Canva co-founder Cameron Adams said there’s a way to get employees to stop worrying about AI: force them to use a specific AI tool.

In an interview with Rapid Response published Tuesday, Adams said his staff can choose whichever AI tool they want. The interview was filmed during the Cannes Lions festival last month.

“So, we’re not requiring Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or whatever tools you want to use in your part of the business,” Adams said. “You can figure it out.”

He said employees have their own AI budgets to test tools, determine workflows and processes, and address problems they face.

By giving staff the freedom to choose the tools they use, staff feel more comfortable experimenting, he said.

“If you impose a tool on them, they will do it reluctantly and they won’t get into this very experimental mindset that we need,” Adams said.

Another way to encourage AI experimentation, he said, was to give staff time away from their other responsibilities to play with AI, during Canva’s AI Discovery Week.

“All week we told people, ‘Please don’t do your normal work. We want you to think about the problems you have, the tools you’ve heard about, the opportunities you’ve heard from colleagues in other industries, and we want you to try them all week,’ he said.

The design company has made AI a central focus of its business. In April, it launched Canva AI 2.0, a conversational platform that allows users to turn simple prompts into designs. Business Insider previously pitted Canva 2.0 against Claude Design to build the same slide deck and found that Canva 2.0’s final product was comparable to Claude’s.

Getting employees to adopt AI into their workflows has been a challenge for many companies. Some, like Duolingo, added employee AI usage as a performance metric. JPMorgan and Disney started AI token leaderboards that rank their staff usage.

Spending on AI has become a major challenge for businesses, and companies are looking for ways to spend less without limiting their employees’ AI ambitions.

One cost-saving tactic that has emerged is to use different AI models and tools for different tasks, rather than being loyal to a single AI vendor.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that this tactic prevents excessive AI tokens from being burned on simple tasks. He also recommended using cheaper Chinese models as defaults.

Cloud platform Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said in a TechCrunch interview earlier this month that companies are now getting smarter about how to use different AI tools in their AI stack, including model, harness, data platform, sandbox, and gateway.