I Gave Canva and My AI Agents the Same Thumbnail Brief

It's been a tough week at the office for Canva employees and the last week at the office for many Canva employees. And the question is, well, is this AI's fault? Is AI moving in on Canva's territory? Now, I'm a Canva customer. I've been creating my thumbnails in Canva for a long time for this very show, for the Field Notes show here, me generating all my own manual things in Canva still. But is it enough? Is it good enough in this world of things like Photoshop and the whole Adobe Suite being vibe-coded and open-source and given away for free, what is Canva's moat? And in 2026, at this point in time, in 2026, is Canva the right tool for making thumbnails? Today I'm gonna show you what Canva's doing and what my other AI agents were able to do for a thumbnail. So stick around for that. Now Canva has been talking about their new AI releases. So before they got rid of 22% of their workforce the last few weeks, October 30th, they were announcing Canva Brush, a vision language model for design. And they're saying how amazing it is and it can do all these things and it's faster and it's cheaper. It's only rolled out to Pro accounts. So even though I'm paying for a Teams business account, I don't get it yet. I don't think, as far as I can tell in my Canva, I don't have a little popup here that lets me choose which model to use, which in their little press release here, it looks like I should be able to choose beta and use the new Brush model. So I am doing this, full admission: the AI I used for Canva is not their latest and greatest, it's their old one, but they've been doing this for a few years. They've been doing this as long as anyone else borrowing other models. So we're gonna look at how that goes because this week I was thinking about the Operator Stories show, the other show that we do here, and this is the thumbnails. I've built all of these in Canva and they're a bit generic. There's me, there's the guests, there's their name, there's the business logo. What does that mean to anyone? Why in this world of YouTube and so many options, would anyone click on any of those thumbnails? And they probably wouldn't. So I looked at what was going on. I looked at other shows like Diary of a CEO, and I said to my Grokbot, I said to my Grokbot, I wanna redo these thumbnails. You've got access to Canva so you can access all the thumbnails of the people. They're the thumbnails and the thumbnails. And I want you to make these look like Diary of a CEO. And Grokbot, while I sat on the couch, ran through, pulled all the images, went through and read all the transcripts of all the shows, and suggested which quote to use. And built these new, much better-looking, much more likely to get clicked on, thumbnails for the Operator Stories show. So I was like, well... Why am I using Canva? Already for the live show, and I did a whole video on this a few weeks ago, I'm using Hermes agent with an HTML template and it's generating images and it's making really nice thumbnails for the live show. And now I, like I've proven, Grokbot can build these great ones for Diary of a CEO, even for some of the Field Notes ones. I've had my Hamilton, my OpenAI bot use Canva to build the thumbnail for me, like when I was out in the field with the kangaroos, if you saw that episode. So I've been using a mix of tools. Why do I keep coming back to Canva? Now I do like as a human, as a user, being able to click in, edit layers, shift things, tweak things. But I'm also not a designer by nature or training. So I'm not gonna build the best designs every time. So off the back of my success with the Diary of a CEO one, I was like, for Field Notes, maybe we can do better. Maybe we can do better with Field Notes. And so I said right here in the Canva AI, I need a new version of this thumbnail for this week's video. You can update and refresh the design keeping on the AI Operators brand with a focus to stop the scroll and get clicks. The new topic is thumbnail design and is Canva any good at it? Pretty straightforward. It said, "Look, I can see you've got a brand kit for AI Operators with your colours and logos." I said, "Yep, let's do that." Now the new synthwave little background I've got here, not in the brand kit, it's got the old traditional blue nodes that you might've seen on the live show that we use. And so when it went and did this, and yes, this, I got Canva to generate art for one of the thumbnails the other day. And for this, I'll say it did a great job. I said I wanted a spine with two brain stems and it gave me this sort of anatomy diagram. I said, no, no, it needs to be like a Terminator robot style. It gave me the robot one that I used for the robots. So I was like, okay, that's pretty good that it took the bone skull and made the metal one. I was pretty impressed with that from the image gen. So anyway, I gave it that brief and it gave me this. Seriously: "The thumbnail has been refreshed with AI Operators branding, stronger contrast, sharper hierarchy, and the new focus: Is Canva any good at thumbnails?" This is it. It looks like I'm going into a corporate presentation about is Canva any good at thumbnails? And what is this? Just a question mark. No, like that's the question. Is Canva any good? This is not a good YouTube thumbnail. Now maybe their Brush model would be more aware of YouTube. I didn't use the word YouTube, but it, I thought it was implied when I said video thumbnail. Video thumbnail. Maybe that's on me. Sorry, Canva. So Canva, I'm not gonna use that thumbnail. And if you clicked on this video, you didn't see that thumbnail. What? So what did I do? I went to my other agents, I said to Hermes, the one that makes all my thumbnails for the live show, my AI Operators Hermes setup and said, gave it the exact same prompt, the exact same prompt. And it gave me this, it's similar to the live show, one with the image, but it's tweaked it a little bit. Made a Field Notes version custom image there on Canva. Good enough. The highlighted word. It's not bad. It's not bad. I could use that. It's on brand, it kind of works. I went to Grokbot who made all those great Diary of a CEO ones. And I think it's still thinking very Diary of a CEO because it's gone the big head, it's gone the highlighted word, it's done something weird with the synth grid. I don't love that grid. It looks very plain and basic. This is not Grokbot's best work. It's put me on there, with a little highlight around me like that's okay, but it's not its greatest work. And then I said to Hamilton, my OpenAI bot, who also has access to Canva. So Grokbot had access to Canva to get the templates. Hamilton's got access to Canva. It's built things for me before. Hamilton came back with this one, which is the one that I'm gonna use. And it's the one you would've seen if you clicked on this. And I was like, oh, that's not me. It's AI-generated a version of me. It's got that sick neon blue highlight edging around me. It's got Canva for thumbnails, it's got Canva on the laptop with... Like, this is incredible. Like, I dunno why the sunset? And these are one-shots. I didn't iterate these at all. I gave them all the same single one prompt. And this is what I got from all the different models. So it makes me wonder if Hamilton's gonna gimme calibre like this every week, why will I still build thumbnails manually in Canva, especially if I go to Hamilton? Here's actual photos of me. Don't AI-gen weird, slightly like... It's me, but it's not me. I was like... I dunno. That's weird. But this is, I don't mean to kick Canva when they're down. But there's, it's hard, this is really hard. Like these are established products and like I showed you with the Adobe stuff with that Artcraft suite, these are big-name products that are having their lunch eaten. Like what is the moat? Brand loyalty is definitely part of it. And they're trying to innovate with these new AI features, but that's taken them a long time and they're not getting there very fast and they're not rolling them out. And they're probably worried about the cost of the tokens, the cost of the tokens, who's paying for the tokens? What do you use? Do you do content creation? Do you do social media posts? Have you been using Canva? Have you gone away from Canva and now you're just getting AI to generate stuff? Are you not happy with AI-generated stuff because it does weird things like recreates people when you didn't want it to? Like, where are you at with all of this sort of stuff? I will probably do a bit of a mix still. I'm still gonna use Canva for some things. I'm gonna use my AI tools for some things and we'll meet in the middle somewhere, but it's a crazy new world. And if you are from Canva and you've seen this and you're not at Canva anymore and the whole redundancy thing is just blowing your mind, reach out for a chat. I've been through a corporate redundancy and I would love to have a chat and talk to you around what it looks like on the other side. So this isn't meaning to kick Canva when they're down, but obviously they've kicked 22% of their workforce to the curb this week. Why does that happen? And it's because these AI tools are improving. They are getting better and they do produce better outputs than non-design people like me can generate on our own even using a tool like Canva. So that's the field tip. You gotta try different tools. They all have different outputs. What's right for you might be right for someone else. It might not be, but check that out and we'll see you next time.