AI Scales Creativity for Enterprise Marketers at Canva

Skyler Mattson:

Good morning. It is another gorgeous day in the South of France. I'm Skyler Mattson with Infosys Aster, and we are at Cannes Lions 2026. We're speaking with leaders driving innovation with AI in marketing, and I am so thrilled to be joined by Emma Robinson, head of B2B marketing of Canva. Welcome, Emma. Thank you for joining us.

Emma Robinson:

Thank you. It's good to see you.

Skyler Mattson:

Canva, there are so many creators out there. I'm sure it's an exciting business to be in. Can you tell us a little bit about your role?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, of course, yeah. So I lead global growth marketing at Canva for B2B. So you probably know Canva for consumer use — we started many, many years ago. We do a lot of work with students, with educators, with creators, and now we've actually moved into the enterprise. So we're actually really helping businesses of all sizes, whether it be a Fortune 500 or a small business, to really be able to get the most out of their content creation workflows. So if you're a marketer, if you're in sales or in HR, all of those functions have content needs. So it's really about how you get efficiency around creating that content process and being able to productionize it and get it out into the world. And of course, we all know with AI, that's sped up like no tomorrow. There's a lot of volume out there. But really, we truly believe that the platform itself helps with that creativity as well. So there's sort of a very distinct part of creativity we need to protect. And then there's a production element that you do need, to get ideas out into the world, and Canva can help you to do that with the platform. So I run all things growth, so looking for new angles to grow, new customers to sell to, and all the things in between.

Skyler Mattson:

Fantastic. So when you're positioning Canva to a B2B audience, to an enterprise versus a consumer, how does that brand positioning shift?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, yeah. Well, often it's a lot about when people create content for work purposes, they need to be on brand. Everybody has a brand that they need to protect, that's beloved, that has a mission and values and all those things that they want to hold dear to that brand. So the idea being is you want to be able to keep that content on brand. You want it to be consistent and cohesive and tell your brand story. So being able to use things like brand kits for enterprises is incredibly important. And then also just be able to work in one platform. We all know if you work with agencies, if you work in a handoff process between a briefing into the creative process, it's a lot of little steps.

Skyler Mattson:

It is.

Emma Robinson:

And so the idea in enterprise is, if you can be able to find efficiencies within those gaps, then that handoff gets much more efficient, and so the platform allows you to do that. So that's sort of one area. The other thing is enterprises and businesses care about security and compliance and governance and all those things that their IT teams and procurement teams hold them to standard to. So we work a lot on those types of things to be able to make sure they're a really safe and secure platform for them to do their best work. And then really work with all those teams I mentioned. So it could be — I mean, content is such a ubiquitous thing. And so, of course, everything we do, we touch content, and more and more so. So we're helping businesses and teams to be able to kind of transform and create new workflows so they can get those ideas out to market quicker.

Skyler Mattson:

I think so much of what we get out of AI is what we're putting into it. What types of inputs do you recommend to enterprises when they are trying to create those brand standards so that the brand that gets put out into the world feels authentic, feels consistent with the message they want to put out?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah. Well, look, I think there's sort of the fundamentals. So typically, brands have a very strong point of view about their values. So you'd want to codify those values into some kind of framework, and so typically we use brand systems, so that might even be a PDF, for example, that says your typography, your palette, your colors, all of those sort of standard things. And then it's really about what do your customers respond to. So the idea of Canva — we have a really great design model in there, which is actually learning. It's continuously learning as you go. And so you want to be able to say, "What do your customers respond to? What do they like? What don't they like?" And you're feeding information to the LLM the whole time. So to do that, then that allows you to kind of build from there. So we ask inputs to be things like, do you have competitive research? Do you have brand positioning? What are those core brand systems that you have? And that all gets codified into that one central repository, which sits in Canva, and then basically allows you to orchestrate work from that brand kit. So that's definitely one of them.

Skyler Mattson:

Excellent. AI helps us in so many ways, but there are certain things that perhaps AI shouldn't be a part of. I mean, are there steps within the Canva workflow where you feel like a human should always be able to have that final look or to intervene at some point?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, of course. Human in the loop is incredibly important still. We're all here celebrating creativity this week. We're all humans in the world. We're all emotional creatures that connect to brand, and however that sort of manifests and shows up. So that still is an incredibly important part of the process. I think we like to think about that as being creative direction. And then the creative production part is where you scale the idea into Canva. So you never want to replace that sort of incredible idea that an ECD can come up with, that is an insight about your customers that humans really, truly know. That stuff is the kind of thing that's very difficult to replace. So the idea being is you still have checks and balances, there's still guardrails in place, but you also want to democratize design and creativity as much as possible so people can get their ideas out into the world.

Skyler Mattson:

Yeah, yeah. What about your internal teams and the way that you're using AI to be more efficient in your day-to-day?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, yeah. Well, we've been on quite the journey. I think what we saw a lot of, what I would say, are task-based workflows. We had a lot of productivity use cases that maybe took something, a traditional workflow, and could take it a little bit better as it went through. So things like customer research, or maybe we were looking at how we showed up in sentiment on LinkedIn, for example. So those things, we want to be able to put them into a system that allows others to access them, the context of them being very important for future builds. So we actually went through a process where we actually started to build more of a system. So the idea being, you wanted to build a data foundation. You want to build then the contextual layer. You want to build a reasoning layer, and then finally your artifacts and your outputs can be into that top layer, like what you actually interact with. So being able to sort of build that infrastructure allowed us to sort of scale to that next level, because a lot of those things that we talked about, the shares, like customer research, whether it was analysis about why your customers were not buying your products, like those things all sit within sort of a core system that allows people to grow and build on top of that and grow their use cases. So we've done a lot of that sort of systems-thinking work to enable that. And then that's helped us unlock, as I mentioned, sort of more productivity, but actually disruption too. So sort of new sources of revenue, new ways to do things, and the team have been pretty excited about it.

Skyler Mattson:

I am sure. I love that idea of disruption in the process. But I want to talk about data, because you just mentioned it. And I sometimes hear from enterprises, "We're not ready to implement AI workflows because our data is all over the place." Or, "We're not sure we have the right data to inform what we want to do." What do you say when you're working with a new customer that's feeling that way, that they aren't ready because of their data models?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah. Well, look, data will never be ready. It'll never be perfect. Just do it. I've worked for many, many companies where that's not the case. But I would say that what you can do — Canva allows you to have an MCP out to data providers, so whether it be Snowflake or maybe Salesforce or other examples. So ideally, you'd want to be able to keep your data in a place that is like that, that does have the most cleansed data that's possible, and then be able to access that. So we do things like, you can do a prompt, and then take data and put it into a deck, for example, automatically in an agentic workflow. So yes, it's important to have the data cleansed and ready and structured and set up in those systems. But really, Canva doesn't allow for that. It's more of — that would be an IT function or a data function to be able to set those things up properly. And then we would just call upon them from the MCP.

Skyler Mattson:

That makes sense. Okay, one final question. What is something that you're most inspired by or excited about AI and how it can help you do things better?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah. Oh my gosh, there's so many things.

Skyler Mattson:

I know, it is a hard one.

Emma Robinson:

I think for me, I'm doing a lot of thinking around AI visibility right now. So how do we become, as Canva, more visible in LLMs, so people are sort of starting their searches in different ways. And so for me, introducing a new metric around percentage of brand visibility that we own, and share of voice with that regard. So those are some of the new metrics. So I'm kind of excited because, for B2B, for many, many years, we were sitting in the world of leads and pipeline and closed-won bookings and all of those things. So now this has given us an opportunity to create a new metric and rally around that.

Skyler Mattson:

That's so exciting. Yeah. I want to ask one more question, because you've just touched on something that has been coming up. So search engines — people are using Chat, Claude, pick your…

Emma Robinson:

Pick your flavor.

Skyler Mattson:

Pick your flavor. I was going to say poison. But pick your flavor.

Emma Robinson:

Pick your champagne.

Skyler Mattson:

And that's where they're going to start their search. And so brands who used to target a customer or be ready to have their search results pop up in Google now have an agent to target. And when you say visibility in LLMs and how you're showing up, what should B2B brands be thinking about in terms of how they rise to the top when an agent is now in between you and the customer?

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think we're still a little way off it being fully there, but I would say that the time is now, and the time to start working on content — that's going to be, whether it's earned or owned, but mostly I think the kind of content in social and organic is going to be the most important content. So we had a session yesterday with LinkedIn where they talked a lot about how your employees can be advocates of your brand and start creating content that actually will allow you to have an amplifier effect around your brand. So it's really about where the algorithms are kind of measuring that content and citations that are coming through. And I would say it's really about trying to be in communities, so whether you're in Reddit or Quora, or YouTube, and just making sure that your presence is known. And then your content strategy supports — like every time you do any kind of campaign or content, you would make sure that it is visible by LLMs.

Skyler Mattson:

Yeah. Exactly. Well, thank you so much.

Emma Robinson:

Yeah, you're welcome.

Skyler Mattson:

I've loved talking with you. I hope you enjoy the rest of the week here.

Emma Robinson:

Thank you. You too.

Skyler Mattson:

Thank you.