India is one of our largest & fastest growing markets: Robert Kawalsky, Canva

Australian design platform Canva launched Visual Suite 2.0 at its flagship event Canva Create in Los Angeles on April 10, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and data into its design-focussed platform.

Featuring advanced data visualisation, conversational design, personalised content at scale, and new ways to create interactive experiences, this is expected to be a turning point for the company’s enterprise offerings, which it ventured into less than a year ago.

Some of the products featured include Canva Sheets (reimagined spreadsheets that allow one to incorporate data from the internet), Magic Charts (transform data into interactive visual stories), Canva AI (a generative AI tool that generates text, images, and edits designs based on prompts), and Canva Code — which lets users write code to create interactive designs.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Robert Kawalsky, Global Head of Product at Canva spoke about India being one of the company’s largest markets, its localisation strategy, impact of AI, the Studio Ghibli discourse, and more.

Edited excerpts: 

It’s been over a year since you launched your AI tools. How has the demand and adoption been so far?

It's been incredibly strong. We feel really positive about the journey ahead of us.

Globally, 95 percent of the Fortune 500 firms are using Canva, and we are most pleased about the impact that we're having. For instance, FedEx is one of our large enterprise customers, and today, their design output is 77 percent faster. They're achieving this in a number of ways, one of which is that they use our Magic Translator tool to create campaigns globally.

What’s demand been like in India? Cameron Adams (Canva Co-Founder) expects India to become your biggest market in the next two years.

Demand in India has been amazing. It's one of our largest markets, and also among the fastest growing. The usage stats are fantastic.

We've had over 666 million designs created in India in 2024, almost 2 million in a single day. Also, over 139 million presentations were created, and over 17 million whiteboards.

Any specific industries where you're seeing more demand?

We see freelancers as a really strong space for us. We are also building really strong inroads into SMBs (small and medium businesses). We have over 2,40,000 freelancers across India now using Canva.

We also have a huge presence globally in the education space, and In India, there are over 11,000 teachers in our Facebook community.

What’s the update on your Hindi platform? Is it live now?

Yeah, it's live. We've launched a Hindi website recently. It's really authentic and has truly Indian content. Also culturally relevant UI and UX.

Is localisation going to be the way you build a moat as competition seems to be increasing, with AI models evolving so quickly?

We've been focussed on being global from day one, so it's very deep in our DNA. Canva is now available in over a hundred languages.

Design is nuanced and different across cultures,  geographies, and countries. It's really important to us that our users and our community can use Canva in a way that's relevant to them. It's a strategy we're doubling down on.

As for AI, while the hype cycle is in full swing, we are  ensuring that we are offering our community true workhorses. What we really focus on is offering our users tools and capabilities that can help them achieve their goals and get their work done better.

Our AI strategy has three prongs. The first is in-house capabilities  that we've developed over the years. The second is that we use the world's best third-party models where that makes sense. And the third one is our ecosystem of apps built on top of the Canva platform, many of which are AI-first.

The combination of these three things  allows us to do what we think is most important, which is to abstract away the complexity from our users and offer them the easiest  and the most powerful AI experience.

We're focussed on ensuring that users have a proper end-to-end experience rather than point (standalone) solutions. To be able to go from an idea all the way to a deliverable requires more than just generating text or  an image.

Three months into 2025, what’s changing in terms of trends and impact in AI?

We're going to find that users will expect and the technology will enable increasing levels of prompt adherence and quality, so that you get the output you want when you talk to AI. I think another really important trend is to be able to iterate on what AI produces.

Canva's AI tools allow you to create content in a multi-modal way, whether it's a document or an image or a complete design. In all those cases, you can take what you create directly into Canva Editor and edit it.

That's really important, because users want to have a hand in the creative process. AI is a companion rather than a replacement.

Adobe’s AI leader Hannah Elsakr mentioned that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is still work in progress and we may not see any use cases anytime soon. Where do you stand on this?

I think I would agree with that timeline. People tend to overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term, and that probably applies to AGI too.

We focus deeply on the things that we believe to be true today and that will be true tomorrow. Those are things like a simple user experience that gets to the heart of what users are trying to solve. Things like ensuring that people are empowered to unleash their creativity in the ways they use AI. Those are things that we think will be true and stand the test of time.

In the past couple of weeks, there’s been debate on copyright concerns and AI taking over art after Studio Ghibli’s AI template went viral. How is Canva, as a design company, assessing this? Is individual expression in design fading away?

We have put AI safety at the heart of what we do. We developed a framework a couple of years ago, called the Canva Shield. It’s a multi-layered framework for safety in AI.

It includes everything,  from the content we use to train our in-house models to how we protect the output for users.

We have a community of creators. These are designers all over the world that create content for Canva. We've chosen not to automatically include the community's designs in training our AI engine, but to give them the choice . And 99 percent of the creators have opted in. They're fairly remunerated for that. This is in line with our values and a good model for the future.

The role and the creativity of humans and designers and illustrators and creative people of all kinds is not going away. But with technological advancement, roles change and evolve.

We're already seeing completely new ways of creative expression from people leveraging AI. And I think that'll continue. But overall, we're also seeing  AI enabling an explosion of creativity across the board. That aligns well with what we've been doing for the last 10 years, which is democratising design and making it accessible to everyone.