How Suhayb Ahmed helped build the AI-native legal team at Canva: “Just start experimenting”

“I’ve been looking at contract review tools for many years, and Ivo was the first one that actually did what it claimed to do,” Suhayb Ahmed, the Head of Commercial Legal at Canva told us. “That was a real wow moment for me.” 

Suhayb has been leading the charge to build an AI-first legal team at Canva. To him, that means redirecting lawyers’ time to do the work they can do better than anyone else: using their strategic judgement to solve problems. "An AI-native legal team means using AI to handle the high-volume, low-impact work that takes up so much of our time, so we can focus on what makes us human: applying strong judgment, making decisions, building relationships."

That strategy has changed how Canva's legal team approaches contract review and redlining entirely. Instead of spending time crafting the exact right language, lawyers focus on the judgment calls that matter most.

"How do we best protect our business?” Suhayb notes. “How do we help move the deal forward while still achieving the needs of the counterparty? We can use Ivo to say, this is what our business needs to achieve, so we can focus our efforts on what actually has the bigger impact pays lots of dividends in allowing us to focus our efforts in the right places."

Ivo Beyond the Legal Team

One of the most compelling things about Suhayb's story is how quickly Ivo's value spread beyond the legal team. For example, when Canva's revenue accounting team needed a quicker way to review executed contracts for key terms, Suhayb showed them what Ivo Intelligence could do.

"They're reviewing every single contract for a bunch of terms to ensure that they're recognizing the revenue in the right way. With Ivo, they can just build a spreadsheet with a prompt for each of the key terms that they're looking for. They've got all the details that they need and they can then apply the revenue accounting principles based on the details that are already surfaced to them."

Advice for getting started with AI

If you’re just getting started with AI, Suhayb has very direct advice.

"Don't wait for the perfect prompt. Just start experimenting and iterate from there and you'll find these amazing solutions that just make your life a lot easier."

Take a look at how Ivo could create value for your team.