Artists and creatives are familiar with the fear of AI. Illustrators and graphic designers have watched in dismay as increasing numbers of businesses decide that AI slop is good enough for their branding and marketing needs. And many put the blame on companies like Canva and Adobe, who have been aggressively rolling out AI tools in their software.
Canva's just revealed another side of the story: the tech companies driving the change aren't immune to its impact. The Australian design software giant has announced the biggest restructuring in its 12 years of history, with plans to eliminate or relocate more than 1,200 jobs. That's almost a quarter of its global workforce, and it will include staff who helped to build the platform.
Canva aims to “collapse layers” in its organisation and bring “more teams together in person”. It's handling the layoffs in the classiest way possible, promising six months of salary and 12 months of healthcare to those affected, alongside career support, a fund for those who want to start their own business – and it's letting people keep their MacBooks.
But the layoffs highlight an inescapable contradiction. Even those responsible for the ubiquity of AI image generation are suffering from its expansion. Rather than a push for growth and innovation, Adobe and Canva's rollout of AI tools feels more their own desperate fight for survival, and it's a fight they might not be able to win.
"Success in our first chapter doesn’t guarantee success in the next," Canva CEO Melanie Perkins writes in an update to staff. "This has been our hardest year yet, and as we shared earlier this year, our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade."
There's been talk of an “SaaS-pocalypse” as AI becomes advanced enough to make specialised software redundant. We've already seen the release of an open-source vibe-coded Adobe alternative, and it works to an extent. Generating your own software is only going to get easier, as is asking an AI bot to generate design assets directly.
Despite its heavy investment in AI, Adobe's stock price has fallen by around 25% in the past year and over 60% in the past five years. It's not clear that even AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude, can become profitable as Chinese rivals emerge delivering similar technology at a cheaper price.
Some creatives opposed to AI might feel a twinge of satisfaction at seeing a prominent proponent floundering. But Canva has also been a positive force, even if you don't use it's AI tools. As well as its premium platform, it has one of the best free Adobe alternatives in its free Affinity app, providing much-needed competition.
Creatives using the app might have cause to worry about how long it will be offered as a loss leader. Canva's shown a strong commitment to it so far, recently adding new raw editing tools and an iPad app. But its recent decision to pull the previously free Remove.bg into its paid suite shows that the structure and availability of creative software is constantly in flux as developers try to work out how to respond to competition from AI.
