Copy article

25,940 Hours: Canva Just Switched The Office Off Again — A Masterclass In Training ROI

ended 01. June 2026

Canva has shut its global business down for the second year running, pausing 5,000+ staff for a full working week so they can do nothing but learn AI, and the receipts say it was worth every dollar.

The design unicorn's second annual "AI Discovery Week" ran in May 2026, racking up over 25,000 hours of hands-on AI exploration and 330+ hackathon ideas in five days. Co-founder Cameron Adams confirmed on LinkedIn that this was Canva's "second ever" company-wide pause for AI learning, with workshops led by trainers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

The price tag isn't small. Industry analysts put the full cost of the week, payroll plus external trainers plus opportunity cost at between $12-15 million. But Canva is already on track to save 30,000 work hours via agentic AI, it's now deploying internally, meaning the upskilling week pays for itself in productivity before the year is out.

The wider market is finally catching on. US corporate training spend hit $102.8 billion in 2025, and the global corporate learning market reached $375 billion in 2026. 63% of L&D professionals expect their budgets to grow or hold steady this year. Companies with a strong learning culture report 57% higher retention than those with only moderate investment, and 90% of organisations now rank learning opportunities as their number-one retention lever,  ahead of pay, benefits and flexibility.

The kicker: only 8% of organisations currently measure the business impact of their learning programmes, and 67% of L&D leaders struggle to demonstrate training value to their executives. So the ROI is there, most just aren't proving it.

And the clock is ticking. The World Economic Forum estimates that 59% of the global workforce, around 120 million workers, will need reskilling or upskilling by 2030, with 11% unlikely to ever receive it. As of September 2025, AI represented 67.5% of all learning priorities across surveyed industries. Deloitte's latest analysis shows that among the small minority of AI "ROI leaders,", 40% now mandate AI training, but across the wider market, 66% of leaders call training a top priority while only 37% of employees actually have access to it.

Translation: the gap between companies that do this and companies that say they will is becoming the gap between businesses that survive the next three years and those that don't.

We'd like your views:

  • Would your senior leadership team ever sign off on shutting the business down for a full week of training, or would they call it commercial suicide?
  • Canva spent up to $15m on one week and expects to save 30,000 hours. If your finance director asked you to prove the ROI of L&D tomorrow, could you?
  • Should AI upskilling be made mandatory across all roles — or is forcing it on reluctant staff just expensive box-ticking?
  • With AI capabilities changing month-to-month, is one focused week a year enough — or are we already overdue for "AI Discovery Day" every single month?

For the small business owners reading this, you don't have Canva's $15m budget, but you can't afford to stand still either. We'd like your views:

  • Could you realistically shut your shop, agency or studio for a single Friday afternoon a month to let your team play with AI tools? If not, what's the actual blocker, money, cover, or culture?
  • Canva brought in OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to train staff. For an SME, would you trust free YouTube tutorials, pay for a structured course like Google's AI Essentials or LinkedIn Learning, or hire a local AI consultant for the day? Which gives you the best return?
  • If you've only got 5 people, do you train everyone to the same level, or pick one "AI champion" to learn deeply and cascade it to the rest?
  • Would you let staff use work time to build their own AI side-tools (a custom GPT, an automation, a chatbot) even if the output never gets used commercially, on the basis that the learning itself is the ROI?
  • The government's Growth and Skills Levy and Help to Grow schemes offer SME training support. Have you used them, ignored them, or never heard of them? Is the system actually accessible to a business with under 50 staff?
  • Honest answer: When was the last time you, as the owner, sat down for two uninterrupted hours to learn an AI tool yourself? And if you haven't, why would you expect your team to?
  • Is Canva's model genius PR or a genuine workforce strategy, and would a stripped-down version of it work in a UK SME, or only at a cash-rich tech giant?
     

2 responses from the Newspage community

Copy all

Star Quote
Copy

Editor
Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
Canva spending $15m to shut the whole business down for a week of AI training sounds like a fever dream for most SMEs, but the principle is bombproof. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, and the real question is, can you afford not to invest?
Standing still in 2026 isn't safe; it's slow suicide. The businesses that win the next three years won't be the ones with the biggest budgets, they'll be the ones who carved out the time to actually learn.
You don't need to shut up shop for a week. Start with a Friday afternoon a month. Pick one AI champion if you've only got 5 staff. Use the Help to Grow scheme nobody seems to talk about.
And owners, before you preach learning to your team, when did you last sit down for two hours and properly play with an AI tool yourself? Thought so. Lead from the front, or don't bother leading at all.
Copy

Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Canva’s AI Discovery Week looks like a training success story but a company doesn't pause 5,000 staff for a week because it wants everyone to feel more confident with prompts. It does it because human knowledge is the asset now mined voraciously.

First Canva execs came for the creatives by scraping their uploaded work to build their AI service, and those outputs sold. Now, it's the workplace version. Staff are invited to explore, experiment, document, build workflows and “share ideas”. Lovely language. but also a very efficient way to extract tacit knowledge from the people who know how the business actually runs.

Yet again, if workers help build systems that save 30,000 hours, who gets the upside? Do staff get better jobs, shorter weeks, higher pay, stronger security, or a graceful transition? Or disposed of once their knowledge, behaviour and judgement is cloned. Remind me? Who's going to pay for universal basic income again? Because 1000s of people are going to need within months.