Dreamforce 2024 | Rob Giglio | Canva

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Rob Giglio

Chief Customer Officer

Canva

Canva meets Salesforce: AI-driven data autofill streamlines visual communication

Based on the universal need for organizations to unlock the true potential of visual communication, the demand for interoperable, secure and easy-to-use tools, such as the Canva Data autofill feature, is growing. To offer dynamic design personalization, streamline batch design production and provide data-rich sales visuals, the Canva Data autofill feature makes this a reality thanks to its integration with Salesforce Inc., according to Rob Giglio (pictured), chief customer officer of Canva Pty. Ltd.Canva’s Rob Giglio talks to theCUBE about the game-changing impact of the Canva Data autofill feature

play_circle_outline Canva's use cases in marketing and sales within the Salesforce ecosystem

play_circle_outline Integration of Canva with Salesforce for data autofill feature

play_circle_outline Importance of keeping Salesforce data clean for effective integration with Canva

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Rob Giglio | Canva

Rob Giglio

Chief Customer Officer Canva

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>> Welcome to theCube from the New York Stock Exchange Office in San Francisco. We're covering Dreamforce 2024 and we're talking to clients, ecosystem partners, Salesforce folks, covering a lot of ground with where the technology is going, what's going on in the ecosystem and what to expect. So I'm very pleased to welcome to theCube, our new friend, Rob Giglio, who is the Chief Customer Officer at Canva. So Rob, welcome.

>> Yes, thank you so much. I love the pronunciation of the last name. You nailed it.

>> Perfect. We had a little bit of fun before, that's why. So let's talk about Canva. First of all, tell us about yourself, tell us what you do and tell us about the company and in general terms, what type of customer do you have? What do you do?

>> I love it. I love it. Well, the least important part is who I am. I'm Rob Giglio, and like he said, I'm the Chief Customer Officer at Canva, which means I have responsibility for sales and customer success for our products that we sell into businesses. More interestingly and importantly, Canva is a platform for design. We like to describe our mission as to empower the world to design. So we're a product that lets anybody in the entire world, whether you're young or old, whether you're in business or in school, or you're just doing it for yourself, to design, which is really a way of expressing and communicating yourself. The company for the first 10 years was really focused on individuals, was focused on helping individuals design, and we have shifted. We've just entered our 11th year and we have now said we are about empowering businesses to design. And so for us, that means really focusing on salespeople, marketers, human resources professionals and creatives to help them communicate and design.

>> Well, that makes a lot of sense that you'd be here at Dreamforce because obviously it's about sales, it's about marketing, it's about leveraging that data in visual content, if I follow you correctly. So let's talk about that. Certainly I've heard of the name before. I think maybe even my daughters use a free version of that for school projects, but definitely now connecting this to the business world is very interesting. So let's talk about some use cases. Who should be using your platform if they are a Salesforce customer or a user?

>> That's also a great question. And back to your point about your daughter, I'm almost positive that your daughter has used Canva. We have almost 200 million monthly active users. We just crossed the 190 million monthly active users, which is a massive number. And so you see people using our product everywhere. When we think about business uses and particular in the Salesforce ecosystem, I think the two main use cases that we see that are so powerful, we hear about it all the time, is marketers creating assets to publish. So they've created an asset for an ad campaign and they're now going to publish it to try to drive demand and capture demand. And so when you think about the marketing cloud, marketers using the marketing cloud are a perfect example of customers using Canva. That's probably the single biggest use case. The second use case we hear about and we see all the time are salespeople, whether they're SDRs, BDRs, MDRs, account executives or managers, customer success professionals, building presentations that need to be on brand, need to be visually compelling, persuasive, and at the same time fast and easy to make. And so that is the use that we see every single day in customer meetings. I mean, essentially you don't get to almost 200 million monthly active users without tons of use cases like that. They're at scale.

>> So it makes a lot of sense. So really your target perfect customer would be anybody who's in these functions. Is there a company size you're targeting specifically or vertical, or is it really across the board?

>> It's literally across the board. Now. I know no marketer likes to hear you say that. Marketers say, "Well, you need an ICP and you should really be very specific and targeted." But what's interesting about a product like Canva that is largely ubiquitous, there's almost every function in a company that has a use case. I mean, we see it in human resources for onboarding documentation, for talent acquisition. So if you're a recruiter, you're using it to create Facebook posts. It's really almost every company size, and it is pretty much every function. I think we do have some specific industry verticals where it's particularly impactful. And I would describe it, I'll give you the industry vertical, which is real estate. We see a massive presence in real estate because you can imagine that there's a corporate brand, but then there's a lot of agents, whether they're a commercial real estate agent or they're a residential real estate agent, they're having to create a lot of content to market properties and it's very distributed and they need to move quick. So that's a use case we see a lot of. But if you think about that in parallel, you could imagine that anybody who has a corporate brand who wants to tell their story, wants to do it consistently. And so that's where we see those use cases pop up.

>> The real estate example is really interesting because first of all, there are lots of shows on TV, so everybody understands these, but of course it's very visual and you have to also look at numbers. We're talking about very specific numbers, cost per square foot, location, comps, all of that is visual.

>> Right?

>> So is that really something... How does that connect then back to Salesforce, to either CRM environment or just in general to Salesforce? Do I go ingest some of that data and massage it?

>> That is a wonderful question, and I am going to thank you, if you were leading me down this path, I don't know. But we just launched a product integration with Salesforce, and the way it works is it's called Data Autofill, and it works in the Salesforce CRM. You're able take Salesforce data from Salesforce and publish into Canva presentations. And so what it does is it allows you to scale these presentations. If you're a sales team, for instance, very quickly. So if I have 50 accounts, I don't want to go into 50 different presentations and add a logo and add a name and add business details. Instead, now what I can do is I can create an automated workflow using this brand new integration that just launched where I take Salesforce data, I autofill it into my presentations, and I can create 50, a hundred or 150 presentations in seconds.

>> Could you also... And I'm thinking about a real life example that I've seen quite often in B2B, IT technology type of interactions. Somebody walks in, they want to talk about licensing. How much business have I done with you? What are my licenses? How many systems do I have? Whatever the case may be. Well, essentially what you're telling me is auto-magically, I'm going to be able, as a salesperson, to import all of this. It's going to be templatized, going to give me all of this with maybe the product image, with the logo, with everything. So I can walk into a CEO's office and say, "So much you spent with us, this is where your licenses are." Maybe some geographic representation, all of that, right?

>> All of that. So if you have the data in a system of record and you have common fields, like you always have the size of account or you always have the number of employees, or you always have the business name in a common field, you can create a templatized presentation builder that takes that data and publishes it into Canva.

>> And it's going to ingest some of the data for that account into the presentation based on-

>> Absolutely.

>> field.

>> Here be another really good use case. One of the use cases that we hear come up all the time is a customer service representative. So a CSM is doing a quarterly business review with a customer, but they don't just have one customer. They maybe manage 25 or 30 customers and the quarter ends and suddenly they need to create these presentations for these customers and they need to do it quickly. And so Canva with the data autofill feature is a fantastic way to do that. They can fill the data from the source into the Canva presentation, and then really they're just off to the races doing a presentation to their customer.

>> Well, I can think of a lot of friends who would love to use this given the work they have to do at the end of every quarter, also for internal purposes, which I guess is another use case. So let's talk about what the impact is on then how you think about Salesforce in terms of how you prepare the data or how you organize the data. Obviously there's an integration and that's great. Do you have recommendations in terms of how you optimize the workflow so that you can literally get a lot of that but cleanly without massaging too much?

>> Well, I think anybody who is a Salesforce user, which Canva is a Salesforce customer, all of our reps are on Salesforce. One of the things you'll know, and I think anybody who's watching this who's an admin or a user. The one thing that is incredibly true about using Salesforce is keep the data clean. You have to keep the data clean. If you let it get out of control, the next thing you know it's not very usable. And I think Salesforce does a really good job of providing tools to help do data cleanup and data migration from one system to the other helps a lot, but I think it's incumbent on individual users to make sure they keep their data clean, and if they keep their data and their fields clean, then tools like Canva's Data Autofill are incredibly powerful.

>> So let's talk about the type of qualifications you need to use Canva. Do you need to be certified or take a class? What do you need?

>> No, you need a computer.

>> All right. Check.

>> It would be great if you had an enterprise license. I'm just saying that, I'm just joking. But no, I mean that's actually the powerful thing about Canva and we like to talk about it as a tool that is for everyone. It is very easy to use. In fact, one of the things that we see is one of our largest segment of users globally is students. Students that are between kindergarten and graduating high school are some of largest user groups. And that is, I think, really a case in point that this is an easy tool to use and it's very intuitive.

>> Which is great news because guess who's going to be working in the next few years? The same students.

>> Bingo, bingo. I mean, we are interested in empowering the world to design. If the residual benefit is that they come into the workforce prepared to communicate better and collaborate on their projects, whether it's creating documents for text or whether they're creating presentations for compelling, convincing, we don't care. We see it as a long game where ideally they'll be using the product through the rest of their life.

>> Absolutely. I think it's really changing the way we communicate. I agree with this. And now I would like to of course talk to you about AI. I waited until the end. See, I have been very, very good. All right, let's talk about how you use AI in your product. So AI to support the integration, the automation, the creation of the visual support, and also what you're thinking about AI in general terms moving forward from a roadmap standpoint.

>> I mean AI has come on the scene in such a big way. I don't think you could do a... You can't drive down the street in San Francisco and not see a billboard for AI.

>> That's for sure.

>> I think thankfully Canva has been at the forefront of the implementation of generative AI in our products. We have applications that are available to be activated inside of our product. We have many, many different iterations. So tools for helping with text generation, tools for helping with image generation. Probably the one that is most commonly used and known is we have a background remover, which is driven by AI. We recently made an acquisition of a company called Leonardo, and Leonardo is a text to image generation generative AI tool. It's wildly powerful. We are in the process of integrating it into the Canva experience more deeply. And so I think if you're interested in creating great design and you want to create compelling presentations, videos, documents, we're the place to do that. But importantly, AI is an important way that you do that creation. We have something called Magic Studio, which has a number of different features, which lets you take advantage of the power of AI in all kinds of design applications.

>> Excellent. So let me summarize here. Essentially you connect Canva to your Salesforce environment. You're a salesperson, you want to present for QBR, whatever the case may be, and you're going to get a great presentation with all the data that's relevant for the customer. Obviously you have a number of other use cases, but it seems to me that you've actually unlocked the true potential of visual communication, which used to be reserved only to the few. Very nice democratization tool in many ways. So now you said, "Well, there's no real qualification that's needed." But do you have best practices? I mean, not everybody's really good at this. You have to have some level of judgment. How do you get there? How do you do this?

>> Well, I like to describe it as we have guardrails, or maybe a good metaphor is we have training wheels. One of the most powerful features inside of Canva is something we call templates. And templates are available for almost every design type you could imagine, whether it's a presentation or a social media post. We have templates that help people get started. And the reason I think of those as training wheels is oftentimes people don't know where to get started. They don't know what good design looks like, and so they just need some place to just have a first kickoff. Our templates allow users to get started easily. And then I think what happens, I've seen it with users, I've experienced it to some extent for myself. You become more confident. So you've seen the templates, you've seen the way the basic design principles play out. You've seen what colors and fonts you like and what look good to you, what match your aesthetic. And then you can start to do some of this design yourself. It sort of starts with templates. Start with something that's been pre-designed, make edits off of it, add your own images, add your own words, and then eventually you migrate into creating from scratch yourself.

>> Great. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, so thank you so much for joining us today. And I'd like to thank you for watching theCUBE. My name is Christophe Bertrand, I'm the principal analyst here, and we are at Dreamforce 2024 at the New York Stock Exchange Office in San Francisco. Thank you and see you in the next one.

Rob Giglio | Canva

search

>> Welcome to theCube from the New York Stock Exchange Office in San Francisco. We're covering Dreamforce 2024 and we're talking to clients, ecosystem partners, Salesforce folks, covering a lot of ground with where the technology is going, what's going on in the ecosystem and what to expect. So I'm very pleased to welcome to theCube, our new friend, Rob Giglio, who is the Chief Customer Officer at Canva. So Rob, welcome.

>> Yes, thank you so much. I love the pronunciation of the last name. You nailed it.

>> Perfect. We had a little bit of fun before, that's why. So let's talk about Canva. First of all, tell us about yourself, tell us what you do and tell us about the company and in general terms, what type of customer do you have? What do you do?

>> I love it. I love it. Well, the least important part is who I am. I'm Rob Giglio, and like he said, I'm the Chief Customer Officer at Canva, which means I have responsibility for sales and customer success for our products that we sell into businesses. More interestingly and importantly, Canva is a platform for design. We like to describe our mission as to empower the world to design. So we're a product that lets anybody in the entire world, whether you're young or old, whether you're in business or in school, or you're just doing it for yourself, to design, which is really a way of expressing and communicating yourself. The company for the first 10 years was really focused on individuals, was focused on helping individuals design, and we have shifted. We've just entered our 11th year and we have now said we are about empowering businesses to design. And so for us, that means really focusing on salespeople, marketers, human resources professionals and creatives to help them communicate and design.

>> Well, that makes a lot of sense that you'd be here at Dreamforce because obviously it's about sales, it's about marketing, it's about leveraging that data in visual content, if I follow you correctly. So let's talk about that. Certainly I've heard of the name before. I think maybe even my daughters use a free version of that for school projects, but definitely now connecting this to the business world is very interesting. So let's talk about some use cases. Who should be using your platform if they are a Salesforce customer or a user?

>> That's also a great question. And back to your point about your daughter, I'm almost positive that your daughter has used Canva. We have almost 200 million monthly active users. We just crossed the 190 million monthly active users, which is a massive number. And so you see people using our product everywhere. When we think about business uses and particular in the Salesforce ecosystem, I think the two main use cases that we see that are so powerful, we hear about it all the time, is marketers creating assets to publish. So they've created an asset for an ad campaign and they're now going to publish it to try to drive demand and capture demand. And so when you think about the marketing cloud, marketers using the marketing cloud are a perfect example of customers using Canva. That's probably the single biggest use case. The second use case we hear about and we see all the time are salespeople, whether they're SDRs, BDRs, MDRs, account executives or managers, customer success professionals, building presentations that need to be on brand, need to be visually compelling, persuasive, and at the same time fast and easy to make. And so that is the use that we see every single day in customer meetings. I mean, essentially you don't get to almost 200 million monthly active users without tons of use cases like that. They're at scale.

>> So it makes a lot of sense. So really your target perfect customer would be anybody who's in these functions. Is there a company size you're targeting specifically or vertical, or is it really across the board?

>> It's literally across the board. Now. I know no marketer likes to hear you say that. Marketers say, "Well, you need an ICP and you should really be very specific and targeted." But what's interesting about a product like Canva that is largely ubiquitous, there's almost every function in a company that has a use case. I mean, we see it in human resources for onboarding documentation, for talent acquisition. So if you're a recruiter, you're using it to create Facebook posts. It's really almost every company size, and it is pretty much every function. I think we do have some specific industry verticals where it's particularly impactful. And I would describe it, I'll give you the industry vertical, which is real estate. We see a massive presence in real estate because you can imagine that there's a corporate brand, but then there's a lot of agents, whether they're a commercial real estate agent or they're a residential real estate agent, they're having to create a lot of content to market properties and it's very distributed and they need to move quick. So that's a use case we see a lot of. But if you think about that in parallel, you could imagine that anybody who has a corporate brand who wants to tell their story, wants to do it consistently. And so that's where we see those use cases pop up.

>> The real estate example is really interesting because first of all, there are lots of shows on TV, so everybody understands these, but of course it's very visual and you have to also look at numbers. We're talking about very specific numbers, cost per square foot, location, comps, all of that is visual.

>> Right?

>> So is that really something... How does that connect then back to Salesforce, to either CRM environment or just in general to Salesforce? Do I go ingest some of that data and massage it?

>> That is a wonderful question, and I am going to thank you, if you were leading me down this path, I don't know. But we just launched a product integration with Salesforce, and the way it works is it's called Data Autofill, and it works in the Salesforce CRM. You're able take Salesforce data from Salesforce and publish into Canva presentations. And so what it does is it allows you to scale these presentations. If you're a sales team, for instance, very quickly. So if I have 50 accounts, I don't want to go into 50 different presentations and add a logo and add a name and add business details. Instead, now what I can do is I can create an automated workflow using this brand new integration that just launched where I take Salesforce data, I autofill it into my presentations, and I can create 50, a hundred or 150 presentations in seconds.

>> Could you also... And I'm thinking about a real life example that I've seen quite often in B2B, IT technology type of interactions. Somebody walks in, they want to talk about licensing. How much business have I done with you? What are my licenses? How many systems do I have? Whatever the case may be. Well, essentially what you're telling me is auto-magically, I'm going to be able, as a salesperson, to import all of this. It's going to be templatized, going to give me all of this with maybe the product image, with the logo, with everything. So I can walk into a CEO's office and say, "So much you spent with us, this is where your licenses are." Maybe some geographic representation, all of that, right?

>> All of that. So if you have the data in a system of record and you have common fields, like you always have the size of account or you always have the number of employees, or you always have the business name in a common field, you can create a templatized presentation builder that takes that data and publishes it into Canva.

>> And it's going to ingest some of the data for that account into the presentation based on-

>> Absolutely.

>> field.

>> Here be another really good use case. One of the use cases that we hear come up all the time is a customer service representative. So a CSM is doing a quarterly business review with a customer, but they don't just have one customer. They maybe manage 25 or 30 customers and the quarter ends and suddenly they need to create these presentations for these customers and they need to do it quickly. And so Canva with the data autofill feature is a fantastic way to do that. They can fill the data from the source into the Canva presentation, and then really they're just off to the races doing a presentation to their customer.

>> Well, I can think of a lot of friends who would love to use this given the work they have to do at the end of every quarter, also for internal purposes, which I guess is another use case. So let's talk about what the impact is on then how you think about Salesforce in terms of how you prepare the data or how you organize the data. Obviously there's an integration and that's great. Do you have recommendations in terms of how you optimize the workflow so that you can literally get a lot of that but cleanly without massaging too much?

>> Well, I think anybody who is a Salesforce user, which Canva is a Salesforce customer, all of our reps are on Salesforce. One of the things you'll know, and I think anybody who's watching this who's an admin or a user. The one thing that is incredibly true about using Salesforce is keep the data clean. You have to keep the data clean. If you let it get out of control, the next thing you know it's not very usable. And I think Salesforce does a really good job of providing tools to help do data cleanup and data migration from one system to the other helps a lot, but I think it's incumbent on individual users to make sure they keep their data clean, and if they keep their data and their fields clean, then tools like Canva's Data Autofill are incredibly powerful.

>> So let's talk about the type of qualifications you need to use Canva. Do you need to be certified or take a class? What do you need?

>> No, you need a computer.

>> All right. Check.

>> It would be great if you had an enterprise license. I'm just saying that, I'm just joking. But no, I mean that's actually the powerful thing about Canva and we like to talk about it as a tool that is for everyone. It is very easy to use. In fact, one of the things that we see is one of our largest segment of users globally is students. Students that are between kindergarten and graduating high school are some of largest user groups. And that is, I think, really a case in point that this is an easy tool to use and it's very intuitive.

>> Which is great news because guess who's going to be working in the next few years? The same students.

>> Bingo, bingo. I mean, we are interested in empowering the world to design. If the residual benefit is that they come into the workforce prepared to communicate better and collaborate on their projects, whether it's creating documents for text or whether they're creating presentations for compelling, convincing, we don't care. We see it as a long game where ideally they'll be using the product through the rest of their life.

>> Absolutely. I think it's really changing the way we communicate. I agree with this. And now I would like to of course talk to you about AI. I waited until the end. See, I have been very, very good. All right, let's talk about how you use AI in your product. So AI to support the integration, the automation, the creation of the visual support, and also what you're thinking about AI in general terms moving forward from a roadmap standpoint.

>> I mean AI has come on the scene in such a big way. I don't think you could do a... You can't drive down the street in San Francisco and not see a billboard for AI.

>> That's for sure.

>> I think thankfully Canva has been at the forefront of the implementation of generative AI in our products. We have applications that are available to be activated inside of our product. We have many, many different iterations. So tools for helping with text generation, tools for helping with image generation. Probably the one that is most commonly used and known is we have a background remover, which is driven by AI. We recently made an acquisition of a company called Leonardo, and Leonardo is a text to image generation generative AI tool. It's wildly powerful. We are in the process of integrating it into the Canva experience more deeply. And so I think if you're interested in creating great design and you want to create compelling presentations, videos, documents, we're the place to do that. But importantly, AI is an important way that you do that creation. We have something called Magic Studio, which has a number of different features, which lets you take advantage of the power of AI in all kinds of design applications.

>> Excellent. So let me summarize here. Essentially you connect Canva to your Salesforce environment. You're a salesperson, you want to present for QBR, whatever the case may be, and you're going to get a great presentation with all the data that's relevant for the customer. Obviously you have a number of other use cases, but it seems to me that you've actually unlocked the true potential of visual communication, which used to be reserved only to the few. Very nice democratization tool in many ways. So now you said, "Well, there's no real qualification that's needed." But do you have best practices? I mean, not everybody's really good at this. You have to have some level of judgment. How do you get there? How do you do this?

>> Well, I like to describe it as we have guardrails, or maybe a good metaphor is we have training wheels. One of the most powerful features inside of Canva is something we call templates. And templates are available for almost every design type you could imagine, whether it's a presentation or a social media post. We have templates that help people get started. And the reason I think of those as training wheels is oftentimes people don't know where to get started. They don't know what good design looks like, and so they just need some place to just have a first kickoff. Our templates allow users to get started easily. And then I think what happens, I've seen it with users, I've experienced it to some extent for myself. You become more confident. So you've seen the templates, you've seen the way the basic design principles play out. You've seen what colors and fonts you like and what look good to you, what match your aesthetic. And then you can start to do some of this design yourself. It sort of starts with templates. Start with something that's been pre-designed, make edits off of it, add your own images, add your own words, and then eventually you migrate into creating from scratch yourself.

>> Great. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, so thank you so much for joining us today. And I'd like to thank you for watching theCUBE. My name is Christophe Bertrand, I'm the principal analyst here, and we are at Dreamforce 2024 at the New York Stock Exchange Office in San Francisco. Thank you and see you in the next one.