentations, websites, videos, documents) that made the model possible.
On being private during the SaaS-pocalypse: When I asked about the current panic among public software companies over AI disruption, she was relaxed. "We've been profitable for nine years, so we've kind of avoided that yo-yo," she said, referring to the growth-at-all-costs-then-suddenly-profitability whiplash that has defined the SaaS market. Being private (at least for now) and based outside Silicon Valley, she said, "does create a little bit less noise for us."

Also in this week’s episode: Ellis and I talk about why we are less hyped on OpenClaw, The Social Network sequel that might actually be great, and why recent attacks on Sam Altman signal a real reputational crisis for the AI industry.

Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.