Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The U.S. Women’s National Team is out of the World Cup, Barbie passes $1 billion at the box office, and Canva CEO Melanie Perkins sees one major problem with A.I. right now. Have a great Monday!
– A.I. issues. Like most tech founders, Melanie Perkins is excited about the potential of A.I. But the Canva CEO sees a major problem with the A.I. landscape as it exists right now.
“The whole A.I. landscape is very fragmented today,” she says. There’s A.I. for writing and research, like ChatGPT. There are A.I.-powered tools for videos, for images, for coding, and for audio. There’s not a mainstream consumer product that can do all of the above—yet.
Perkins runs Canva, the visual communications platform, from the startup’s home base in Sydney. Earlier this year, she and her executive team spent several weeks traveling throughout Europe and the U.S., opening new offices, meeting international teams, and hosting events. I caught up with Perkins during her San Francisco stop in June.
A.I. was the topic of the day. And fragmentation was the top concern on Perkins’s mind—in part because she thinks Canva is poised to fix the issue. The startup, valued between $26 billion and $40 billion, is competing against giants like Adobe by consolidating different corners of the design industry, from social graphics to video editing, into one consumer-friendly platform.
She’s taking the same all-in-one approach to A.I., featuring several A.I.-aided tools on the platform. The company’s Canva Docs, a Google Docs rival, relies on OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) to power generative A.I. writing. Canva’s video editing platform employs A.I. for its popular “background remover” feature that lets users erase backgrounds from their videos. And A.I.-generated images are also available to Canva users.
Canva continues to call its A.I. tools “magic,” a marketing choice that plays into the startup’s approachable brand.
The startup may not be first in the A.I. race, but Perkins sees a path forward for an A.I.-powered Canva ecosystem—one that’s inspired by its past. “It’s reminiscent of what we first set out to do with design,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Kicked out. The U.S. Women's National Team was dealt a heartbreaking early exit from the World Cup. The U.S. women lost on penalty kicks 5-4 to Sweden, the earliest the team has left the tournament and potentially star Megan Rapinoe's last World Cup game. CNN
- Let's go party. Barbie has crossed $1 billion at the box office. Greta Gerwig is now the first solo female director to helm a billion-dollar movie. CNN
- Gender lens. Women make up only 24% of fund managers around the world, up 2% from 2020, but that progress is too slow for Sonya Sawtell-Rickson, investment chief at pension fund HESTA. The $48.5 billion fund, which boasts a female CEO and an investment team that’s 42% women, is increasingly applying a “gender lens” to investments. Bloomberg
- A bigger crew. Director Ava DuVernay, founder of Array Crew, a database of minority and underrepresented workers in the entertainment industry, is teaming up to build something bigger. Array Crew will merge with Impact, another talent database app created by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, to create a larger network of entertainment employers and employees. L.A. Times
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Following Fauci. Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo will replace Anthony Fauci as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease organization. Marrazzo, an HIV expert and head of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, joins a list of women who have recently been appointed to roles in U.S. health policy. NPR
- Straight from the source. How much has diversity, equity, and inclusion really improved in recent history? Women’s tennis legend Billie Jean King and Aniela Unguresan, founder and CEO of EDGE Certification, share their perspectives in a new commentary piece for Fortune.
- The heat is on. New research shows that women suffer the most from heat waves, not just physically but financially. Women are more physically susceptible to heat stress, are often responsible for keeping their families cool at home, and face a greater loss in income during periods of extreme heat. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
How to live your values with Melinda French Gates Inc.
Meet Window Snyder, the trailblazer who helped secure the internet and billions of devices TechCrunch
The women making waves in Moroccan surfing Vice
PARTING WORDS
“If I’m gonna stand there 18 hours in a dress of an iconic Disney princess, I deserve to be paid for every hour that it’s streamed online.”
—Actress Rachel Zegler, star of an upcoming Snow White remake, on why she joined the SAG-AFTRA picket line.
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