Canva gave 5,000 employees a week to explore AI and found the bottleneck was human behavior, not technology

Canva ran an 'AI Discovery Week' for over 5,000 employees, pairing a dedicated week of exploration with guided sessions, role-specific workshops, and a two-day hackathon. By the end, the company logged 26,000 hours of hands-on exploration, and over 90% of Canva employees became weekly or daily users of AI assistants.

The program surfaced concrete results: one B2B growth marketer built a 7-agent workflow (autonomous AI systems that can run entire workflows) pulling from Slack, sales calls, customer reviews, and forums to automatically generate digital ad formats, saving 60 working days. A Chief of Staff built an end-to-end app for Cannes Lions coordinating scheduling across 20+ executive diaries.

The core blocker wasn't AI tools themselves but organizational culture: employees felt guilty stepping away from inboxes, defaulted to familiar use cases rather than exploring new ones, and needed actual time to experiment without feeling they were falling behind on their real job. The company sustained momentum through an AI Hub with self-paced courses, fortnightly AI Forums, and a network of AI Exemplars leading roadshows.