AiThority Interview with Natalie Schwartz, Head of Global Brand Marketing and Partnerships at Canva

Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Gen AI or GAI, has become a mainstay in a creative tool kit. According to a survey of 4,000 marketers and creative leaders, GAI tools save 4-5 hours every week on creative projects. The benefits of using GAI tools for creative projects exceed expectations. However, marketers find it hard to match the pace of innovations in the AI ecosystem. 47% of marketers say they don’t know how to use generative AI, and are concerned about job loss, plagiarism,  bias, and data privacy.

We sat down with Canva’s Global Head of Brand Marketing and Partnership, Natalie Schwartz, to understand how new Generative AI tools are reviving marketers’ creativity and productivity – and becoming an essential part of their job. Here’s what Natalie had to say.

Please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities at Canva

I oversee our global marketing and partnerships efforts at Canva – everything from campaigns to events and partnerships that demonstrate the value of Canva and build love for our brand. My team uses Canva for our own marketing efforts day in and day out, so we especially enjoy highlighting all the ways Canva can save time for marketers and creatives.

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Could you tell us more about the ideal customer profile of Canva that specifically uses AI solutions?

Canva’s AI tools were intentionally designed so that any of our 150M users around the world could use them – they’re designed to be simple and accessible, and solve real design challenges or eliminate the need for mundane, time-consuming edits. That said, we’re especially excited about the possibilities they open up for teams who are trying to do more, with less time. Particularly for marketers and creatives who need to create content at scale, or are seeking a bit of inspiration to kick off a presentation, brainstorm meeting, or strategy doc, tools like Magic Write and Text to Image provide a powerful starting point.

What is the most impactful generative AI technology that drives digital transformation for digital marketing organizations?

Canva’s Magic Write tool is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for marketers and teams who need to create a high volume of strategy documents, meeting agendas, presentations and more, every day, and often need to reformat those materials for different purposes. Magic Write can summarize text for you making it easy to turn a strategy doc into an email, but it can also generate copy within presentations or social media posts, so you never have to start from scratch again.

With fears of AI replacing up to 70% of traditional marketing and sales job functions, isn’t the rise of generative AI actually a paradox in the creator economy?

AI has risen to mainstream awareness incredibly quickly and it’s understandable that there are concerns about how it will impact work and jobs. That said, we’re incredibly confident that AI will be a partner and an asset to human creativity. AI can cut down time-consuming and mundane tasks to help teams do better work, more quickly.

Our recent survey of more than 4,000 global marketing and creative leaders showed that 81% of them agree that AI-powered tools reduce the minutiae of repetitive tasks, freeing them up to focus on the more meaningful parts of their role, such as higher-level creative thinking and strategic decision-making, which add true long-term value – moreover, 69% said AI is saving their teams at least two to three hours per week.

How do you introduce ethical guidelines around the use of generative AI?

Providing a safe, ethical AI experience is a top priority for us. We’ve implemented multiple layers of safety measures in our Magic AI-powered products, including but not limited to input and output moderation and reducing bias in the models we use. We also use machine learning to prevent users from accessing or generating content that might be harmful.

What are the major challenges in the current AI ecosystem? How do these challenges limit the reach of Gen AI tools?

A big challenge to the widespread adoption of AI is that the market for AI design tools is fragmented and complex. All of these different solutions exist across various products and ecosystems, requiring users to switch tabs or pay for multiple subscriptions.

Canva is working to bring all of these fragmented tools under one roof.

Additionally, many of these tools have a learning curve and are not intuitive for the average employee. As with all of our products, we’re focusing on simplicity and ease of use. We’re empowering 100% of the world to communicate in a way that was once limited to the 1% of people who have technical training or access to expensive software.

Lighter notes:

Burn the midnight candle or soak in the sun?

Soak in the sun, for sure! I’m in bed by 9 PM.

Coffee, or Tea?

Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon

Your favorite Canva product marketing initiative that you want everyone to know about:

Our latest Brand campaign is running in the US. It shows the pain points of marketing and creative teams and how Canva products can help solve them! Working with our internal creative team in Sydney on this was a lot of fun.

First memorable experience in your career as a marketing leader:

One of my first jobs out of school was working in the Google Creative Lab as it started. In 2009 the company tasked the group with creating the first official advertising campaign for Google Search.

The brief was in essence: to remind the world why they love Google. One of my teammates wrote and created the Parisian Love spot over the weekend. He came in Monday to show the team and everyone was crying. It was so good it was quickly shown to Google’s co-founders who said, can you get it on the Super Bowl in 2 weeks?

And, yes, we did.

Most useful app that you currently use:

My most useful app for work is Canva, of course. My team is split between California and Sydney, Australia, so we do much of our work asynchronously. Collaborating on documents, presentations, and assets on Canva makes this painless. The most useful app outside of work is Instacart for grocery delivery. I’m a single mom to a 2-year-old, so having groceries delivered is one of the many time savers I rely on!

Thank you, Natalie! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.