B2B marketing in 2030: How domain signals replace the lead [Ft. Emma Robinson, Canva]
Founders are now really understanding that brand is gonna differentiate them. How far do you think we are from AI decoding the the creative process? I think AI is not quite to the point where it's got judgment. It's got options, but optionality is is not the same as being able to have that really important human judgment. The creativity, I'd like to think, would still never be replaced. It's twenty thirty. Let's focus on b to b marketing. How do you think things will have changed with the way, you know, technology is advancing right now? I think you'll be starting to see a lot more. Welcome to the twenty thirty podcast. I'm Keith Jensen, president at Cadre AI. We have Emma Robinson, head of b to b marketing at Canva with us. Thanks for being here. No problem. It's good to see you. And we both had, hellacious travel experiences getting into New York City last night, so we're, you know We did coming today. Knew the president would cause so much so much disruption in the streets? The president and the Knicks. You know? And the Knicks. Yeah. They didn't even Combined. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm I'm excited to chat today because b to b marketing has been my background and obviously yours as well. I think one of the things that that I love to kinda commiserate on the most is just how annoying it is sometimes with all you have so many different platforms that you have to work with with b to b. It's I mean, when you think about the b to c side, you've got pixels that sit on a site, automatically pulls in, you're retargeting, you're you got credit card, and we got all these different data points to look at, whereas b to b marketers definitely have a lot less, it feels like. You know? And and I'm just curious, like, how did you how have you found the evolution of b to b marketing recently? Like, mean, in the last I would say last four or five years, there's been some pretty big shifts. Yeah. And I'm just curious how you've kind of navigated those. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Look, mean, I think on the on the technology side, for sure, I mean, we've started to see, you know, more monolithic platforms that are now broken down into sort of point solutions. So, you know, AI, of course, is just giving us a lot of choice. And I would say, probably yourself included, when people start evaluating, it's it becomes a lot to consider and to even make sure that there's talkability and there's, you know, pluggability across these platforms. So I would say from a technology point of view, we've gone from this kind of mass application sprawl, and I think we're starting to see it come back to more of, like, the platform play that has multiple tools. So if you think of Canva, that's very much how we play. You want to not disrupt a workflow ultimately. And I think b to b is starting to get better at that we are defining workflows. AI is helping us to create those and define them in a little bit more structured way. And so by being able to be breaking them down allows you to apply AI to that full workflow, and mostly our workflows are being disrupted. Right? They're not as, you know, seamless as they once were because they have to be disrupted to build them with AI native first versus, you know, maybe it was just a broken process. The briefing process to campaign delivery is, as I'm sure you've been through, has been a very painful journey. So so I think we're seeing now on the technology side, you know, I think the creative as well is becoming we're learning a lot of lessons from consumer, and I think sort of these cultural zeitgeist moments, we're really learning what is it to entertain, to be human, to have a brand that is really stands for something that has vision and and and mission, importantly. So I I think we're starting to see a lot more of that. And certainly where I'm from in Silicon Valley, it's you know, there's just a myriad of AI companies, and so founders are now really understanding that brand is gonna differentiate them. So I think those are the kind of the the sort of two main shifts. And then there's probably a third one around the talent that we're bringing in. So, you know, before marketing was sort of like this art and science, I think we're still indexing a little bit more on the science side for what we're trying to build with AI. So I think of orchestrators, content creators that are more systems thinkers. But then this is really incredible layer of just how people are you know, creative direction and how human sort of storytelling can show up. And so I think you're also starting to see that that role is really important too. So people that work on brand, on creative and storytelling, those are some of the most important people that we're starting to see come back again. Have you seen a difference in how people are applying? Like, when you when you think when somebody's applying to be part of the team, right, you're hiring somebody, have you seen a difference in how they're they're speaking about what they do? Like, are people leaning in more to how they use AI, or are candidates more in the realm of, like, no. This isn't this isn't art. Like, are are there a lot of purists out there that are just focused on, AI can't do what I do, especially in the creative side versus the are are there more that are saying, no. No. No. I I love leaning into it to help me with these parts, and then a human's gotta take it from here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, ordinarily, as you look through candidates, you know, you want them to be able to be curious. You want them to be able to be folks that are reskilling and learning. Like AI is, of course, gonna disrupt all of our roles in some capacity and already is. So I think you look for those components. I think the creative direction and the creative production are two very distinctly different roles. And so on the production side, yes, you want people that are those system thinkers, the people that can orchestrate AI to help the creative process. But on the creative direction side, you still want someone who's got an eye for taste, for judgment, for emotion, for for joy, for beauty. You know, you still want all of those characteristics. So I think the answer is that it really depends on what they would be, you know, tasked to do. But I think also everybody has to have an aptitude, a curiosity, and a desire to relearn and find where AI could be applied in in the best possible way across their workflows that they they're producing. Okay. So I got a question for you. You said all those those those nice things of, you know, they've got a thing of joy and beauty, and there's these What we would associate as human, you know, generated or led emotions. Right? And I guess my question is, how long do you think we have until that gets like, until AI figures out the formula there? Because, right, isn't it like if a human can do it, it's it's there's some formula that we're using. The best creative directors, the best anybody out there coming up with these types of creative things, like even music. I mean, Suno AI, which is wild. I don't know if you've used it, but, like, put any prompt in, and it's gonna come out with a song that sounds pretty much similar to those songs you hear on, like, reality TV shows when they're transitioning from scene to scene. You hear, like, ten seconds of a song, and you're like, wow. Some artists came up with this. And, like, now it's like, I think AI is coming up with that all the time. But how far do you think we are from AI decoding the the creative process, the ideation process to be able to come out up with, like, award winning campaign ideas? Yeah. It's such an interesting question. I wish I had a crystal ball for it. The answer is I don't know. I don't know. I think I think we're making progress. Are we there yet? Absolutely not. So, you know, I think there's still space, and we'd love to think that in humanity, there is still space for creativity. And I think even, you know, if you look back in time, history will tell you, you know, just because we came up with word processes, Shakespeare didn't go away. People still love the art, the storytelling, the, you know, the interest, the emotion that those things evoke. And and it's the same with cameras. You know, we were in film and and then going to digital, like, no one really cares about the camera. It's more about the eye behind it. Right? So I think you still have this really important role that judgment is a filter on work. And I think AI is not quite to the point where it's got judgment. It's got options, but optionality is is not the same as being able to have that really important human judgment. And if you've ever worked with creative agencies and some of the best creative directors I've ever worked with, I think, you know, it's it's the it's this it's this something inside the spark that is is or delivering on a brief is something that they have inside them that's so inherently connected to insights, and it's connected to the market and the and the customers. And and that is an incredibly hard thing to codify into a prompt of sorts. Yeah. I think with contextual learning and reasoning, you'll start to see some of it work, but will it really truly inspire a delight? I think the jury's still out. Even if it does do a good job, right, and we get to a point where good creative is being pumped out by AI, I gotta believe there's gonna be, for lack of a better term, the purists who are, you know, now like, now there's gonna be this, I I would think, this sway back at a at a point to, like, okay, well, we want to see this stuff. Whether it's better or not, we want to see the brands that are utilizing humans, and we can tell what they are. Wouldn't you think? I think so. I mean, it's so interesting. I don't know if you've seen a lot of the the some of the work that's in the market right now has got made by humans. Like, is there it's like, you know, this is the organic food label. But it's true. I mean, they people are putting that on because, you know, it does there needs to be a stamp of authority. And I think if you see some of the trends too I was speaking with an analyst last week, and you start to see the trends actually coming back towards humans and creativity and storytelling as being the moat for brands. So I think, you know, we'll we'll start to sort of see some of the work be and I think it's more in the production of it. I mean, everybody wants to scale that idea. We wanna get it out to market quickly. So I think it will be more on the production side that we'll start to see that work really, really well for us and that'll be seamless, whereas the creativity, I'd like to think, would still never be replaced. I agree. And then there's probably also buckets of content. Right? Like, do you need the do you need the super creative stuff in SEO content or in, you know, fifty percent of your, you know, LinkedIn and social content? You probably don't. There's there's this range of, like, I wanna be I want this to be a showstopping, you know, stop my scroll and, like, pay attention to this, and versus the ones that are there for consistent reminders of product features and Right. Right. And so I would imagine that I mean, look, at Cadre, we were about to hire a marketing director. We saw the role posted, so, you know, anyone who is amazing applies, we will take them. But I've you know, with a marketing background, said, what am I doing? Like, I I haven't found the perfect person. I know everything they should do. Why don't I just build an agent? You know, like, why don't I just try to work to convince myself that we don't need a marketing director, we need a marketing intern Who's gonna run this machine and make and be the human in the loop to make some some micro decisions along the way and to get everything, you know, posted or making sure there's not an error when it's automatically an MCP posting to WordPress or whatever the the, you know, case may be. But and we're still in the process of building out, and it's been pretty cool to to do, and it's an interesting exercise. I'd be petrified if I was younger, you know, going into these types of of professions. I guess that maybe is another question. How how what does your team look like at Canva today? Yeah. Yeah. So the team across the board is, I mean, primarily a growth team. So we have people working in performance marketing, SEO, AEO, doing ABM, like, of that type of sort of digital at scale. So that's the biggest team because we have been at Canva much more of a PLG motion. Now we're moving into SLG, into SalesLed, because we're selling to businesses more, so they need that more enterprise marketing. So the growth engine is really just like the scaled growth digital engine. We also have a field marketing team that you know, importantly, it's really great for us to be able to go tell stories to actual humans in real life. So doing events, we just did a Canva Create event, which is our annual user conference earlier in April, and, you know, that's a two thousand person, huge, big, one day long event. Those things are so important to kinda get people really eyeballs and and playing with the content, doing the demos, getting hands on. So a lot of that type of work and then that surrounds with things like partner marketing. We have a big ecosystem. We work Canva's a very pluggable platform, so we work across the full sort of partner ecosystem from agencies right the way through to reseller mark marketing. And then we have content teams. We have a a team that looks after PR and comms. And so it's a full sort of b to b enterprise marketing team. We like to keep it quite lean, so everybody has a sort of role to play in AI and sort of sprint capacity, as well as sort of running against our company goals, which which is sort of that long term play versus the midterm, short term to really get people fired up around individual goals. Have you felt of of I'd say it's well, I'm curious of senior versus junior you know, more junior talent. Have you felt any difference in the in any reticence or excitement about AI? Meaning, like, do do more senior people go like, for for me, I'm like, hell yeah. Let's automate as much as possible, and let me get less team members who are more heavy in a concentration of a skill set to, like, run it. Versus if I was a more junior talent, I'd probably be like, woah. Where are the jobs going? And I'd be nervous about that. Have you seen any difference in senior versus junior talent and how they think about AI? You know, I think it's it it depends on your sort of culture, and I think we're very lucky. At Canva, have a culture of people that are very curious by nature. We also give people the space to be creative. So part of our AI strategy is to, you know, give time and effort back to be able to learn the tools, to be able to rescale, and then deploy agents. And so, I mean, we cut shut the company down three weeks ago, and we did something called an AI discovery week, which was everybody just learned, built, did a hackathon at the end of the week and presented the work. So we do a lot of that type of those initiatives to really be able to get people just jazzed and excited. That's cool. As part of that, every leader has to build. So you have to build an agent as a leader. So I I think there's something really great about getting people hands on, getting them to the fail, and as they're building their you know, whether it be a Claude agent or whether it be something in Canva AI, but being able to kind of fail and learn and and sort of move on from basic prompting and sort of more thought partnership, but really build towards autonomous agents doing some of those workflows. So so it's been a cultural change. I think, people wise, I mean, it really ranges, to be honest. You know? I think everything from some people that would completely surprise you that are building, you know, incredible, like, six tool workflows that are fully autonomous, human in the loop, of course, but really off to the races. And and so they should be celebrated, and then you have everything else in between. Yeah. I've yet to see so much resistance to it. I actually don't think tools are the problem. Like No. Access and training, all those things are very accessible. It's more about what do they do with it, and I think that's the harder question. You know, it's it's one thing to be able to build a use case, but does the use case stand up, stand the test of time? Does it help to be able to create more reasoning? The contextual layers, is it plugging into that? Is it helping more teams than just marketing? There's a lot of things that I think you need to consider as you start to build out those use cases. And when you mentioned, you know, the like, a build someone building a skill or a workflow, what I think a lot of people forget is the that final mile of getting that to Right. Work and work consistently is tough. I mean, I have a a skill that runs on Claude Cowork every morning that goes and grabs from four or five different sources. It it, you know, pulls it in and creates this, like, dashboard for me. And it'll work perfect for a week. And then it'll go off the rails a little bit On day eight. And and I'll be like, wait. And then I'll come back, then it's like, oh, for some reason it tried to go use Claude and Chrome for this. I see what it is. Let me update the skill. Okay. So I update the skill. The next day, something else is a little off. And like and there's just that that fine tuning stage is so critical because the moment you put something out there, especially someone who builds skill and puts it out to other people Yeah. And it doesn't work, I feel like people just throw their hands up because they put time into it to to test this thing, and then they're like, let me just go back to the Yeah. Yeah. Before. If it doesn't work perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. We've definitely had those situations. I think the only other thing I would add to that is, it's more of an enablement issue as well. I mean, it's one thing to productionize a use case, but it's another thing entirely to be able to show people what it means, why it matters, how to leverage it. And that stuff is actually much harder. Like, it's very easy to for every individual to create this incredible task based flow, but to get other people actually using it and to be able to have a common kind of set of resources that people can pull from does get very challenging, and then if it breaks, it's even more challenging. So, yeah, I definitely hear you. And I think the point I made earlier about the tool sprawl, I think some of that is if you do have six tools that, you know, all trying to talk to each other in some capacity and one part of the chain breaks, then that does become a very challenging thing. So I think the majority of what we're trying to build in in Camera AI is actually just in that one platform, so at least we have, like, less dependencies on all those tools having that interoperability. You you guys have an MCP. Is that Correct. Yeah. So so the marketing agent that I'm building, in theory, what I could do is I could say and I'm asking this question, but, like, in theory, what I could do is I could say, okay. Every week, I want you to go back through Fireflies call recording, Slack, this this, come up with five pieces of content that are rooted in some kind of it's not just, hey. I thought of this because you're an AI consulting agency. It's like, I think you should write about this because this, you know, prospect is asking about this or whatever it is. So it comes up with these content ideas, and then I could have it come in. I could you know, so it runs that. I go and I select which idea I wanna go down or, you know, and then I it says, you wanted to write a blog? Do you want to write this? Want to and then we could have it create the prompt essentially and push into Canva Correct. For Canva to then go take that that and Yeah. Take make the creative out of it. Yeah. Of course. And and we would take them one step further too, you know, if you would want different sizes, variations, formats, localization, depending on where you are marketing, you can do all of that in something we have called Bulk Create, which does create, like, visual images, ads, those types of things. So, yeah, there's all sorts of great things you can do with Camera AI. And it's more about you know, the idea still stays core, so you'd still have to decide and be that human in the loop on the selection. But then it's about how you kind of productionize and operationalize it is makes it much easier, quicker, faster, all the things. So we we do a lot of that work with with ABM. So we're doing account based marketing program. We have a series of thousand accounts and various stages of maturity. And so we typically try to build very custom paths for every single one of those accounts that we do at scale. And we can only really operationalize that through Canva because we're actually building, you know, local copy, local images, messaging, and then that all gets posted into files that then will be just would distribute it on, like, a really beautiful website for a customer. So if you think sort of like clicking on a custom personalized ad into that experience just makes the journey so much more tailored to them and and customized to where they're at. One thing that always drove me nuts, I I was I was at a software company, and I was like, I wanna do I wanna scale a one to for AI, but I wanna scale a one to one account based marketing program that is more digital focused. Because, you know, you can do one to one where you have, you know, a a an email that's specific to that client, a PDF that's specific, and somebody's sending it. But I wanted to get digital one to one. And it drove me nuts that, you know, with something like LinkedIn, I could create an ad that was like, hey, Tesla, blah blah blah blah. Right? And I could have an you know, it say it in there, but I couldn't send that to just the people at Tesla I cared about unless there were three hundred and eighty four people in that segment group. And I just wonder so so, I guess, maybe, like, to you, when you think about the the one to one, where is the where are the channels of that going out? So you go and you create a custom path for a thousand different companies. Like, what are the channels that you're getting those personalized assets out to? And and are those personalized to the extent where they have, like, the company name in it? Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, every single one has a company name, has a tagline about that company, of course, because a lot of what we have signals wise in the in the products shows whether they have usage at that company. So, typically, that's where people are signing up to some kind of form of Canva license from a credit card. And the idea in businesses is that, you know, you don't want sort of so many people doing that because you probably want them protected under their IT security path, so things like SSO is really important. So we wanna be able to consolidate all that usage into sort of one package. So importantly, with for that, we are starting to we are sending ads, so that would that would be trafficked on LinkedIn. That's created all through Canvas, pulling in those custom taglines through research, through looking through our CRM, looking through Gong, which is some of our sales calls, those types of things, putting it into Canva, being able to localize it if need be, and then it goes out to the ad platforms, it goes out to email, all of the places that it could be distributed that would be in a typical funnel. We have not yet got that to a physical environment, but it definitely into digital. So landing them on a hub essentially, which would be like a Canva website where we'd be able to show them all the things that we do specific to their account. So if we're targeting Tesla marketing, it would be about, you know, the types of automotive customers we might have already, what they're doing with the technology, and sort of showing use cases or similar use cases in in their market and their industry. Yeah. So that's cool. So so you are if I hear that right, one of the major ways that you're going after these companies is to say, you already have two to three people at the organization using this. Get on a a larger plan. Right. Right? So you can do that leasing. Nicer than that, but yes. Yes. Right. Sorry. And so do you find that that that is largely the the that PLG motion is what's driving the SLG Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. We have thousands of users in Fortune five hundred companies that typically go out and just purchase Canva on their credit cards or in into their department. And so the idea is that you'd want people to leverage, you know, brand kits, for example, like, you know, there are teams that probably are not creating on brand in the way that a brand would expect, and a CMO may not be have that visible. So our our role and sort of our sales effort is to bring that to a CMO or creative leader and show them that actually what they'd wanna be able to do is protect this with things like the brand control, the governance, the the controls that allow people to really make sure that this content does actually get out the door when it's on brand, and they feel good about it. That makes sense. Tell me we talked about some workflows and some some agents and stuff. Tell me what percentage of what you see online of people saying they are doing you think is real versus hype? Because for me, I see a lot of stuff on LinkedIn of, I just built Claude just became my SDR and got me fifteen leads. And I send it to other people on my team. I'm like, is this real? They're like, no. This is not like maybe there's part of it. Right? It it helped me create custom, you know, personalized contents that I sent out or this stuff. But the I do feel personally, being inside an AI services and consulting company, I see a lot of this stuff out there that I'm like, that's not if that if that is happening, it is not working as well as a human, you know, would would have worked it. But I'm curious if if you see that out there of, like, hype versus reality. I mean, look. There's definitely hype. I I think where we try I mean, we market to so many people. So a lot of what we set up in our SDR flows is sequences. It's email sequences that are highly personal and tailored to an individual, and we can only do that through AI. I mean, the amount of sort of human and capital labor to go into doing all that research and codifying it and finding the right signals, it's a lot. So so we do marry sort of those product signals, the signals from the web. I mean, we have, like, a, you know, a chatbot which will allow people to come in and sort of interact with so it it depends on the experience. I think that that those sort of paths to entry and removing the barriers has been very helpful. I would say that it's still a work in progress. All these things need to be tested. And to your point, if one of the flows breaks, one of the sequences breaks, then a lot of the time, you need you need the alerts, you need the failovers, you need someone watching that. So there's still a lot of human in the loop on those things. But, yeah, I mean, I I I see a lot in the in the world of AI created content, and I think where I'm where I live in Silicon Valley, the one zero one is just full of very similar tech companies and AI companies with very similar words. All the billboards up and down the one zero one are very see a sameness. Oh, yeah. So so I think it is, you know, you just going back to what makes the brand stand out, it is a lot about what the differentiation is for your brand. Like, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What's the founder story, the origin story? Like, find those things and find the human spark and delight in those things and then tell that. But there's a lot of enterprise AI something something. Isn't it wild driving on the highway in San Francisco and, like, every billboard is a tech company? Yeah. Like, I remember going and looking up billboard inventory because we wanted to the last one of the last companies I was with was a a tech company, and we the founder had moved out to San Francisco, and we're like, alright. Well, let's get a billboard up there. Let's And we're building an office out there and everything, and it is like they're booked out for, like, a year. Yeah. You know? Apple got this one locked up. You know? Stripe got that. It's nuts. It is. It is. I'm gonna think, you know, I mean, we're very lucky at Canva. We our b to b work is very consumer led, so it is around, you know, emotional storytelling. Like, our billboard ads has got squirrels on them, for example. So, you know, we we try and find the playfulness, and, you know, we're all about sort of empowering people, and so we try and bring that through a lot in our in our creative work as well as show what we do. So I I think it can be done, but it takes a sort of it takes a a sort of cerebral intelligence that you really need, like, from a creative point of view, that you would need to find that sort of connection to the customer, what they care about, and what's gonna move them, and what's gonna surprise them and delight them, and all those things, which which is not easy. That's the really hard thing, and I think founders sort of sometimes take the the easy path, which is to create a billboard with something around AI efficiency or productivity or yeah. What must be interesting, I would assume, at Canva is having so many small businesses on through a PLG motion where you've got, like, the designer at this business or, you know, maybe even the founder at another business to to use it. I almost feel like the the idea of brand being so important was lost on small businesses for a long time, mainly maybe not because they I mean, ones with, like, VC money or something maybe a little bit different, but, like, I I would imagine a lot of the businesses that are using Canva are maybe not like the enterprise side, but like the smaller ones are maybe this is the first opportunity they've had to, like, have a really beautiful brand A hundred percent. At the with with the investment level that they're able to make in it. Yeah. Right? I mean, you go back five, six years, maybe ten years, like, they're not going to prioritize the brand. Yeah. Right? Because it's a lot of work, you gotta pay someone a lot of money, whereas now I feel like it's a bit more democratized. Yeah. It is. It's a ubiquitous entry point, which is great. So, I mean, a lot of people that were not designers by trade, they have now this, like, incredible template library. And and now with Camera AI, you can almost create whatever you want. I mean, our image creation using things like Leonardo AI and, you know, and Nana Banana and all those the it was just a whole myriad of different models that you can use. So then now the creative just suddenly gets that click better. And I think they start to see that actually creating a brand and having that differentiated is a growth lever. Before, it was never really seen. It was like a nice to you know, nice to have where we have to justify it. But now with with a lot of agents making decisions too on product services, that becomes a whole new thing too. But I think, ultimately, you really you know, you have an opportunity to really, like, solidify a brand in whatever digital platform you're running. Yeah. And and small business owners, of course, like, find that incredibly helpful to be able to sort of create that next level quality. Okay. So fast forward to twenty thirty. I know it's always hard to hypothesize about the future when, like, literally everything's changing every week, but it's twenty thirty. Let's focus on b to b marketing. How do you think things will have changed with the way, you know, technology is advancing right now? Yeah. I I mean, we've always said that traditional waterfall model is dead, and I think it is to some degree, but I think still people live in a world of leads and, you know, passing leads to sales. I think you'll be starting to see a lot more account domain signals that will be the qualifier for whether something's quality or not. And and, I mean, a lot of people are sort of starting to tip tip their toe in the water, but truly doing that at scale is not an easy thing to do and really look at all the signals that you start to see and pulling them from AI visibility and, like, other areas, that's gonna get very complex. So I think signals versus kind of the the lead mantra will be something that the B2B's teams will start to really kinda dust off and move away from. So that's one. I think on the talent side, you know, orchestration with AI agents is gonna be a big one. So being able to find people that are really good systems thinkers, but also program managers who understand the business, but also the technical side. So a lot of the kind of growth strategist type of roles, I think, will evolve to become more of how do you build autonomous agents that, you know, work towards a business goal. Like, we shouldn't forget that, but really do work towards that. And content creators, I think, are gonna have a field day with, like, lots of new tooling. It's gonna be I mean, the amount of things that you can start to do, even we have a pro design tool affinity, and we you know, we were just taking a look at some of the new features yesterday, and it's just mind blowing, the level of creativity that you can create, like, just some incredible work through those types of tools that it starts to make everybody feel like, you know, it it is about, like, connecting to that creative when you see it. And I I love the idea that humans will still be really, really important for us, and and we won't all be replaced by AI, so that will be fun. And then I think just borrowing a bit more from the consumer roots, so being able to be fun and friendly and, like, have this emotion and find the cultural zeitgeist moments and attach to those. And those types of things in b to b has never normally been been the thing we've done. So I think we'll start to see a lot more evolution of that type of, you know, emotional fun storytelling. Do you think there'll be websites? Meaning, like, obviously, there will be a a place you can go to learn about a business, but will it be just all hyper personalized to the person who's visiting? Like, you know, right now someone goes through Canva to create a more personalized site and but like, I wonder if just websites become this this thing that gets created at the moment that you go to it based on everything it knows about you and Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I think the role of the website is gonna be really interesting. I mean, obviously, we're a long way from that right now, but I think as AEO picks up, it'll be a really interesting thing how we start to think about what does your site look like to an agent, and how do they interpret it? How do they measure it? How do you still find a funnel, like, find that as your front door into your into your your own experience? So so that will become very interesting. But, yeah, I I think personalization is gonna be huge, so and we now have the tools to do it, whereas before, that was something that was always, you know, harder to do. Yeah. I almost wonder and this I've never thought about this before, but, you know, just as we're talking about this, I almost wonder if what an agent would be looking at to determine like, so you're you're in, let's just say, an LLM, and you're asking about Canva or whatever. I I wonder if the agent would be reading a markdown file to learn about what Canva is or doing research for it. And then just visualizing, doing the sales for it right there. Because I I we we keep saying you wanna meet the consumer or the business where they're at. And if they're doing all their work inside of these, you know, FrontierLab LMs, like, I just wonder if that isn't also where people get sold to. Yeah. You know, you know, more and more over time, you just start gravitating all into there. Yeah. No. A hundred percent. And I think that's why the role of the MCP servers is so incredibly important because, you know, that is where if you start in LLM, you're gonna be able to get that sort of, like, you you know, path through immediately. You're still gonna be in your workflow. I think the disruption of a workflow is incredibly that context switching is really disruptive. But being able to be in LLM and start there, be able to go through to something like Canva and edit in Canva, like, that sort of still continues that journey in a more seamless way. I don't think people will be tolerant of having to, like, disrupt the flow and go to a website and find the contact sales form and fill it out. You know? So there's there's a lot of those things that I think we put these, like, slightly unnecessary gates in front of people, and we have to right now because it's the only way to do it. But, you know, the sort of future of a lead is really sort of like it's almost gonna be just like an unsubscribe. Right? Like, one step away from an unsubscribe. So, yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be a fun journey, though. I'm excited to be on the ride. Me too. Yeah. Emma, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. Appreciate you coming. See you. Thanks. Too.
Canva runs account-based marketing across a thousand accounts, producing custom copy, images, and a personalized landing page for each, with the company name and a tagline in every asset. Emma Robinson, Head of B2B Marketing at Canva, tells Keith how product usage signals, CRM, and sales-call data feed the creative to make that scale work.
She argues leads are giving way to domain signals as the real marker of quality, and that the hard part of AI adoption is never the build. It's the final mile of getting a workflow to run consistently, and getting a whole team to actually use what one person made.
Topics discussed:
Canva is a design platform with a large template library that lets people who aren't designers by trade create their own work, built as one platform with multiple tools so users don't have to disrupt their workflow. For businesses, it adds brand kits, brand controls, and governance so creative leaders can make sure on-brand content is what ships. Its Bulk Create feature produces images, ads, and other assets across sizes, variations, formats, and localizations, its professional design tool Affinity extends into higher-end creative work, and its MCP server lets an agent working in an LLM move a user through to editing in Canva without leaving their workflow.
Maybe this is the first opportunity they've had to, like, have a really beautiful brand with the investment level that they're able to make in it. Now I feel like it's a bit more democratized. Yeah. It is. It's a ubiquitous entry point, which is great. So, I mean, a lot of people that were not designers by trade, they have now this, like, incredible template library. And and now with Camera AI, you can almost create whatever you want. So then now the creative is just suddenly gets that click better. And I think they start to see that actually creating a brand and having that differentiated is a growth lever. Before, it was never really seen. It was like a nice to you know, nice to have where we have to justify it. But now with with a lot of agents making decisions too on product services, that becomes a whole new thing too. But I think, ultimately, you really you know, you have an opportunity to really, like, solidify a brand in whatever digital platform you're running. Yeah. And and small business owners, of course, like, find that incredibly helpful to be able to sort of create that next level quality.
How far do you think we are from AI decoding the the creative process, the ideation process to be able to come out with, like, award winning campaign ideas? I think we're making progress. Are we there yet? Absolutely not. So, you know, I think there's still space, and we'd love to think that in humanity, there is still space for creativity. And I think even, you know, if you look back in time, history will tell you, you know, just because we came up with word processes, Shakespeare didn't go away. People still love the art, the storytelling, the, you know, the interest, the emotion that those things evoke. And and it's the same with cameras. You know, we were in film and and then going to digital, like, no one really cares about the camera. It's more about the eye behind it. Right? So I think you still have this really important role that judgment is a filter on work. And I think AI is not quite to the point where it's got judgment. It's got options, but optionality is is not the same as being able to have that really important human judgment.
Even if it does do a good job, right, and we get to a point where good creative is being pumped out by AI, I gotta believe there's gonna be, for lack of a better term, the purists who are, you know, now like, now there's gonna be this, I would think, this sway back. We want to see the brands that are utilizing humans, and we can tell. I think so. I mean, it's so interesting. I don't know if you've seen a lot the the, some of the work that's in the market right now has got made by humans. But it's true. I mean, they people are putting that on because, you know, it it does. There needs to be a stamp of authority, and I think if you see some of the trends too I was speaking with an analyst last week, and you start to see the trends actually coming back towards humans and creativity and storytelling as being the moat for brands. So I think, you know, we'll we'll start to sort of see some of the work be and I think it's more in the production of it. I mean, everybody wants to scale that idea. We wanna get it out to market quickly. So I think it will be more on the production side that we'll start to see that work really, really well for us and that'll be seamless, whereas the creativity, I'd like to think, would still never be replaced.
Have you seen any difference in senior versus junior talent and how they think about AI? You know, I think it's it it depends on your sort of culture, and I think we're very lucky. At Canva, we have a culture of people that are very curious by nature. We also give people the space to be creative. So part of our AI strategy is to, you know, give time and effort back to be able to learn the tools, to be able to rescale, and then deploy agents. That's cool. As part of that, every leader has to build. So you have to build an agent as a leader. So I I think there's something really great about getting people hands on, being able to kind of fail and learn and and sort of move on from basic prompting and sort of more thought partnership, but really build towards autonomous agents doing some of those workflows. I've yet to see so much resistance to it. I actually don't think tools are the problem. Like No. Access and training, all those things are very accessible. It's more about what do they do with it, and I think that's the harder question. You know, it's it's one thing to be able to build a use case, but does the use case stand up, stand the test of time? Does it help to be able to create more reasoning? The contextual layers, is it plugging into that? There's a lot of things that I think you need to consider as you start to build out those use cases.

