India could be our biggest market in the next two years: Canva co-founder Cameron Adams

Canva co-founder Cameron Adams

Australian online graphic design platform Canva counts India as its fifth-largest market and aims to make it the biggest within the next two years, driven by a surge in internet users, content creators and enterprise users.

In an interview with Moneycontrol from Australia, Canva co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams also spoke about its plans to build an India team, how AI will shape trends in 2025, the future of design roles and its IPO plans.

Canva currently has over 220 million monthly active users and 22 million paid subscribers. Founded in Australia a decade ago by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams, Canva was last valued at $32 billion and has plans for a public listing. Edited excerpts:

AI has been a huge focus of all your launches this year, right from Canva Create to the recent Dream Lab that you unveiled in October. Take us through the year that was.

Cameron Adams: It's been a huge 2024 for us. We pulled the covers off a whole host of AI features, including Magic Edit capabilities for our photo editor, improvements to Magic Write for any text that you want to include in Canva, as well as stuff all the way from the homepage to the moment that you publish. Being able to use Magic Translate in Canva is a really highly used feature within our visual creation platform. And India is one of our highest users of Magic Translate.

Canva started out as a community focused product, focused on independent creators, but this year you've sort of sharply focused on the enterprise customer.

Cameron Adams: So, we're entering the second decade of Canva. The first decade was a lot about social media, individuals and small businesses. And as Canva has grown, we're now over 220 million users that use it every single month.

Within the last three to four years, a huge number of those have been enterprise users, people using it on large teams, inside large organizations.

And we launched Canva Enterprise this year with a keen focus on delivering the tools that large teams need when they're looking at a visual communications platform like Canva. So that means increased security, better administration, speaking to larger teams and providing use cases across the organization. So, it's not just a marketing tool. It's something that the HR department can use. It's something that the sales department can use, something that you can use for internal communications, just wall to wall within enterprises.

Are you also seeing a lot of demand from India for your enterprise offering? And from which industries or sectors?

Cameron Adams: So, India is Canva’s fifth biggest market. It's a critical one for us. And we've seen a great take up of the product there. We've had 139 million presentations created this year alone in India. So, I think that gives you a taste of the appetite that Indians have for expressing themselves in a much richer way that they can do in Canva.

How difficult is building in an AI era? Because every week you have some new startups, some exciting new product that's promising magic using AI.

Cameron Adams: It's an exciting time. We've had research teams and product teams using machine learning at Canva for just over seven years now. But I think you have seen a real change in the way that products are developed and the ways that product teams interact with each other over the last couple of years. And it has honestly been exciting to see what AI can now unlock for our users and our customers and the different ways that you can create products now utilizing AI.

We really see it as a partnership between humans and machines and the ability for AI to suggest new ideas, to help you in your brainstorming, to help you convert something from a big messy whiteboard into a proper strategy doc, into a presentation that you might deliver to your board.

How do you ensure that you don't lose your moat?

Cameron Adams: I think any company, any organization that's thinking about innovation, even outside of the AI era, always needs to stay on their toes. You can never rest on your laurels and assume that what you built 10 years ago is going to be a big enough moat for the next 10 years.

We've been keenly aware of that, and we have always sprinted to be at the front of the pack and make sure that we're using the best technology, but ultimately delivering the best experience to our customers.

And we set up Canva 12 years ago now with the mission of empowering the world to design. We see AI as a huge enabler of our mission.

What are the two, three big trends that you see playing out in 2025, in terms of the impact AI will have?

Cameron Adams: I think there's still a massive amount of change ahead of us. It might slow down slightly, but I think it's more about people getting comfortable with AI and understanding it and weaving it properly into their workflows. So that's on both the human side as well as the product creation side.

As people get more used to AI and understand how it works and how they can partner with it appropriately, I think it'll make its way deeper into our workflows and deliver more powerful returns.

You've seen a lot of shiny things come out from AI. Finding the real world uses that they can use generative AI for is still a bit of a learning process. And I think 2025 will be a year where lots more people start using it for practical real-world examples.

I think another big trend that we're starting to see emerge is AI agents. But again, it's one of these areas that I think people are going to need to get used to it and understand it and figure out the right ways to work with it to get the most out of it.

What would your message be to students who are perhaps starting to become graphic designers and illustrators? Will those roles still exist in companies if design is automated to such an extent?

Cameron Adams: I think those roles will exist, but they'll be updated for the AI age.

And I think pretty much across all markets, all different specialties, AI will be changing the work that's done and changing the sort of skills that you need to bring to perform in that area, whether that's finance or graphic design or even sales or marketing.

Those jobs are going to exist, but the job that you'll be doing will look different than the job that you did last year. And I think particularly in design, there will be a stronger focus on your role as an editor, as a tastemaker, as someone who understands style and as someone who can direct more than you're on the tools. So, I still think there will be a need to be able to draw, to put together layouts, to understand typography and color and all the fundamental skills that you need for visual communication.

But the way that you deploy those will be different. You'll be working more with an AI partner as well as human teammates.

People who lock themselves into a particular tool set are ones that often get surpassed as those tools change.

So, I think locking yourself into a particular tool set is a bad idea and updating your knowledge of tools and adapting to new tools is a great idea.

As these tools keep getting better and better, there's obviously a lot of concern around deepfakes and AI generated images. What more needs to be done?

Cameron Adams: Misinformation has been something that has been possible for many years. And I think we really need to pay attention to it, whether it's developed with AI or whether it's just someone using some image manipulation software or it's someone just posting something on social media that was taken from five years ago and claiming that it was yesterday in some other location.

I think we must be aware of mis and disinformation and make sure that we have the right legislative framework to deal with it, as well as the right product kind of technology aspect to deal with it.

We have a very strong trust and safety team within Canva who are constantly testing our tools that are already out there, as well as the tools that we're developing and making sure that they're safe for the audiences that we deal with, whether that's businesses or schools or universities or non-profits who might be accessing Canva.

But there is also a massive role for government to play in setting the policy and legislative framework and making sure that people who spread misinformation and use tools the wrong way are prevented and penalized as well.

In the beginning of the interview, you told us that India is your fifth biggest market globally. What plans do you have for India next year in terms of growing your business here, hiring people, expanding your presence in this market?

Cameron Adams: Yeah, so it is our fifth biggest global market, more than doubled in growth last year, which is amazing, particularly for a country the size of India. We're continuing to double down on our investment. And we have this thing which we call truly local. We want you to be able to use Canva in your market and feel like it is precisely made for you, and it's made for the community and the society that you're in. And India is one of our key markets for that, making sure that we have the right photos and illustrations and templates and language accessibility that you would expect from a native Indian product.

To do that, we have a massive team that focuses on all that content, particularly Indian content. And we have started developing a team on the ground there. So, we hired our first few people there in the last year and we'll continue to grow that out and make sure that India is not just number five, that it can be number one.

When will India become your number one market?

Cameron Adams: Oh, I can't put in an accurate guess, but I would hope that within the next two years, India could be our top market.

And in terms of the design talent there, are you seeing a lot of talent available?

Cameron Adams: Yeah, there's fantastic design talent in India. We have several creators that come from India. So, we have a massive library of design elements that you can use in Canva.

Will we see a Canva IPO in 2025 or is it too early to call that?

Cameron Adams: Too early to call. An IPO is on the horizon, but when exactly it's going to happen, we can't put a flag in the sand yet.

Finally, Cameron, tell us about how you use AI every day apart from experimenting with Canva's own AI tools. How do you use it in your life?

Cameron Adams: I use it as a constant partner to test messages that I'm sending, whether that's email messages or more visual messages that I might be sending through a pitch deck. I also love creating unique images with it. So, using Dream Lab, which we launched just a couple of months ago to create just the right image that no one else has ever seen before can be impactful.