‘Plethora’ of underperforming AI apps to get the chop this year, Canva survey reveals

Chief information officers will cull a plethora of AI apps staff use but spend up big on the ones that deliver a return on investment, according to Canva.

Canva co-founder Cameron Adams says companies will demand more of a return on investment from AI apps this year. Picture: Britta Campion

AI experimentation is over and businesses are moving to consolidate the “plethora of apps” which staff use and demand investment returns, according to Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams.

The much-hyped technology has sparked an explosion of companies – big and small – developing AI-powered apps that promise to eradicate drudgery and free up employees for higher value work.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT – which helped people perform tasks from writing emails and corporate reports to Shakespearean-style sonnets, via simple verbal prompts – amassed 100 million active users within two months of its launch, unleashing the potential of generative AI.

But despite the excitement, Mr Adams said few businesses were incorporating AI platforms into everyday workflows, even though most chief executives say artificial intelligence was one of the only ways to lift flatlining productivity, according to The Australian’s 2024 CEO Survey.

“Certainly 2023 was the year when AI started coming across everyone’s plates, not just technology folks but lawyers, ops people, communication specialists – like everyone talks about it now. It’s the conversation at every barbecue,” Mr Adams said.

“The technology is out there now. You have apps like GPT but even something like GPT people are still figuring out how to bring it into their workflows.

“It isn’t quite there yet. It’s something that everyone has a great story about but using it in their day to day is often quite rare.”

Cameron Adams at Canva’s head office. Picture: Jonathan Cami

Mr Adams was speaking as Canva – an Australian-owned digital design and visual communication platform worth $US26bn ($39.6bn) – released the findings of a survey of almost 1400 global chief information officers.

In Australia, almost 95 per cent of respondents (versus a global average of 84 per cent) said there were too many AI tools in the market. Meanwhile, 88 per cent (versus a global average of 72 per cent) were concerned about “application sprawl” potentially creating security risks.

“Off the back of technology like large language models, you’ve seen an explosion in the number of start-ups, software apps, that are using AI to do things in a slightly different way,” Mr Adams said.

“There’s so many competing apps; apps that do small, vertical tasks. And the CIO’s role is really to look at that landscape, understand the needs of their employees and their colleagues and map out a strategy forward that’s going to make sense from an IT perspective.

“But also meet the needs of the people working in their remit, and also the needs of the organisation in terms of budget efficiency, and increasing their goals.”

This means 2024 will be the year that AI applications that fail to deliver a productivity benefit will get the chop.

“Now that a lot of the technology has been out there and has been developed this year, it’s about consolidating it, figuring out what actually works, figuring out how to bring it into the workflows that matter to your organisation and I think really consolidating around a few tools that are actually proven, that are showing ROI and delivering something your organisation,” Mr Adams said.

“There are lots of these micro apps and I think if you let every person at your enterprise – just let loose and use whatever micro apps they want to work with – you end up with this plethora of things that your IT team has to manage and it becomes a real problem.”

But there is still money to be made in the expected consolidation, Canva’s survey has revealed that 96 per cent of CIOs planned to increase investment in AI apps.

This was despite 74 per cent, saying they did not have enough IT staff to train employees on the proper use of AI apps.

“There’s still a strong need for CIOs and IT teams to be innovating within organisations finding new solutions, finding better ways of doing things and really connecting the workflows that people are trying to do with the technology,” Mr Adams said.

And he said there was still room for start-ups despite tech giants such as Microsoft and Google launching platforms tailored at enterprise users. Mr Adams highlighted Canva’s own success.

“You’re not going to create a better calendar or better mail client against someone like Microsoft. What you, what start-ups, need to do is identify an opportunity and those opportunities can arise from so many different areas – shifting customer patterns, new technology, like AI and LLM (large language model), new ways of thinking about the experience, new geographies that you might want to go into that haven’t been exposed to traditional software before,” he said.

“The essential part of a start-up is connecting technology with those opportunities. Often with the start-up, the actual technology underlying it isn’t supremely innovative in and of itself.

“It may have existed for a while, but thinking about how your chosen technology field intersects with new customers, new needs, new trends in society, that’s where I really see start-ups being successful.

“It’s about the combination of things rather than just driving home in one innovation area. So for an AI start-up, it is really about connecting with an emerging need.”

One of these companies is Tel Aviv-based start-up Tabnine, which Telstra Ventures led a $US25m raising last November, attracting a suite of investors including Atlassian.

Tabnine has created an AI coding assistant to accelerate and improve the software development life cycle. It says it has been used by millions of developers around the world to “boost code quality and developer happiness using generative AI technology”.

“Come up with a hypothesis that is totally unfeasible,” Mr Adams advised start-ups.

“Like, say you see an opportunity for copywriting for gardeners that your AI can help with. It’s not a great market because it’s very small.

“But finding those unique intersections that you can really start building an advantage in and grow your foundational user base. Then use that as a springboard to bigger problems.

“That’s exactly what we did with Canva. We were in a particular technology landscape that didn’t yet include AI but included things like mobile apps, web apps, JavaScript, HTML, which were all quickly evolving at the time.

“And we managed to connect that with the need for visual communication and create a tool which spoke to people who had the biggest need for that at the time. It wasn’t 170 million people at the time.

“It was actually a small market of social media marketers who were just coming to grips with what Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter were like and how to successfully utilise those platforms.”