The Canva Confession: the most expensive lesson in corporate AI

Canva gave all 5,000 of its employees a full week off — cleared calendars, best tools, guided workshops, a hackathon, 26,000 hours of hands-on AI. Then its Chief Customer Officer wrote a confession in Fortune: "The bottleneck wasn't the technology. It was us."

If it happened to Canva — AI-native, generously resourced, staffed with people who wanted the tools — it's already happening to you. Only your budget was tighter and nobody cleared a week off anyone's calendar.

In this episode Ashley unpacks why record AI spend is delivering almost no return, the difference between access, adoption and embedding, and the five reasons every stalled AI rollout fails — every one of them a marketing problem, not a technology one. Plus what 82% engagement actually takes, and the discipline Canva walked right up to and never named.

The data (all sources):

Download the AI Adoption Playbook and stop paying for tech no one uses. It includes the same methodology behind our award-winning Capgemini work.
Rob Giglio's confession, Fortune
Enterprise GenAI spend hit ~$37bn in 2025, Menlo Ventures
Near-universal adoption, and only ~a quarter measuring return — McKinsey, The State of AI
95% of AI deployments delivered no measurable impact (MIT), Fortune
42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives in 2025, S&P Global
80%+ of workers use AI at work, 78% bring their own, CIO —
Willingness to support change fell from 74% to 38%, HBR (Gartner)
How we drove 82% engagement at Capgemini

Key topics:

AI adoption challenges
Behaviour change vs. technology deployment
Marketing and communication in change management
The importance of internal champions and community
Measuring true success in AI initiatives

Ep 128 - Canva's Confession: A Very Expensive AI Experiment

Marketing For Learning®

Ep 128 - Canva's Confession: A Very Expensive AI Experiment