Canva Poaches Adobe AI Lead for Advanced Video Research

Design software giant Canva has appointed Kshitiz Garg, a former generative AI lead from rival Adobe, to spearhead its audio and video research. This high-profile recruitment signals a significant escalation in the company’s strategy to move beyond static design tools and develop production-grade generative video for its massive user base. The move intensifies the ongoing AI talent war between Canva and Adobe and underscores a focused effort to translate cutting-edge research into reliable, scalable multimedia features, with a particular emphasis on the education technology market.

Garg’s appointment as Audio and Video Lead within Canva Research is a targeted acquisition of deep technical expertise aimed at building foundational AI infrastructure. This development demonstrates Canva’s ambition to build upon its popular Magic Studio suite by tackling complex engineering challenges in AI-driven video, positioning the company to redefine creative communication for a mass-market audience.

Architecting the AI Video Pipeline

Kshitiz Garg’s role is explicitly focused on bridging the gap between experimental AI and scalable, production-ready systems. After nearly eight years at Adobe, his mandate at Canva involves building a team of research scientists and engineers to solve core challenges in generative multimedia, as reported by the EdTech Innovation Hub. This signals a long-term investment in foundational technology, not just incremental feature updates.

The team’s technical objectives include developing and evaluating advanced diffusion-based video models. A key focus is on improving temporal consistency—ensuring that objects and characters remain coherent across multiple frames—and enhancing user controllability. Translating these research outputs into dependable production pipelines is a critical part of the mission. This emphasis on system reliability, safety, and benchmarking is essential for serving markets like education, where tools must be intuitive and adaptable for diverse classroom needs, according to IBTimes .

This focus on production-ready systems marks a significant step in Canva’s AI video production roadmap.

Growth Metrics in the Creative Battlefield

The context for this strategic hire is an intensifying rivalry between Canva and Adobe. While Adobe maintains its dominance in the professional creative market, Canva’s growth metrics illustrate the strategic value of acquiring Adobe talent. According to data from sacra.com, Canva reached an estimated $3.3 billion in annual recurring revenue with a 44% year-over-year growth rate, far outpacing Adobe’s 11% YoY revenue growth.

Canva’s scale, now at 240 million monthly active users, provides a massive testbed and distribution channel for new AI technologies. The platform’s users are already highly engaged with AI, logging 800 million AI tool uses per month—a 700% year-over-year increase. This contrasts with Adobe’s strategy of integrating its Firefly AI model into its professional Creative Cloud suite, which serves a different market with higher switching costs. As noted by FinancialContent, Adobe aims to be a platform for the “entire content supply chain,” but Garg’s move highlights a talent flow toward platforms prioritizing mass adoption and accessibility.

From Static Images to Dynamic Narratives

Canva’s strategic focus is on making advanced AI practical for non-professional users, a philosophy well-suited for its large educational user base. The company’s recent launch of Magic Studio, a suite of AI tools for image generation and basic video editing, established the groundwork. The recruitment of Garg represents the next phase: evolving from single-shot content generation to creating cohesive, dynamic, and controllable multimedia narratives. The move demonstrates how competition between Canva and Adobe in generative video is intensifying.

The implications for education are significant. Advanced generative audio and video capabilities enable educators to create custom animated videos to explain complex topics or design interactive visual aids without specialized training. For students, these tools facilitate the production of high-quality video reports and multimedia projects. Canva’s freemium business model has already secured a vast footprint in schools and universities, creating an unparalleled distribution channel to accelerate the adoption of generative AI in classrooms globally, as highlighted by sacra.com.

Democratizing Video AI: The Education Frontier

Canva’s decision to bring in Kshitiz Garg is a multi-faceted move that deepens its technical capabilities while directly challenging Adobe in the next arena of generative AI: dynamic multimedia. By investing in foundational research for audio and video, the company is building the infrastructure for the next generation of creative communication tools. This strategic hire positions Canva as a key player in shaping the future of digital content creation, particularly in education, as IBTimes concludes. As platforms democratize advanced video generation, how will the definition of digital literacy evolve for the next generation of creators?