The Technology Interview: Duncan Clark, Head of EMEA, Canva

When Duncan Clark set out to build Flourish, his goal was simple: make data communication as intuitive as storytelling.

Today, as Head of EMEA at Canva and CEO of Flourish, Duncan stands at the intersection of two areas transforming how people work – visual communication and data‑driven decision‑making.

“Almost every presentation is actually a data story,” Duncan says.

“And yet the tools we use for visualisation and those we use for storytelling have traditionally existed in two completely separate worlds. What we’ve been trying to do is bring them together – everything in one place – and that’s exactly the Canva product philosophy.”

That “one place” ethos now stretches across the entire Canva platform. From enterprise teams to educators and small businesses, Canva’s mission remains unchanged: to empower the world to design.

However, under Duncan’s leadership – especially in EMEA – it’s evolving into something broader, redefining how creativity, AI and data come together.

The growing visual, data-driven world

From where Duncan sits, he sees two “mega trends” shaping modern communication: firstly, that the world is becoming more visual and more data‑driven.

Every few months, Canva releases new features designed to bridge those worlds.

Recent rollouts like Canva Sheets, Canva Code and Canva Grow, for example, all point to this.

Sheets integrates a live data layer across Canva’s visual workspace, enabling users to create interactive, data‑backed content without writing a line of code, whereas Code adds a no‑code automation backbone.

Then, there’s Grow, which helps small businesses build and deploy full marketing campaigns – powered by AI – all in a single workflow.

“All over the world, there are small businesses that could grow through marketing and advertising but don’t have the team or experience,” Duncan shares. This is where Canva comes in. “So what we’ve done is built an end-to-end workflow that allows anyone not only to produce advertisements, but to place them and iterate them with AI based on the user reaction.”

This shows that, for Canva, the goal isn’t just to create more tools, but to ensure its offerings are accessible to all users around the globe.

And, with AI embedded throughout Canva’s platform, even the smallest company can scale content creation to global reach while keeping messaging consistent and on brand.

AI: Canva’s creative collaborator

In the design space, there’s a big debate about the place AI has.

Some are excited about its capabilities, while others are anxious of the impact it will have on the sector’s human workforce.

Canva’s view here is pragmatic: AI is there to accelerate creativity, not replace it.

“There are really two things you can do in visual communication with AI,” Duncan affirms.

“One is to iterate faster – to kickstart the creative process – and the other is to manage the workflow so teams can create at scale. That second part is where the greatest value lies.”

For many organisations, the bottleneck isn’t creativity itself, it’s capacity.

With marketers now producing campaigns across multiple formats, languages and markets – often with static budgets and small teams – Canva’s AI systems address that problem by automating translation, format conversion and bulk creation.

The result, more free time for the more nuanced, human aspects of design.

From Duncan’s perspective, the most crucial part of Canva’s AI pursuits is that, ultimately, the designer remains in control – meaning that AI will not replace human creativity.

“Canva’s user numbers are continuing to go up on an exponential curve,” Duncan says, “and they have been for the last 12 years. Every single year, more and more people are designing.

“We see AI as a democratising extension of what we’ve always set out to do – to empower more people to design.”

Keeping a hold of this philosophy, Canva encourages its users to explore new ways to collaborate with AI like a real-life, human colleague.

New capabilities launched in Canva at the end of 2025 allow designers to tag Canva’s intelligent AI assistant directly in a design comment – for example, asking it to reword a headline or adjust the colours of a visual element – making AI a team player, not a creative director.

How AI is closing the data storytelling gap

Canva may be going full steam ahead with AI, but none of this is possible without a solid baseline of data.

When Canva acquired Flourish in 2022, it significantly enhanced the former’s data storytelling capabilities, allowing users to seamlessly integrate sophisticated, interactive data visualisations – like animated charts – from Flourish directly into Canva’s design ecosystem. In turn, users are now able to create richer presentations and reports and Canva's European presence grew exponentially.

Canva’s Beyond the Numbers report itself tells a compelling, data-driven story and highlights a worrying paradox – that 66% of people feel anxious when facing a data‑heavy task.

“Everyone acknowledges that data storytelling is important, but there’s this gap between significance and capability,” Duncan says.

“What we’ve been trying to do at Canva is unlock data storytelling for everyone so that you can produce better data graphics that are designed to engage, be explored and be interactive. You can add filters, animations, but, most importantly, they're also on brand.

“We think that data is such a core part of communication now that it needs to be treated as a core part of visual communication.”

This means that a deck is no longer a static presentation but an interactive narrative.

Updates to Canva’s data connectors now allow users to pull live data from platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot or even the World Bank, keeping designs dynamically in sync.

“It’s like breaking down the distinction between a deck, which is the normal currency of day-to-day work in a company, and a dashboard – which is more technical, generally slower to load and more to preserve the data scientists.”

Redefining enterprise design with AI and data

Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Duncan sees a single truth reshaping enterprise workflows: that everyone has become a publisher.

“Internal comms, HR, onboarding – they all have people they're trying to communicate with and they all have the same problem that we are in an intention economy,” he says.

“Communicating visually and communicating well are essential to getting heard. What we are seeing at Canva is more and more people realising that design is a key part of communication both internally as well as externally.”

This shift has positioned Canva not only as a design platform but as a collaboration infrastructure. Its adoption often grows organically – as teams use it to streamline day‑to‑day projects, Canva then often sees this naturally progress to scaling to enterprise‑wide deployments with single sign-on, governance controls and shared brand assets.

And Canva itself is what it calls ‘customer zero’ in this chain, with Duncan emphasising how rigorously it tests new capabilities in‑house.

“We are big believers in dogfooding our own tools and we are always the first users of our products,” he says.

“We heavily test them internally before we release them publicly and we take the feedback from our team incredibly seriously.”

Underpinning this is a deep technical foundation focused on security and trust. 

“We think about this not only from the perspective of certifications like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, but also from the day-to-day reality of ‘are we acting in the most responsible way possible?’ We also think really hard about security when it comes to AI, as well as trust and safety more generally,” Duncan says.

“For example we offer indemnification for Gen AI in our platform for our enterprise customers so that they can have the confidence that their staff can use AI safely without a legal risk to the company.”

Recent launches like Canva’s Affinity suite, the company’s pro design suite, push accessibility even further.

The professional‑grade tools integrate photo editing, illustration and layout inside Canva’s broader Creative Operating System – anchored by its foundational design AI model, which assembles entire, editable compositions rather than static images.

This evolution supports a broader enterprise trend Duncan calls “data‑driven creativity”.

“Everyone can benefit from this highly performant, deeply integrated professional suite at no cost,” he says. “And forever.”