Design software giant Canva has halted normal operations across its 5300-strong global workforce for five days of nothing but AI learning and hackathons, bucking the global wave of technology giants that have slashed jobs, citing the technology.
Dubbed “AI Discovery Week”, the program involves more than 60 talks and workshop sessions, speakers flown in from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and a pizza party that, by one Canva executive’s measurement, demolished 50 metres of pizza in 27 minutes.
The move comes after WiseTech Global, Block and Atlassian have all reduced headcount in the past six months, with executives in some cases pointing to artificial intelligence as the reason productivity gains made the cuts possible.
Canva’s stop-work program is optional, not compulsory, but has led to a Sydney office that is so full this week that staff are struggling to find a desk.
Jennie Rogerson, Canva’s chief people officer and the woman who designed the program, says it is a direct response to rampant demand from staff themselves.
“We do a biannual people poll where we hear from our teams on what they want,” Rogerson said in an interview from Sydney. “What they wanted was time and space to look at AI and tinker with it and explore and learn.”
The event is a manifestation of billionaire Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins’ optimism that AI will make teams more efficient and creative, but comes amid a tense backdrop of a growing number of software firms racing to replace some human workers with AI.
Rogerson said Canva was not shying away from that sense of unease. “On any given day you might feel bored, excited, scared, underwhelmed, overwhelmed. There are many emotions that come with this kind of change, and that’s completely fine,” she said she told staff at the kick-off to AI Discovery Week.
“What we try to facilitate is really open conversations … Any job is an evolution, and AI has just sped up that evolution. Yes, the work that you do today may be automated.”
Her counter-argument is that automation has, so far inside Canva, redeployed rather than replaced.
She pointed to “Vibe and Thrive”, an internal Canva benefit where staff once peppered the people team with tickets asking how they could spend their wellness allowance. AI now handles most of those queries. The humans who used to answer them, she said, are working on something else now, something Canva considers higher-impact.
Co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht said: ”The pace of change is unlike anything I’ve seen before, and the teams learning fastest are the ones getting hands-on.”
“That’s why we’re pausing business as usual and giving all 5000-plus Canvanauts the time and space to get curious, experiment, and build.”
Jose Gato, an operations business partner inside Canva’s people org, is one of the staff who has spent the week inside that bet. Last year’s Discovery Week, he said, gave him time to build something he had assumed would require a software engineer. Gato and Rogerson were made available for interview by Canva.
“There’s sometimes an over-index on the idea that AI will replace human work,” he said. “The shift feels less like ‘AI will take your job’ and more that people using AI effectively will raise the benchmark for what’s possible.
“There’s space to be both nervous and excited at the same time,” he said, adding that the week has included pointed sessions on responsible deployment, environmental cost and where human judgment should still hold.
Canva is one of the few software companies to entirely avoid major layoffs amid the market tumult of the past five years. During the pandemic, headcount ballooned from 1000 to 4000. Then, in 2024 and 2025, the company quietly tightened. Rogerson said that when backfilling, Canva applied two principles to almost every new role: was it bringing “net new skills” the company didn’t already have, or “net new leadership” for an emerging area?
That tapering happens to coincide with the period in which generative AI began doing serious work inside the company. Rogerson is adamant the slowdown is about discipline rather than displacement.
The hackathon is expected to produce software that ends up in customers’ hands: Rogerson points to “About Me” – the personalisation feature Canva unveiled at its Create conference in Los Angeles this year – as a hackathon idea that became a real product.
Engagement around AI, she said, has also visibly broadened beyond the engineers. Finance teams have run framework workshops on “keeping humans in the loop” while the Canva chefs have begun using AI to design menus that better reflect the nationalities represented in the workforce.
Rogerson joined as an executive assistant six years ago, when Canva employed 450 people. She is now responsible for the careers of more than 5300 people, and designed the week intended to shape how all of them work alongside machines that did not exist when she started.
The metric she has chosen to judge the week by is buried in the people poll. One question asks whether staff are happy with the ratio of impactful work to busy work.
“If that score goes up, I’ll feel like it was successful,” she said.
“When done well, technology like AI can really help to make teams more efficient. That’s the utopia of what we can build.
“But it’s worthwhile being very open-minded and aware of potential pitfalls.”
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
