Cavna is giving its 5,000 employees a week away from their daily jobs to … learn AI. For real.
A great idea. I think everyone should do it. We even did a mini-version of this ourselves for tiny Team SaaStr.
But is a week enough to turn folks that aren’t “AI natives” … into experts? And can you reskill enough folks, fast enough, in the Age of AI? And do folks really, honestly, even want to be reskilled? Or just talk the talk?
Canva Gives Its 5K Employees a Week to Learn AI. Will It Really Work?
Canva just made a $2.5M+ bet on AI training. Here’s what other B2B leaders can learn — and why it’s a good idea, but one week probably isn’t enough.
Cameron Adams, Canva’s Co-founder and CPO, just announced something bold: They’re giving all 5,000+ employees the entire week off their regular work to learn AI. Not a few hours of training. Not optional lunch-and-learns. A full week.
The nominal cost is staggering. At an average fully-loaded cost of $100K per employee (conservative for a company Canva’s size), that’s $10M in payroll for the week. Add in expert trainers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, plus opportunity cost, and you’re looking at a $12-15M investment.
For context, that’s more than most Series A rounds.
Why This Matters for Every B2B Founder
The “AI skills gap” is real, and it’s expensive. We’ve all seen the stats about AI boosting productivity 20-40%. But here’s what the surveys don’t tell you: Most employees are using AI like they use Excel in 1995 — barely scratching the surface.
The evidence is everywhere that companies need to move fast:
Salesforce: Marc Benioff revealed that AI now handles 30-50% of work at his company, calling it a “digital labor revolution.” Salesforce has reached about 93% accuracy with its AI systems and has already cut over 1,000 jobs this year as part of its AI restructuring.
Shopify: CEO Tobi Lütke just issued an ultimatum to all employees: “Teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI” before asking for more headcount and resources. He’s made “using AI effectively” a “fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify” and added AI usage questions to performance reviews.
HubSpot: CEO Yamini Rangan told SaaStr that 95% of their engineering team uses AI tools daily, and they completely pivoted their roadmap just two months after ChatGPT launched.
But Rangan’s approach goes beyond just engineering. She’s personally driving AI adoption company-wide: “One of the reasons I do a five-minute video for our entire company, we call it a weekly wrap and I send it out every Friday and I’m demoing what how I’m using AI and I’m demoing how our teams are using AI. We’re talking about where we are getting benefit, where we are seeing real customer value.” Her message is clear: “It has to come from the top. So those of you who are leading organizations, go-to-market teams, your founders, you have to lead from the front and you have to believe that there is value for your customers.”
Translation: The companies that don’t reskill fast enough will get left behind. Not in five years. Right now.
The Three-Pillar Strategy They’re Rolling Out
Most companies approach AI training wrong. They do one-off workshops or mandate tool adoption. Canva’s doing something different:
1. Time (The Expensive Part) Every employee gets permission to ignore their regular work. This sounds insane until you realize the alternative: having your team slowly, inefficiently learn AI while juggling deadlines. Better to rip the band-aid off.
2. Tools (The Smart Part) They’ve already been providing team-wide access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of specialized tools for over a year. This week isn’t about access — it’s about mastery. But is this alone … enough? It hasn’t yet led to the adoption across 5,000 employees the founders want.
3. Learning (The Scalable Part) Mix of self-directed exploration and expert-led sessions. Role-specific training for Finance, Engineering, Sales. Plus a 2-day company-wide hackathon to build actual solutions.
Will Reskilling Really Work? Or Is It Just Performative?
Here’s the elephant in the room: Can you actually teach an entire workforce to use AI effectively in just one week? Is it even practical to reskill folks that aren’t becoming AI fluent on their own?
Probably not. A week might create enthusiasm and surface-level familiarity, but turning people into “AI natives” requires sustained practice over months, not days.
Mass reskilling has a mixed track record. Remember when everyone was going to learn to code? Or when “digital transformation” was the buzzword du jour? Most corporate training initiatives fail because they’re:
- Too theoretical (death by PowerPoint)
- Not role-specific (generic AI overview for everyone)
- Lacking follow-through (one-and-done workshops)
- Missing executive buy-in (optional attendance sends the wrong signal)
Canva’s approach does attempt to address these failure modes head-on. They’re giving people dedicated time, role-specific training, and expert guidance. Most importantly, they’re making it company-wide and mandatory — a clear signal from leadership.
The best leaders are applying what Yamini Rangan calls the “kid in the candy store” test: “If they’re not saying this is the kid in the candy store age, you have the wrong team. They should be excited… If you’re not seeing that [excitement], it’s brutal, but you got the wrong team.”
Rangan’s point cuts deep: “The last five years were boring. We were doing the same playbook and we were trying to push the same exactly.” The teams that will thrive are the ones who see AI as their chance to finally do “cool stuff” again.
The “neat vs. necessary” framework is crucial here. Rangan obsessively tracks usage patterns at HubSpot: “There are novel, neat AI things. We’ve all used it in our personal life. We’ve used it once and it has this beautiful image that it creates and then we never go back to it. That’s just neat. But AI has to be necessary.”
The difference? “AI has to go from just being neat to being necessary, to being in the flow of everyday work in order to have the promised transformative benefits.” HubSpot tracks “daily repeat usage versus weekly repeat usage versus novelty use” to ensure their AI tools become indispensable, not just impressive.
The Bottom Line
Canva’s betting that upfront investment in AI literacy will compound into massive productivity gains. It’s a smart bet for a company with their resources and growth trajectory, even if a single week won’t turn everyone into AI experts overnight.
For the rest of us: You don’t need a $15M training week. You need intentional experimentation, the right tools, sustained support, and leadership that models AI adoption daily.
The companies that figure this out in 2025 will have an unfair advantage. The ones that don’t are already wondering why their competitors are moving so much faster.
Rangan’s final word on who survives: “Curiosity and growth mindset. If you’re trying to slow roll AI, if you think that this is going to go away, if you’re not investing in yourself and developing a level of AI fluency, then you’ve pretty much lost the game.”
