{"id":315875,"date":"2025-07-08T13:27:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T20:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/?p=315875"},"modified":"2025-07-09T07:13:44","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T14:13:44","slug":"canva-gives-its-5k-employees-a-week-to-learn-ai-will-it-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/canva-gives-its-5k-employees-a-week-to-learn-ai-will-it-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Canva Is Giving Its 5,000 Employees a Week to Learn AI. Will It Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cavna is giving its 5,000 employees a week away from their daily jobs to &#8230; learn AI.\u00a0 For real.<\/p>\n<p>A great idea. \u00a0I think everyone should do it. \u00a0We even did a mini-version of this ourselves for tiny Team SaaStr.<\/p>\n<p>But is a week enough to turn folks that aren&#8217;t &#8220;AI natives&#8221; &#8230; into experts?\u00a0 And can you reskill enough folks, fast enough, in the Age of AI?\u00a0 And do folks really, honestly, even want to be reskilled?\u00a0 Or just talk the talk?<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Embedded post\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/embed\/feed\/update\/urn:li:ugcPost:7346700429772148738\" width=\"504\" height=\"662\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2>Canva Gives Its 5K Employees a Week to Learn AI. Will It Really Work?<\/h2>\n<p>Canva just made a $2.5M+ bet on AI training. Here&#8217;s what other B2B leaders can learn \u2014 and why it&#8217;s a good idea, but one week probably isn&#8217;t enough.<\/p>\n<p>Cameron Adams, Canva&#8217;s Co-founder and CPO,<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/were-giving-5000-employees-dedicated-week-explore-ai-heres-adams-8hhmc\/?trackingId=BYwsP0AeQNSlgC7%2FPQZplQ%3D%3D\"> just announced something bold<\/a><\/strong><\/span>: They&#8217;re giving all 5,000+ employees the entire week off their regular work to learn AI. Not a few hours of training. Not optional lunch-and-learns. A full week.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The nominal cost is staggering.<\/strong> At an average fully-loaded cost of $100K per employee (conservative for a company Canva&#8217;s size), that&#8217;s $10M in payroll for the week. Add in expert trainers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, plus opportunity cost, and you&#8217;re looking at a $12-15M investment.<\/p>\n<p>For context, that&#8217;s more than most Series A rounds.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-316003 lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-scaled.jpg?resize=1000%2C563&#038;quality=70&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-scaled.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-980x552.jpg 980w, https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-480x270.jpg 480w\" data-sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) and (max-width: 980px) 980px, (min-width: 981px) 1000px, 100vw\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 1000px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 1000\/563;\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-316003\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-scaled.jpg?resize=1000%2C563&#038;quality=70&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-scaled.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-980x552.jpg 980w, https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588750044-480x270.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) and (max-width: 980px) 980px, (min-width: 981px) 1000px, 100vw\" \/><\/noscript><\/p>\n<h2>Why This Matters for Every B2B Founder<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>The &#8220;AI skills gap&#8221; is real, and it&#8217;s expensive.<\/strong><\/span> We&#8217;ve all seen the stats about AI boosting productivity 20-40%. But here&#8217;s what the surveys don&#8217;t tell you: Most employees are using AI like they use Excel in 1995 \u2014 barely scratching the surface.<\/p>\n<p>The evidence is everywhere that companies need to move fast:<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Salesforce<\/span>:<\/strong> Marc Benioff revealed that AI now handles 30-50% of work at his company, calling it a &#8220;digital labor revolution.&#8221; Salesforce has reached about 93% accuracy with its AI systems and has already cut over 1,000 jobs this year as part of its AI restructuring.<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Shopify<\/span>:<\/strong> CEO Tobi L\u00fctke just issued an ultimatum to all employees: &#8220;Teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI&#8221; before asking for more headcount and resources. He&#8217;s made &#8220;using AI effectively&#8221; a &#8220;fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify&#8221; and added AI usage questions to performance reviews.<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">HubSpot<\/span>:<\/strong> CEO Yamini Rangan told SaaStr that 95% of their engineering team uses AI tools daily, and they completely pivoted their roadmap just two months after ChatGPT launched.<\/p>\n<p>But Rangan&#8217;s approach goes beyond just engineering. She&#8217;s personally driving AI adoption company-wide: &#8220;One of the reasons I do a five-minute video for our entire company, we call it a weekly wrap and I send it out every Friday and I&#8217;m demoing what how I&#8217;m using AI and I&#8217;m demoing how our teams are using AI. We&#8217;re talking about where we are getting benefit, where we are seeing real customer value.&#8221; Her message is clear: &#8220;It has to come from the top. So those of you who are leading organizations, go-to-market teams, your founders, you have to lead from the front and you have to believe that there is value for your customers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"AI and The Future of Sales, Marketing &amp; CS with HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yGlDQV-lVNc?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1&#038;origin=https:\/\/www.saastr.com\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Translation:<\/strong><\/span> The companies that don&#8217;t reskill fast enough will get left behind. Not in five years. Right now.<\/p>\n<h2>The Three-Pillar Strategy They&#8217;re Rolling Out<\/h2>\n<p>Most companies approach AI training wrong. They do one-off workshops or mandate tool adoption. Canva&#8217;s doing something different:<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Time (The Expensive Part<\/span>)<\/strong> Every employee gets permission to ignore their regular work. This sounds insane until you realize the alternative: having your team slowly, inefficiently learn AI while juggling deadlines. Better to rip the band-aid off.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Tools (The Smart Part<\/span>)<\/strong> They&#8217;ve already been providing team-wide access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of specialized tools for over a year. This week isn&#8217;t about access \u2014 it&#8217;s about mastery.\u00a0 But is this alone &#8230; enough? It hasn&#8217;t yet led to the adoption across 5,000 employees the founders want.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Learning (The Scalable Part)<\/span><\/strong> Mix of self-directed exploration and expert-led sessions. Role-specific training for Finance, Engineering, Sales. Plus a 2-day company-wide hackathon to build actual solutions.<\/p>\n<h2>Will Reskilling Really Work?\u00a0 Or Is It Just Performative?<\/h2>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the elephant in the room:<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"> <strong>Can you actually teach an entire workforce to use AI effectively in just one week?\u00a0 Is it even practical to reskill folks that aren&#8217;t becoming AI fluent on their own?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Probably not. A week might create enthusiasm and surface-level familiarity, but turning people into &#8220;AI natives&#8221; requires sustained practice over months, not days.<\/p>\n<p>Mass reskilling has a mixed track record. Remember when everyone was going to learn to code? Or when &#8220;digital transformation&#8221; was the buzzword du jour? Most corporate training initiatives fail because they&#8217;re:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Too theoretical (death by PowerPoint)<\/li>\n<li>Not role-specific (generic AI overview for everyone)<\/li>\n<li>Lacking follow-through (one-and-done workshops)<\/li>\n<li>Missing executive buy-in (optional attendance sends the wrong signal)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Canva&#8217;s approach does attempt to address these failure modes head-on<\/span>.<\/strong> They&#8217;re giving people dedicated time, role-specific training, and expert guidance. Most importantly, they&#8217;re making it company-wide and mandatory \u2014 a clear signal from leadership.<\/p>\n<h2>The best leaders are applying what Yamini Rangan calls the &#8220;kid in the candy store&#8221; test: &#8220;If they&#8217;re not saying this is the kid in the candy store age, you have the wrong team. They should be excited&#8230; If you&#8217;re not seeing that [excitement], it&#8217;s brutal, but you got the wrong team.&#8221;<\/h2>\n<p>Rangan&#8217;s point cuts deep: &#8220;The last five years were boring. We were doing the same playbook and we were trying to push the same exactly.&#8221; The teams that will thrive are the ones who see AI as their chance to finally do &#8220;cool stuff&#8221; again.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>The &#8220;neat vs. necessary&#8221; framework is crucial here.<\/strong><\/span> Rangan obsessively tracks usage patterns at HubSpot: &#8220;There are novel, neat AI things. We&#8217;ve all used it in our personal life. We&#8217;ve used it once and it has this beautiful image that it creates and then we never go back to it. That&#8217;s just neat. But AI has to be necessary.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The difference? &#8220;AI has to go from just being neat to being necessary, to being in the flow of everyday work in order to have the promised transformative benefits.&#8221; HubSpot tracks &#8220;daily repeat usage versus weekly repeat usage versus novelty use&#8221; to ensure their AI tools become indispensable, not just impressive.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"AI Mastery in GTM: The Secret to Success in Sales: Jason Lemkin + Owner&#039;s CRO Kyle Norton\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/C7meUHBkWys?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1&#038;origin=https:\/\/www.saastr.com\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>The Bottom Line<\/h2>\n<p>Canva&#8217;s betting that upfront investment in AI literacy will compound into massive productivity gains. It&#8217;s a smart bet for a company with their resources and growth trajectory, even if a single week won&#8217;t turn everyone into AI experts overnight.<\/p>\n<p><strong>For the rest of us:<\/strong> You don&#8217;t need a $15M training week. You need intentional experimentation, the right tools, sustained support, and leadership that models AI adoption daily.<\/p>\n<p>The companies that figure this out in 2025 will have an unfair advantage. The ones that don&#8217;t are already wondering why their competitors are moving so much faster.<\/p>\n<p>Rangan&#8217;s final word on who survives: &#8220;Curiosity and growth mindset. If you&#8217;re trying to slow roll AI, if you think that this is going to go away, if you&#8217;re not investing in yourself and developing a level of AI fluency, then you&#8217;ve pretty much lost the game.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"What Used to Take 2 Weeks in Marketing Now Takes 3 Seconds with AI - Aaron Levie CEO Box\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1ddUV_YxMmA?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1&#038;origin=https:\/\/www.saastr.com\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cavna is giving its 5,000 employees a week away from their daily jobs to &#8230; learn AI.\u00a0 For real. A great idea. \u00a0I think everyone should do it. \u00a0We even did a mini-version of this ourselves for tiny Team SaaStr. But is a week enough to turn folks that aren&#8217;t &#8220;AI natives&#8221; &#8230; into experts?\u00a0&#8230; <br \/><a class=\"more-link fade\" href=\"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/canva-gives-its-5k-employees-a-week-to-learn-ai-will-it-work\/\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":315876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpscp_schedule_draft_date":"","_wpscp_schedule_republish_date":"","_wpscppro_advance_schedule":false,"_wpscppro_advance_schedule_date":"","_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"default","_twitter_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type":"default","_pinterest_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"default","_medium_share_type":"default","_threads_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[]},"categories":[24898,31,24987],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-blog-posts","category-saastr-ai"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588819128-scaled.png?fit=1000%2C563&quality=70&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5oib2-1kaL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1751588819128-scaled.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315875"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316027,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315875\/revisions\/316027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}