Canva empowers employees across teams with Claude

Canva, a leading design and collaboration platform with over 5,000 employees, empowered their teams with Claude for Work, resulting in rapid demand and widespread adoption across the organization. Claude quickly became a highly popular ‘go-to’ tool, with employees showing remarkable enthusiasm for its capabilities. From engineers to product managers, teams across Canva use Claude to bring their ideas to life.

With Claude, Canva:

• Democratizes prototyping, allowing employees to create designs without specialized tools
• Boosts engineering productivity with powerful code generation
• Allows team members to quickly write copy in the correct tone and nuance, ideal for polishing content and allowing brand voice consistency
• Empowers business teams to create custom solutions independently

Building an experimental AI ecosystem

When Canva began formalizing and expanding their AI assistant tooling in mid-2024, they approached it differently than traditional technology rollouts. They embraced a top-down philosophy driven by their founders, which aimed to help empower Canva’s workforce through familiarity with the technology. Samantha Garrett, who heads Canva's internal AI Solutions team within the IT Department explains, "We knew it was up to us to give our team the space and time to test, learn and discover what good prompting looks like.”

Instead of locking in a single AI vendor, Canva deliberately created an ecosystem of AI tools to offer their employees. Garrett explains, "We knew there would be rapid developments in different tools that would benefit different groups. We wanted to provide room for experimentation."

Why Claude stood out in Canva's AI toolbox

In this multi-vendor environment, Claude stood out as a great ‘go-to tool’ for many employees. Garrett notes, "Claude has been an extremely popular choice over the last six months."

Demand for Claude licenses quickly outpaced supply, creating enthusiasm within the company. As Garrett recalls, "We had people begging for Claude accounts—literally."

Beyond its technical capabilities, Claude's approachable interface and communication style were key differentiators. "People can't pinpoint it, but Claude has this vibe in the way it responds. The way it communicates leaves you feeling warm afterwards."

Another crucial factor was the enterprise-ready nature of Claude for Work. "We felt Claude was built enterprise-first, with all the features we truly care about. Even though it was very early days for Claude for Work, we were impressed by their roadmap and saw it as a product that would continue to evolve in ways that would align with what we needed,” said Garrett.

How Claude enhances work across Canva

Claude's integration into Canva employees' workflows supports several key use cases:

• Design prototyping: Designers use Claude to simulate and iterate user testing of Canva templates, with Claude populating templates with content from screenshots.
• Component building: Teams build interactive components that can be tested with real users without developer resources.
• Product visualization: Product managers use Claude to develop prototypes of new features and visually explain concepts to engineers or designers.
• Collaboration: Product managers and designers use Claude's Projects feature to maintain context about product design styles, principles, and philosophies, creating reusable workspaces for consistent outputs.
• Code generation: Engineers provide "overwhelming feedback about Claude's excellent capabilities" in writing and optimizing code.

Garrett explains: "One product manager commented, 'Claude has allowed me to create prototypes I wouldn't have attempted otherwise, giving me a visual way to communicate my ideas to the team.'" The Projects feature has been valuable, allowing teams to build design knowledge repositories for Claude. "It's enabling people from non-design backgrounds to express concepts in a completely new way."

From AI everywhere to AI impact

Encouragement in testing, learning and experimenting with AI tools has quickly cultivated a culture of collaboration among Canva’s team, with employees regularly sharing their AI successes with one another. Garrett says, "We have internal Slack channels for sharing AI success stories. People regularly post videos showing 'here's this cool thing I did with Claude.'" Canva’s internal education team, Canva University, has also put together ‘AI school’ content for employees to learn and implement AI. This has contributed to 65% of team members recounting that they use AI to increase productivity and effectiveness either “everyday” or “often”.

Looking ahead, the company is shifting from "AI everywhere" to "AI impact," to better quantify the productivity gains and business benefits of their AI investments.

Navigating the AI future with Claude

Canva's AI journey represents a shift in technology adoption within organizations. Garrett reflects, "Never before have we seen new technologies adopted so quickly and integrated so meaningfully as part of the day-to-day.”

In this evolving landscape, Canva employees value Claude's enterprise capabilities, user-friendly interface, and high-quality outputs. Garrett concludes, "It's key to encourage teams to experiment and learn as they go in a space that’s changing so quickly. Rather than waiting for all the answers, giving people the space to test ideas and adapt helps us grow with the technology—and shape where it goes next, together."