How Canva supports millions of happy users by balancing AI and a human touch

Canva is transforming the way the world designs. They empower users to create everything from presentations and social posts to videos, print products, and websites – all through their intuitive platform.

With over 260 million monthly active users, the Canva support team handles more than a 100k customer tickets each month, ranging from “What’s the status of my print order?” to “How do I use the new social media video creator?” For every interaction, Canva’s support strategy is rooted in quality, not just efficiency.

As Marlene Ensor, Canva’s Global User Voice Enablement Lead says, “Customer experience is our priority over efficiency and automation. We don’t automate things unless it drives a better customer experience. Ultimately we just want to get users back to designing as fast as possible.”

Their challenge

With hundreds of agents across three BPO sites and a goal to grow their support capacity without adding significant additional headcount, the Canva team needed a swiss army knife tool that would help them:

• Reduce manual operations: Managing a large, complex workforce across multiple BPOs and time zones required over 20 hours of manual forecasting, scheduling and adherence tracking in spreadsheets every week. Reporting on key metrics was equally slow and resource-intensive.
• Increase agent efficiency: Support specialists spent significant time toggling between systems and drafting replies — which slowed resolution times.
• Maintain a best-in-class customer experience: While macros helped speed up resolutions, the responses often felt robotic and impersonal. Even with macros, inconsistent or inaccurate responses were still an issue, especially for complex, high-touch cases. 

Why Assembled

Canva’s ambitious goals meant they were looking for a partner that could support their growth over time. Assembled stood out for its scalability, commitment to both AI and humans, and easy implementation. “At Canva, we prioritize getting results fast — and Assembled embodies the same philosophy,” said Derek Lichtensteiger, Canva’s Senior Systems Engineer. This was a similar reason why high-growth companies like Robinhood, and Stripe have partnered with Assembled to help them support the extreme changes that come with scaling a technology company.

Canva also wanted a partner who could balance AI innovation with human empathy. With Assembled, they found a partner who could connect the dots between workforce data and AI performance — unlike AI point solutions or legacy WFM providers. 

Last but not least, Canva chose Assembled because they could get started in weeks, not months. "Having implemented other enterprise-level SaaS systems, these [implementations] can typically drag on for months," Derek noted. But the Assembled experience was completely different. 

Speed to value 

Thanks to native integrations, self-serve configuration, and comprehensive training programs and support, Canva’s onboarding experience has been “great in terms of time to value,” according to Derek and team. 

• Workforce and Vendor Management: fully operational in six weeks
• AI Copilot: piloted in three weeks, scaled to hundreds of agents in months 
• Adoption: 80% of agents using Copilot within four weeks

Jasper Johnson, Canva’s Specialist Systems and Platform Lead, explained, “I’ve been delivering technology into operations environments for many years, and the overall implementation experience with Assembled has been a considerable highlight. The level of support and speed of co-designed feature delivery have garnered strong trust.” The Assembled team even flew to Manila to shadow agents, co-design features, and implement feedback within hours. Overall, that spirit of co-creation ensured the solution evolved in lockstep with Canva’s goals.

Within just a few weeks, Canva was streamlining forecasting, scheduling, and reporting across its hybrid workforce of BPOs and in-house agents with Assembled Workforce Management.  Processes that once took a week were reduced to one or two days. Automated adherence tracking alone saved more than 18 hours of manual work every week.

A key part of this success was Assembled Vendor Management, which became the single source of truth for both Canva and its BPO partners, eliminating billing discrepancies and improving visibility into daily operations. The result: faster reconciliation, more accurate invoices, and deeper insight into how vendor teams were performing.

AI Copilot: A partner in every ticket

After a successful Workforce Management rollout, Canva expanded its partnership with Assembled into agentic AI with Assembled AI Copilot — affectionately known internally as Cal.

Before Copilot, Canva’s 1000+ support specialists faced familiar productivity challenges: complex product inquiries, time-consuming knowledge searches, and inconsistent response quality across skill levels and locations. Training new agents took time, and maintaining consistent quality across regions was a constant challenge.

To launch Copilot, Canva took a uniquely creative approach, complete with Cal-themed short films and cupcakes to build excitement and drive adoption across teams.

Once live, Cal quickly became every agent’s sidekick — one agent even shared, “We can’t solve tickets without Cal!” Instead of toggling between multiple tools, agents could stay in one workspace while Copilot surfaced relevant knowledge, summarized context from previous tickets, pulled customer account data instantly, and drafted personalized responses.

Paired with Assembled’s agentic workflows — dynamic, multi-step AI that can call tools and take actions across your support stack — Copilot helped Canva’s support team resolve issues end-to-end faster. Like the “Print Order Status Workflow” which automatically surfaces order status information so that specialists can update customers. Agents can choose to run the workflow and customers are updated – eliminating the hunt for customer information and the administrative work involved to update other systems.

The impact was clear. Agents are now handling 30% more tickets a day all while maintaining or improving CSAT. 

By embedding Copilot directly into their daily workflows, Canva’s agents became more confident, efficient, and consistent — proof that AI can empower humans, not replace them. 

A new model for customer support

Canva’s journey with Assembled shows what’s possible when AI and human expertise work in true harmony. What began as modernizing workforce management has evolved into a global operation powered by agentic AI — where automation and empathy are seamlessly orchestrated to deliver faster, higher-quality support at scale.

As Canva enters its next chapter, it’s proving that AI doesn’t replace the human touch — it amplifies it. By unifying data, automation, and human insight across every channel, Canva is building a new standard for support: efficient, intelligent, and deeply human.

Whether you're planning for hypergrowth, around-the-clock coverage, or transforming support into a competitive advantage; Assembled gives you everything you need to deliver superhuman support at any scale.

Ready to see how? Set up time with us to learn more.

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