Episode overview

Steve Grace records this episode just 48 hours after Canva announced its acquisition of Leonardo.Ai. He sits down with Jessie Hughes, Senior Creative Technologist at Leonardo.Ai, to talk through what the acquisition means, what the platform actually does, and what the arrival of generative AI means for creativity, employment, and the Australian tech ecosystem.

The Canva acquisition and why Leonardo stays independent

The acquisition was driven by two things: Leonardo.Ai’s Phoenix foundational model, which Jessie describes as Australia’s first homegrown foundational AI model with particularly strong text-in-image performance, and the cultural and strategic alignment between the two Australian companies. Both are built around the idea that powerful creative tools should be accessible to everyone, not just professionals with expensive software and years of training.

Leonardo remains operationally independent under the acquisition. This was important to the team because Leonardo’s competitive advantage is speed: shipping new features every week and pivoting in response to a market that changes daily. Remaining independent means Leonardo can continue to move at startup velocity while gaining access to Canva’s distribution network and financial backing.

What Leonardo.Ai actually does

Leonardo.Ai is a generative AI content creation suite. At its core it generates images from text prompts, but it goes significantly further than standalone image generators. The real-time canvas lets users sketch rough doodles that the model transforms into polished renders or product photography in seconds. The universal upscaler uses AI to intelligently fill in the missing information when converting low-resolution images to high resolution. Video motion tools let filmmakers animate static images. A prompt enhancer co-writes prompts when a user struggles to articulate what they are trying to create.

For teams and businesses, Leonardo offers LoRA fine-tuning: you train the model on your brand’s visual identity and every subsequent output reflects your aesthetic without manual adjustment. The platform also has team features and the Leonardo for Teams tier.

Democratising creativity is not a threat to creative professionals

Jessie is direct about the jobs question. She draws the parallel with Canva: she has a three-year design degree. Canva lets anyone make what she learned to make. Rather than feeling threatened, she thinks this is genuinely positive because it frees professional designers to do the things that actually require their skills, not produce newsletter templates and basic social assets.

The more powerful framing is the upskilling argument. Generative AI removes the capital and technical training barriers that previously prevented people from realising creative visions. The person who could imagine a story but could never afford an animation studio can now make animated content. The brand without a photography budget can produce high-quality imagery. Jessie’s phrase is “the rising tide”: everyone’s creative capability lifts, including professionals who can now execute ideas faster and at a higher level.

The AI space race and what it feels like from inside Leonardo

Jessie describes the pace as unlike anything she has experienced. She built a keynote on a Wednesday and by Friday had to open by telling the audience to ignore half the slides because three major developments had occurred in 48 hours. Every morning she wakes up and something has changed. The competitive pressure is constant: a competitor releases a feature, and the team has to assess whether to respond, ignore, or leapfrog. With 19 million users and a Discord community that is the third largest in the world, the stakes of getting those decisions right are significant.