Cameron Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just need to acquire hockey teams. I want to talk about AI, something on the top of everyone's minds these days. It's another area you guys have nailed. You're doing amazing work with AI. It's providing actual value and business impact. I hear you have an amazing internal AI ops team. Is there anything that you've learned so far that you can share about just how to integrate AI successfully and effectively into a product? As a technology company, you always just need to be constantly evolving and using the best technology. And when we started that was mobile phones and cloud computing. They were the innovations that came in that really unlocked Canva. AI is the next decade I think of innovation. It's the next pivotal piece of technology that helps you build better products, but it also can't just be the basis for your product. You can't just be a product that's purely built on AI on being a rapper around an LLM or something like that. You still need to think about what it is that people want to do and how you build a product that actually meets that need. It isn't just about slapping a chatbot on something that already existed. It's about deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that goal even faster. And we view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design, helping more people design, helping more people design quicker, helping more people design quicker with better quality. And that's how we approach every aspect of including AI in the Canva platform. We've had a team of machine learning engineers for probably seven years now. I think their work has become a lot more visual now and more customer facing way back when they were just doing recommendation engines inside our emails and our homepage and suggesting templates to you. But now they get to work with some really cool technology, which lets them produce images for people and create designs and summarize text and translate to a hundred different languages like it's really stuff that you can put directly in front of customers now, and that's super exciting. And over the last couple of years, we've built up more and more visual AI experts inside Canva, and we approach AI inside the product through three pillars. First of these is that we need to build some of our own AI tech, and we focus on building the AI tech that we have the biggest advantage in that we have the most data that we can put into it, the most insights, the most criticality to our product and our business. So we have teams building our own AI models around design and images and that stuff. Second pillar is just finding the world's best AI people to partner with. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to internalize in your company. You don't need to create an LLM because it's a commodity thing now. And there's a bunch of providers who can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do. So finding a great partner like OpenAI, and we partnered with RunwayML to do video generation, finding the world's best and bringing them into your product with a great integration, the second pillar. And for us, the third pillar is our app ecosystem. So we're fortunate now we've got 170 million people using the product every single month. We have quite an audience that people want access to. llar. And for us, the third pillar is our app ecosystem. So we're fortunate now we've got 170 million people using the product every single month. We have quite an audience that people want access to. And through our app developer ecosystem, they can build apps which directly integrate with the Canva product to give them access to those hundreds of millions of people when people are quite eager to do that. Now, we've seen huge uptake in that from AI developers who have included stuff in Canva from music generators to virtual avatars that can present your presentation to you to a whole slew of things. And those three pillars have, I think, allowed us to create a really coherent experience and one that still keeps a focus on what people want to do, how to help them reach their big goals in a way that doesn't just push technology in the face in a way that just is part of the experience and is a natural way of getting them to where they want to go.…

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