Is the company newsletter dead?

The humble company newsletter may be nearing its final chapter, according to Duncan Clark, Head of EMEA at Canva, who says video is rapidly becoming the default language of workplace communication.

Speaking ahead of his BRIDGE Summit keynote, Clark said the “unstoppable rise of visuals” is changing how organisations speak to employees and customers alike. “Everyone is becoming a content creator,” he said. “Whether you’re an HR director or a marketing team, everything now has to be visual.”

That shift is putting pressure on traditional written formats. Internal memos and long newsletters, once staples of corporate communication, are struggling to keep pace with employees trained by social media to expect fast, engaging content. Short videos, Clark argued, feel more authentic, more immediate and more human.

“I got a direct message yesterday with a video instead of a memo,” he said. “People are used to high-quality visual content everywhere else. They expect the same at work.”

Canva has seen this trend accelerate globally and in the Middle East. Users in the UAE created 54 million designs in the past year, with strong adoption of AI tools that allow instant editing and visual storytelling. Clark said the region’s young, digital-native workforce is pushing companies to modernise how they communicate.

The platform is also leaning heavily into AI, launching its foundational design model that generates full, editable layouts rather than static images – addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of AI-generated content. “There will always be a need for human editing,” Clark said. “But AI can now generate designs that are actually usable.”

As video creation becomes frictionless, Clark predicts CEOs will increasingly produce their own visual content for staff and followers, rather than relying solely on comms teams. Authenticity, he said, is now the cornerstone of executive communication.

“Be visual first, and maintain your own tone of voice,” he advised. “People engage more when they feel the content truly comes from you.”

Whether the newsletter fully disappears is still up for debate — but in Canva’s world, the future of workplace communication looks a lot more like TikTok than a text-heavy PDF.