Canva cofounder Cameron Adams said there’s one way to get your employees to stop caring about AI: forcing them to use a specific AI tool.
Speaking in an interview with Rapid Response, released on Tuesday, Adams said his staff can choose whichever AI tool they want. The interview was filmed during the Cannes Lions festival last month.
“So, we’re not mandating Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool you want to use in your part of the company,” Adams said. “You can figure it out.”
He said employees have their own AI budgets to try out tools, figure out workflows and processes, and tackle the problems they face.
By giving staff the freedom to choose the tools they use, staff feel more comfortable experimenting, he said.
“If you force a tool on them, they’re just going to do that very begrudgingly, and they’re not going to enter into this very experimental mindset that we need them to,” Adams said.
Another way to encourage AI experimentation, he said, was to give staff time off from their other responsibilities to play around with AI, during Canva’s AI Discovery Week.
“The whole week, we said to people, ‘Please don’t do your normal work. We want you to think of the problems that you have, the tools that you’ve heard about, the opportunities that you’ve heard from colleagues in other industries, and we want you to try those out for the entire week,” he said.
The design company has made AI a core focus of its business. In April, it launched Canva AI 2.0, a conversational platform that lets users turn simple prompts into designs. Business Insider previously pitted Canva 2.0 against Claude Design to build the same slide deck and found that Canva 2.0’s final product was comparable to Claude’s.
Getting employees to adopt AI into their workflows has been a challenge for many companies. Some, like Duolingo, added employee AI use as a performance metric. JPMorgan and Disney started AI token leaderboards ranking their staff’s usage.
AI spend has become a foremost challenge for enterprises, and companies are looking for ways to spend less without throttling their employees’ AI ambitions.
One cost-saving tactic that has emerged is using different AI models and tools for different tasks, rather than being loyal to a single AI provider.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that this tactic prevents excessive AI tokens from being burned on simple tasks. He also recommended using cheaper Chinese models as defaults.
Cloud platform Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch, said in a TechCrunch interview earlier this month that companies are now becoming smarter about how to use different AI tools across their AI stack, including the model, harness, data platform, sandbox, and gateway.
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