- Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht is on the hunt for ‘AI natives’—even those who have dropped out of college. Speaking to Fortune at VivaTech in Paris, Obrecht said the company sees high value in hiring less traditional candidates who natively understand AI tools and workflows. As AI threatens to change the job market rapidly, Obrecht says that curiosity and adaptability are becoming more valuable than ever.
With anxiety mounting over the mass automation of entry-level jobs, job-seekers with AI skills may now have an edge over those with university credentials. Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told Fortune the company is actively hiring AI-savvy college students regardless of whether they finish their degrees.
Obrecht said Canva is increasingly looking for “AI natives” when hiring new staffers and is benefiting from university dropouts when it comes to engineering talent.
“We are looking to actually hire second to fourth-year university graduates because they are AI natives,” Obrecht said in an interview at Viva Technology in Paris.
“Hiring a lot of junior people who are native at building agentic workflows and picking up AI first is just a different way of thinking about building products,” he added. “We are actually getting a lot of value from bringing in those university dropouts.”
Obrecht said most organizations are currently trying to up-skill engineers on AI coding tools in the hopes of productivity gains, but he was looking to hire less experienced talent who have a stronger grasp of the current AI tools on offer.
“They’re really good hires, especially when you add them to a nontechnical team and up-skill the rest of the organization. They’re AI natives and become evangelists in the organization and really help drive that mindset shift,” he said.
What is an ‘AI native’?
The discourse around AI-fueled job losses, particularly concerning entry-level work, has been heating up recently and has created somewhat of a divide in the tech industry.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sparked a fierce debate with his recent prediction that AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. While some, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, have pushed back on Amodei’s predictions, recent data suggests that some entry-level work may already be under pressure from the rise of automation.
Companies are also increasingly looking to incorporate AI into their workflows in the hope of productivity gains, with some putting in formal requirements for workers to embrace the tech. But getting ahead of the curve when it comes to AI skills is less about using ChatGPT every day and more about being at the forefront of the technology, according to Obrecht.
“An AI native has got a deep understanding of the AI tools in their tool belt,” he said. “And they’re constantly at the forefront of creating agents, chaining multiple complex AI workflows together—maybe from different products and providers—to create unified experiences. They have a goal in mind, and that goal isn’t just delivered through single AIs. It’s connected to a bunch of different things.”
Obrecht sees AI natives as “curiosity-focused” rather than confined to one certain generation.
“You can be a hungry, curious person who sees this brand new technology changing our world, and be someone who’s like ‘I want to learn everything I can about this part of this.’ That curiosity is the key attribute that leads to someone being successful in companies now,” he said.
