Canva’s CMO of B2B says brand governance must be baked into AI infrastructure
Meghan Gendelman explains why scaling marketing with AI requires brand governance built into workflows while human judgment protects creativity, culture, and trust.
Meghan Gendelman
CMO of B2B at Canva
Operational Gains: AI marketing automates formatting, reporting, and asset production, freeing teams for strategy, creativity, and audience connection.
Human Judgment: Keep strategic perspective, cultural understanding, and brand voice human while AI handles repetitive execution at scale.
Brand Risk: AI can accelerate generic, off-brand content, making governance and human review essential for protecting audience trust.
Workflow Redesign: Successful AI adoption requires organized data, trained systems, custom brand standards, and redesigned marketing workflows.
Leadership Shift: CMOs should learn alongside teams, redesign approval processes, and prioritize strategic thinking over editing every asset.
Meghan Gendelman is CMO of B2B at Canva. She has also held leadership positions at the likes of Salesforce and DocuSign.
We sat down with Meghan to find out how AI is being used in the marketing organization at Canva. Along the way, she told us about some of the risks marketers now face.
Marketing for the full spectrum
I lead B2B Marketing at Canva. My team covers marketing for the full spectrum — from solo professional creatives using tools like Affinity, to small businesses leveraging Canva Business, to global brands rolling out Canva Enterprise across teams to unify their visual work. More than 95% of the Fortune 500 use Canva today.
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It's a truly global team covering every marketing function: PMM and content, field and data marketing, growth and customer marketing, research, experiential, martech — the works.
I couldn’t be prouder of how this team is driving a growth business inside Canva. We’re taking the magic people feel when they use Canva and combining it with the governance and centralized control CMOs need to run their businesses.
The real opportunity of AI
Before joining Canva, I spent over 15 years marketing at enterprise companies like Salesforce and DocuSign. That experience taught me a principle that still guides my thinking: marketing only earns its seat at the table when it's a genuine growth partner to the business, not a support function.
I was at Salesforce when it became ubiquitous in enterprise. I was at DocuSign as it launched its AI products and built an incredible PLG business alongside its sales team.
Those inflection points shaped my approach as AI rapidly evolved. I approached it with curiosity and a growth mindset, checking my ego and experience at the door and focusing on what it could truly change about how teams work rather than treating it as a trend to get ahead of.
I quickly found the real opportunity wasn't in flashy outputs. It was in automating the operational drag that prevents good marketers from doing their best work. Freeing someone from spending half their day on formatting, reporting, and administrative back-and-forth leads to better strategy, better creativity, and stronger audience connection. That's what we're building at Canva, and it evolves every single day.
Unlocking operational shifts with an AI Discovery Week
We're all in on internal AI adoption because we've seen firsthand what it unlocks for our teams. We recently wrapped our second annual AI Discovery Week, where employees paused their day-to-day work to explore the technology's possibilities.
Hosting an AI week directly unlocked significant operational shifts for our teams. One of our B2B growth marketers built a 7-agent workflow that pulls data from Slack, sales calls, customer reviews, and online forums to automatically generate digital ad formats. This saved 60 working days and freed the creative team to focus on higher-impact work like motion and video.
We've seen the same impact on creative execution and message testing. Historically, testing ten different copy ideas across multiple channels required a design team to manually create every variation — easily a full week of creative resources. Today, this happens almost instantly. The strategic point of view and core messaging still come entirely from our people, but the technology handles the mechanical work so they can spend their time on the thinking that moves the needle.
How teams can do the thinking, then outsource execution
AI performs work across our marketing funnel: generating audience insights and co-writing briefs, producing copy and creative variants at scale, optimizing channel activation and bidding, and enabling deeper levels of personalization.
The strategic point of view must remain explicitly human. My boundary is clear: AI effectively helps us execute faster, but it fails to formulate a genuine perspective on its own. If you give an algorithm control over brand voice or messaging, its output defaults to whatever sounds most plausible, which is usually what everyone else produces. This creates a race to the lowest common denominator.
We always include humans to review for brand, authenticity, and accuracy, because the stakes are highest there. AI can clear the noise and help us articulate ideas faster, but it lacks the cultural understanding or lived experience to tell a story that moves someone. Our team must provide that thinking, even if we outsource execution.
Why there's tension between scale and brand
The harder truth is that a campaign can look polished and still be fundamentally off-brand — and by the time you realize it, the trust damage is already done. When every team pulls from the same baseline models, everything starts to converge…If you don’t have a secure, shared framework in place, AI doesn’t just create more content. It helps you get off-brand faster.
On the positive side, the velocity is real. AI enables our teams to move from a raw idea to a finalized asset faster than ever. Our State of Marketing and AI report also backs up what we’re seeing internally: 85% of marketers save four or more hours every single week, and 99% of leaders have increased their AI budgets as a direct result.
We've also seen AI democratize creation in ways that would have been impossible two years ago — people across sales, HR, and ops produce work that used to require a dedicated designer. Now, they can create without waiting for a designer to have bandwidth.
But without proper strategic care, this speed can be a double-edged sword. As an industry, we see an influx of AI slop pushed out purely for numbers. Marketers must remember that if we spot AI in somebody else’s ad, our audiences can do the same to ours. A massive tension exists right now between operating at the scale AI requires and losing what makes our brand loved and trusted.
That same report told us that 70% of consumers can spot an AI ad instantly because it feels like it's “missing its soul,” and 65% find generic AI output so obvious that it's “laughable.” In fact, 78% of consumers would rather see ads made by people, even if AI could make them better.
The harder truth is that a campaign can look polished and still be fundamentally off-brand — and by the time you realize it, the trust damage is already done. When every team pulls from the same baseline models, everything starts to converge. That's why 94% of marketers in our research worry about brand integrity as AI scales. If you don't have a secure, shared framework in place, AI doesn't just create more content. It helps you get off-brand faster.
Why AI puts marketers in the middle of the pack
Cultural nuance is where AI consistently falls short for us. Early on, the industry assumed you could prompt your way to a compelling localized campaign. You can't. The technology can execute flawlessly against a brief and still miss entirely because it doesn't understand the unspoken rules that govern how people in a specific place connect with a brand.
Local insight can’t be a nice-to-have you layer in at the end; it has to be in the room from the beginning. No technology can replace a team that’s on the ground, speaking the language, living the culture day in and day out.
LLMs generate based on what has already been done. That means they cannot generate a new point of view or a spicy hot take, making your thought leadership not so much leadership as middle of the pack.
Why AI success requires workflow redesign
The biggest hurdle isn't the technology — it's the workflow redesign. You can't layer AI on top of how you've always worked and expect it to perform.
This shows up in two places:
- On the data side: If your information is scattered across disconnected platforms and spreadsheets, AI only processes that chaos faster.
- On the brand and writing side: If you haven't invested time building custom models, refining your brand system, and training AI on your voice and standards, you'll get generic output and wonder why it doesn't sound like you.
Technology amplifies whatever you feed it. The unglamorous work comes before you get outputs that impress you.
The most under-examined reputational risk in marketing
…leaders must shift their role from editor to strategist. You cannot be the last line of defense on every asset and simultaneously think clearly about where the brand is going.
The approval room is quietly becoming one of the most under-examined reputational risks in marketing. Teams might easily reject AI slop in round one, but by round five or six, their judgment has drifted. The work looks fine and clears the checklist. But something essential about the brand slips through.
Part of the fix is structural: We might test cycling in fresh reviewers at different stages to prevent fatigue from quietly lowering the bar.
Another part is systemic: Lock brand identity into the creative infrastructure upfront so guardrails do the heavy lifting.
Both point to the same underlying shift: leaders must shift their role from editor to strategist. You cannot be the last line of defense on every asset and simultaneously think clearly about where the brand is going.
Why brand governance must be baked into your infrastructure
Let's dig deeper into the systemic part of the fix.
Most organizations still treat brand governance as a final review before something goes live — someone checks the work at the end, approving or sending it back. That model doesn't work at AI speed and scale. At Canva, we've built an always-on-brand ecosystem that embeds guardrails directly into the creative infrastructure, rather than bolting them on at the end.
Every Canva employee, regardless of team or location, creates on-brand content from the very beginning. We have brand templates for everything, custom emojis, fonts, and distinct color palettes. This makes the creation experience truly seamless for all of us and saves the brand team significant time and energy they'd normally spend resizing logos or aligning text.
When brand standards live in the system rather than the brand team’s inbox, teams move faster and produce more consistent output. Our research with Forrester shows organizations making this shift see a 300% increase in marketer productivity for asset creation.
We also know that while 78% of consumers still prefer human-made ads, 74% feel more comfortable with AI-generated content when formal company guidelines govern it. Embedding governance into your infrastructure doesn't just protect your brand internally; it also builds the trust that matters to your audience.
Why CMOs must dig in, learn together, and embrace vulnerability
Here's my advice: Dig in and be optimistic. A mentor of mine, Andy Kofoid, recently said, “Don’t operate out of fear with AI. You can’t predict the future, so it’s a mistake to avoid a certain career path because you’re not sure how AI will impact it.”
With that understanding, digging in with everyone, learning together, and embracing vulnerability by owning your mistakes helps the whole team embrace the transition. When navigating such a fast-moving landscape, nobody has all the answers up front. The leaders I respect show up authentically, are honest about what they're figuring out, and learn alongside their teams rather than gatekeeping from above.
Practically, shift what you ask your team to think about. A mental shift is required to give up daily tasks and truly push boundaries. Humans are required for deep audience understanding, cultural subtext, and a sharp point of view on what makes your brand distinct. Teach your team to use AI as a sparring partner for that thinking, not just an execution engine. This protects the brand and ensures your output stands out.
Follow along
You can follow Meghan Gendelman's journey on LinkedIn.
More expert interviews to come on The CMO Club!
