Canva's Filipino employees known for creativity: PH boss

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Canva's Filipino employees known for creativity: PH boss

Benise Balaoing,

ABS-CBN News

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MANILA -- Canva's Filipino employees are known for their creativity, the design platform's country manager for the Philippines said Wednesday.

"We have a lot of creatives, designers, photographers and people in the creative industry that are in Canva Philippines," said Yani Hornilla-Donato.

Canva now has over 900 staff in the Philippines, up from around 850 earlier this year, Donato said. They are spread out mostly across design, marketing, social media, growth, operations, and customer service.

"They bring a lot of flavor, and they bring a lot of content into our marketplace, from templates, photos, videos, and all the content that you see and use on the product," she said.

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Aside from this, however, Donato also said that Pinoys' English-speaking skills make it easy for them to work with other Canva offices across the globe.

"Filipinos are also naturally known to be good at building relationships, making friends and making connections in the workplace," Donato noted. "That translates to more productivity, and I think, more progress towards goals that we all share."

The executive said most of the Pinoy Canva employees are part of their customer happiness team, which assists Canva users worldwide 24/7 through email and chat.

She also noted, however, that they have a Philippine-based content moderation team that makes sure that Canva is not used to make harmful content. 

"We have a content moderation team under our trust and safety team that's based in the Philippines, and what they do is (they're)physically humans screening the content to ensure that there's no harmful content and that those who create harmful content are stopped and suspended and banned from the product."

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"So (they're) preventing prompts also that may potentially be harmful related to medical content, mental health content, political content, sexually explicit topics. These are some, just some of the many things that are not that are prohibited under our acceptable use policy of AI (artificial intelligence)," she said.

Donato said Canva has embraced AI as a driving force to boost their business. 

"We see it as a real tailwind to further enhance Canva's value as a product," the executive said, as she noted how the company acquired Kaleido--which owned a background remover--in 2021, and data visualization firm Fluorish in 2022.

"We also launched Magic Studio in 2023 which included a suite of AI-generated features on Canva," she added.

Canva launches its Magic Studio suite of generative AI-powered design apps. HandoutCanva launches its Magic Studio suite of generative AI-powered design apps. Handout

"So we see it (AI) as something that furthers our mission, furthers the value of the product, and furthers the ability of people to do the things that they need to do in our product," she said.

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She stressed, however, that Canva wants to make sure that AI is ethically used by everyone.

"We have a dedicated Trust and Safety Team, AI team, and machine learning and engineering teams that have been working to make sure that our product is set up in a way that it can be used safely and ethically by our users around the world," she explained.

"So there are specific keywords and input, and it's a work in progress today, and I think it will forever be a work in progress. But yeah, there's specific harmful words that are already inputted as prompts that will not generate the content for you. And I think habitual and gross use of these kinds of things are also spotted and flagged by the team," she said.

"And if they're seeing, if it is proven that you have malicious intent... if there's some habitual behavior that is also really creating harmful content in your account we have the ability to suspend and remove your account," she stressed.

"We have an AI ethics community as well, and usually it is quite easy for the team to decide when these things happen, to make a decision around the stoppage of the account," she said.

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