The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up processes and tasks finds increasing traction within Indian businesses, the annual Visual Economy Report by a one of its kind visual communication platforms Canva is putting some numbers to illustrate the trend. There are suggestions that 9 out of 10 surveyed businesses and enterprises in India are beginning to take first steps towards the use AI for content creation and visual communication tasks. Even on a global canvas, of the 3,707 businesses that are part of the survey (of this, 257 are Indian companies), 73% indicate that using visual communication platforms or tools have helped in an uptick in overall business performance, while 70% will further increase investment in such tools for employees to work with.
Features in the new Canva Workplace. (Official handout image.)
“Harnessing the power of visuals and enhancing them with AI capabilities isn’t just beneficial to team communication, it is now a crucial advantage for leaders in their quest to hire, market and sell while aiming to get better results on their financial investments,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, in a statement shared with HT. More than 92% of the businesses and enterprises that use AI tools to create visual communication agree that quality has seen a significant uptick, while 89% of these businesses are finding that AI tools are speeding up the process of production, having used them in the past year.
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From an India perspective, more than one-third (41%) of leaders believe the inability to collaborate across teams and complex workflows (38%) is a challenge when creating and scaling content. Hence the need to invest in such tools, a change in thinking that the report has already alluded to. The rise of visual communication platforms has meant that 97% of the businesses now expect employees who are otherwise in non-design roles, to possess some sort of design skills too. the Canva Visual Economy Report for 2024 suggests that 85% business leaders are realising that resistance towards adopting tech and AI tools for designing communication, is the reason that shackles creativity.
However, there are concerns emerging from this increasing adoption of AI and tech platforms. Business leaders are worried about plagiarism (80%), bias that AI models often tend to represent (84%), and job loss (81%) as well. Issues arising from plagiarism and bias may find some level of resolution as AI models improve with broader data sets to learn from, but we have often seen (as has been the case with Google’s Gemini for instance), they tend to make new mistakes. This is something Canva will have to keep a close watch on, as it uses AI models for its suite, including for personal use as well as Canva Enterprise and Canva Teams. The company is actively working with tech companies as the landscape for metadata (or content credentials) identifying AI generated content, is shaped.
Also read:Canva sharpens focus on enterprises as a refreshed UI waits to be discovered
Late last month, at the company’s first global Create summit, Canva sharpened its enterprise focus with new tools for teams, specific workflows and enhanced security layers. “Canva’s been amazingly driven by word of mouth. So, being able to consolidate that and then have various teams grow Canva in a way that they’re comfortable with inside their organization. That is going to be a great channel for us. But it’s really additive, and not a pivot for us,” Adams, while speaking with HT at Create, illustrated the company’s strategy.
Canva now has more than 180 million monthly active users, including 20 million paying premium ‘Pro’ subscribers, clocking $2.3 billion in annual revenue. The recent updates include, for instance Magic Design, which the company says will now be able to generate up to 3 times higher quality presentations because of the improved models that work on a user’s inputs. If video is your focus, AI Highlights can select and clip a selection of clips from longer videos based on its understanding of what might be exciting or relevant. Enhance Voice can reduce background noise in video files. The Canva owned Affinity v2.5 now includes new advanced editing options for ‘pro’ editing performance, including Variable Font support which should be relevant for designers, with an addition of a Stroke Width Tool for an on-document way of editing the pressure profile of any curve.
