Canva Evolves from Design Platform to AI Powerhouse with Snowflake

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Cliff, it's great to be here at Canva headquarters in Sydney. You've been a long-time partner of Snowflake. Walk us through your data and AI journey.

Cliff Obrecht: Well, thank you so much for coming. Uh, yeah, our data and AI journey really started at the inception of Canva. We obviously built Canva for a year, really trying to get the product-market fit right before we launched it mainstream. What that meant was we had to really instrument the core user journeys within that flow. And then obviously, once we launched it publicly, we had to make sure things like retention and activation were all sort of mapping to a level that we were confident pouring more fuel on the fire, meaning driving up user acquisition top of funnel.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: We are all living through an age of crazy change. AI can seemingly do everything that humans can. How do you steer a company like Canva through this time of change? How do you break that down in your head?

Cliff Obrecht: Yeah, I mean it's incredibly exciting and it's also a scary time for a lot of people, and it's going to have a profound impact on the world in so many different ways. As a leader of the business, obviously we're trying to drive shareholder value and help our customers achieve their goals better than we've ever been able to do before. As a leader, the number one thing that I think all leaders can do is just dive headfirst into really understanding and using AI tools. And through working at the bleeding edge of AI, you can really see the practical implementations of how it can apply to your business.

And so for Canva specifically, things like, I mean, image generation is now trivial in any platform on earth. So it's how do we add more value to the things around creating a graphic? So, how do you get all your data, like Snowflake data, how do you get all your knowledge base, how do you get a good understanding of that? Then how do you not just create visual content, but visual content that can be collaborated on? And then how, when that visual content is deployed, how does it perform in the wild? And then how do we automatically optimize that visual content in a feedback loop? And having that all connected is a key part of sort of helping our customers grow their businesses.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Right, right. And, uh, as you're navigating Canva through this change, what are things that Snowflake can do to help further your goals?

Cliff Obrecht: I mean, Snowflake have been such great partners. I mean, especially working with the Snowflake data connector, allowing us to essentially live present real rich data updated in the moment within presentations, that's constantly synced. That's a key part. Obviously, Snowflake has been such a great partner in sort of understanding how all our data is structured and how we use that data. And we're increasingly excited around putting AI on top of that so we can natural language query everything and get that data in real time. And many teams at Canva are already far along that journey and already seeing huge impact because of those efficiencies. And we're slowly rolling that out across the rest of the business.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: That's great.

Cliff Obrecht: Quite quickly, actually.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: That's awesome. What's coming out of Canva through the rest of the year? We can clearly see AI having an impact on the product. I told you I just tried Canva AI and was very happily surprised by just the big improvements even in the past two months. What can we look forward to through the rest of the year?

Cliff Obrecht: Yeah, it's really Canva flipping from being a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. And that fundamental shift is really going to be the baseline for everything moving forward. So everything within Canva can be done agentically, fully connected into your entire environment, and it really helps you achieve the goals you're setting out to deliver. Not just with creating a piece of visual content, but well beyond that as well.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: That's amazing. 250 million users, growing strongly, global impact. You must be so proud of Canva. Thank you for being such an amazing partner to us.

Cliff Obrecht: Thank you, Sridhar. Thank you to Snowflake.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Thank you.