Keynote: Build for Speed: Lessons from Empowering GenAI Research at Canva - Verena Dittmer

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Keynote: Build for Speed: Lessons from Empowering GenAI Research at Canva - Verena Dittmer, ML Engineering Manager, Canva

Building successful GenAI products doesn’t start with scale — it starts with speed: the ability to iterate quickly, validate ideas early, and reduce friction between research and production. At Canva, we’ve found that empowering ML researchers means designing platforms around their workflows — not forcing them to conform to rigid infrastructure.

In this keynote, I’ll share key lessons from building Canva’s GenAI research platform, now used by over 100 engineers. We’ll explore how we made “Demo in a Day” possible with lightweight prototyping workflows, enabled rapid experimentation through flexible development environments, and strengthened research–engineering collaboration through shared tooling and streamlined support systems.

Whether you’re an AI engineer building GenAI applications or helping design the infrastructure behind them, this talk will offer practical lessons for increasing research velocity, accelerating prototyping, and scaling experimentation without sacrificing developer experience.