Canva AI 2.0 transforms design platform with memory, automation, and third-party integrations

Canva's AI assistant can now call various tools to make designs for you | TechCrunch

The core promise of new AI platforms is that you can describe your task to the AI assistant, let it plan the task and use the relevant tools for you, and keep your preferences in mind for future tasks. This is especially important for design professionals, as they want to have a predictable, automated workflow for creating content and media assets. Canva is leaning into this paradigm in the latest version of its Canva AI assistant, which uses its AI model to let users create editable designs with text prompts. Users can describe what they want it to make, and the bot will call the required tools and come up with a few options. The assistant uses layers to make designs, which gives users the flexibility to tweak different aspects of the final product as they see fit. The update comes as Canva has been working on making its AI assistant central to users' workflows and adding more features such as image generation and website generation. Canva's competitors also seem to be working towards a similar goal. This week, Adobe launched a Firefly AI assistant that can use the company's various apps to do tasks, and Figma last month baked in support for AI agents in its platforms with an MCP server. Canva's co-founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht, noted that while many companies are trying to merge workflows, businesses prefer to execute the final steps of editing and publishing on Canva. "I think a lot of small businesses start and end their day, and they'll do a lot of their workflows completely, in Canva," Obrecht said. "We also work incredibly well with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, so if someone is doing their agentic workflows in those products, they can call Canva, get content, and they can get it back into those LLMs. But they always need to end up doing the final mile of editing, collaboration and deployment. That's where we really are strong," Obrecht added. While a large chunk of Canva's revenue comes from individual and small teams, its enterprise business is showing promising growth of 100% year-on-year, Obrecht said. He added that the company, most recently valued at $42 billion, per PitchBook, will likely go public next year. As part of this update, Canva is also adding integrations with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Zoom, so users can choose to allow the AI bot to build context by reading email, conversations, files, and meeting data. The company is adding a web research skill, too, so the AI bot can browse the internet to do tasks for you. The update also adds scheduling as a feature, so you can tell the AI bot to schedule repeatable tasks to run in the background. This feature will only create a draft that you can review and post, though. Canva is refining its existing AI tools, too. Its AI code generator can now import HTML, and users can use text prompts to describe the kind of spreadsheets they want to generate. The company says that it has improved its AI models' efficiency, claiming that its Lucid Origin image-generation model is now 5x faster and 30x cheaper, and its 12V image-to-video model is 7x faster and 17x cheaper. Canva AI 2.0 is launching in research preview this week, and the company plans to make it available to all users in the coming weeks.

Canva Really Wants to Be Your Workplace AI Bestie

In the age of generative AI, it seems like every tech company has become an AI company overnight. Creative companies aren't immune, as Canva proved this week with the launch of what it calls Canva AI 2.0 at its annual Canva Create conference. Canva is no stranger to AI. It's been investing in proprietary AI design models for years and acquiring AI companies such as Leonardo to incorporate into its graphic design program. But this is the strongest sign yet that the company is betting its future on AI. Canva's journey with AI has led to a "really significant shift," Robert Kawalsky, global head of product, told CNET. "We've actually flipped the platform on its head," Kawalsky said. "Over the last few years, Canva was a design platform with AI tools, and it's really now an AI platform with design tools and design capabilities as part of it." The new Canva AI capabilities extend beyond the graphic and social designs the company is known for. It introduced a host of third-party integrations, called connectors, so you can access Canva's AI on Slack, Notion, Zoom, Google apps and more. The idea is to interact with Canva's AI like you would with ChatGPT or Copilot, if that's what you want. You can have Canva's AI prep for and summarize meetings, create files and search the web for insights. You can also schedule it to do agentic tasks in advance, such as send you reminders at the beginning and end of your work days. It's also upgrading its previous AI launches that are more business-focused, including its AI coding, spreadsheet and email assistant. Canva's updated AI experiences are launching now in a research preview, with broader access rolling out over the next few weeks. Canva has always been known for being a more beginner-friendly alternative to creative software programs such as Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. It made sense when Canva dove into creative AI, which is often touted as a way for non-artistic or beginner creators to make professional-looking content quickly. But creative AI is controversial, especially because many models are built using the work of artists without their permission or compensation. There's no one-click button to turn off Canva AI, which some creators might want. But you can adjust your privacy settings to control the access Canva AI has to your data and your work.

Canva's AI 2.0 update goes all in on prompt-powered design tools

Canva has overhauled its design and workspace suite as it attempts to become the ultimate centralized hub for AI-powered content creation. The platform announced its Canva AI 2.0 update today, introducing updated tools and new prompt-based editing capabilities that allow users to make or adjust their work by describing what they want to create to Canva's AI assistant in their own words. The update includes a new orchestration layer for Canva's AI models that lets creatives and marketers access the platform's entire suite of tools from a single, unified conversational interface. That means users can ask the chatbot to perform actions like "create a multi-channel campaign plan to launch our latest summer products," with Canva automatically generating everything "ready to refine or publish." "Canva AI 2.0 transforms Canva into a conversational, agentic platform where teams can go from idea to execution in one place," the company said in its press release. "The result is a powerful creative partner across the entire process, from the spark of an idea to the final output." The idea is that this will save time compared to using specific Canva tools manually, removing labor-intensive tasks and allowing creatives to focus on polishing finer details instead. Canva says the AI 2.0 update marks its "biggest shift since bringing design from complex desktop software into the browser," and that it "marks the beginning of the next era of creation." If that sounds familiar then you may have seen that Adobe made similar claims about its own prompt-based editing shift, which it announced yesterday ahead of Canva's updates. "Just describe an idea, goal, or rough structure, and Canva AI generates a fully editable design with structure, brand, and layout from the start," said Canva. "Unlike traditional AI tools that produce a single output and stop there, Canva AI 2.0 stays with you throughout the entire creative process." Canva says AI 2.0 adds persistent memory features that learns from users' work over time, allowing it to apply personalized styles that keep branding and aesthetics consistent. The update also introduces "Object-Based Intelligence" for more precise editing via text-prompts, which means creatives can adjust specific parts of generated designs, such as images, text, and font styles, without altering the rest of the image. Canva users are also getting some tooling updates, including support for HTML imports in Canva Code, and a unified connector interface for third-party integrations like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, and Calendar. You can check out the full list of everything being announced today over on Canva's announcement page. Canva AI 2.0 is launching today as a research preview, rolling out to the first one million people who access the Canva homepage. Access will later expand to more users "over the weeks ahead," according to Canva, though a date for the full public launch hasn't been announced yet.

Canva starts previewing a more powerful version of its AI assistant

Adobe isn't the only company releasing a new AI assistant this week. Ahead of its Create event in Los Angeles today, Canva announced Canva AI 2.0. Building on its existing AI assistant, the company is billing the release as its most significant update since the platform first launched in 2013, and the culmination of years of investment to build its own foundational design models. As you might imagine, it all starts with a conversational interface that allows you to describe an idea or goal and the system will start generating a design to match. Under the hood, there's a new orchestration layer that allows the model to use all of Canva's disparate tools to accomplish complex, multi-step tasks. For instance, the company suggests you could use Canva AI to create a multi-channel advertising campaign, and the software will generate everything you need to get that off the ground. If edits are required, the company says Canva AI avoids one of the pitfalls of many other image generation models. It's possible to edit every visual element the system generates, just like if they were created with a traditional image editor. As a result, you can do things like swap out images and tweak fonts without affecting any other part of a design. To bring everything together, Canva has built persistent memory into the tool. The more you use Canva AI, the better the system will get at applying your personal taste and style to future generations. According to the company, it also has a context window that is long enough to maintain coherence until you arrive at a final design. Alongside those enhancements, Canva is adding support for new workflows that expand what you can do with its software, starting with connections that allow its models to pull data from other apps, including Notion, Slack, Zoom, Gmail, Google Calendar and more. Users can also schedule tasks for Canva AI to complete in the background, and the company has even baked in deep research capabilities into the tool. The coding function Canva previously offered has been upgraded to include support for HTML imports, allowing users to bring any HTML file or AI-generated experience into Canva's visual editor to tweak the design of it without breaking things. For brands, the company is also offering a tool that can process their visual identity and apply it to new and existing designs. As a casual observer, it might seem like Canva is trend chasing, but Danny Wu, the company's head of AI, argues the new AI tools represent a natural evolution for Canva. "This is something we've been dreaming of and working towards for quite a while," he tells Engadget. "Even before ChatGPT was a thing, we were thinking, 'what if we don't have a template that matches your needs?' ... So I wouldn't describe this as a pivot or shift, we've been wanting to offer these kinds of capabilities all along as part of our mission to make design simple." If you want to give Canva's new tools a try for yourself, Canva AI 2.0 is available as a research preview starting today. The first 1 million people who visit the Canva website will get first access, with availability gradually expanding to more users over the coming weeks. As before, access to Canva's AI features remains included in the company's free offering, though it's also introducing a new AI Pass add-on that significantly increases rate limits for users.

Canva AI 2.0 introduces memory, connectors, automated workflows - 9to5Mac

At Canva Create today, the company is making its biggest push yet into the agentic design field with the release of the research preview of Canva AI 2.0. Here's what's new. With the introduction of Canva AI 2.0, the platform is launching a unified conversational interface for design, automation, and content creation, based on the company's Proteus, Lucid Origin, and I2V generative image and video models, which are "up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives." In practice, today's news means users can now use natural language-based prompts to describe what they need, while Canva's new agentic system generates designs and handles the tools and workflows needed to create, edit, automate, and even publish work across the platform. Here's Canva on the news: Powered by Canva's frontier AI lab and years of investment in foundation models for design, Canva AI 2.0 transforms Canva into a conversational, agentic platform where teams can go from idea to execution in one place. The result is a powerful creative partner across the entire process, from the spark of an idea to the final output. Canva AI 2.0 combines a new architecture layer with workflow tools that extend beyond design generation into research, automation, and task management. The architecture layer powers Canva's core AI experience, with features including, according to the company: On top of the architecture layer, Canva AI 2.0 also introduces workflow features aimed at making the platform more useful for planning, collaboration, and day to day work, beyond the design process itself. These include: Canva AI 2.0 launches today as a research preview, available to the first million users to join in from the Canva homepage. The company says "access will expand progressively to more users over the coming weeks."

'Productivity and creativity shouldn't live in separate silos': Why Canva's AI push is no different to its core principles of democratizing design

For decades, work and creativity have been measured separately. Productivity tools like spreadsheets and documents were built for efficiency, while creativity lived elsewhere inside specialist tools that often required specialist training. "They had been told themselves that they weren't a designer, or they weren't creative," Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins explained in a behind-doors session for journalists at the company's annual Canva Create conference. Canva's mission has always been to "empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device," and its co-founders only see AI as one step in its long-term strategy to achieve this. Where AI sits in Canva's latest suite Traditional design workflows require active collaboration between multiple teams and the use of multiple tools, creating bottlenecks and wasting hours in repetitive labor. To close the gap, the Australian tech firm, which now operates on a $4 billion annual recurring revenue rate, has spent the past 13 years laying the foundations for the Visual Suite. Think Docs, Sheets and Presentations; Social, Photo Editor and Video. Everything you interact with. This year with the launch of Canva AI 2.0, the company goes one step further to democratizing design by eliminating the need for specialist skills, enabling faster iteration and even automating repetitive tasks. In some ways, the message was that workers can go back to doing the work they signed up to do - brand leads can continue to build out brand guidelines, marketers can generate consistent assets, communicators can craft effective messages. Somehow all separately, but all in unison. "We have always believed that creativity and productivity shouldn't live in separate tools," co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams declared on stage in front of around 6,000 live attendees. Will Canva make designers superfluous? With content creation at an all-time high, company execs acknowledge the potential tension and scepticism that comes with. But even with AI lowering the barrier to entry, the company insists that expertise still matters. "We think in the age of AI, craft is actually more important than ever," EMEA Managing Director Duncan Clark explained in an interview with TechRadar Pro. As of early 2026, Canva reports 265,000 monthly active users with continued growth, with Clark hinting that AI is actually enabling more people to design rather than it replacing their roles. Zooming out Canva's vision clearly represents a broader industry shift, with Microsoft embedding design tools into its Office software, Google blending AI into its Workspace suite and Adobe seemingly covering all bases but with what's criticized to be a portfolio that's both expansive and expensive. "I think that nimbleness and being able to really orientate the company towards the biggest goal is very much what's required in this new era," Perkins concluded, hopeful that Canva's youthfulness could give it the edge over more established giants going forward.

Canva relaunches as AI-first platform with new agentic tools

Canva, the design platform with 265 million monthly users, has launched a rebuilt version of its product called Canva AI 2.0, replacing its template-first approach with AI agents that build and iterate designs from conversational prompts. Rather than selecting a template, users type what they need in plain language -- say, a 12-page trip planning deck -- and an AI agent assembles and refines the design. Integration with external services including Gmail, Slack $WORK, and Zoom $ZM enables content generation across platforms, and a persistent memory feature tracks individual working patterns over time. Designs can update automatically when brand imagery changes. "We had to rearchitect the whole Canva platform," Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht told Fortune. He described a scenario in which the system searches the web overnight for trending topics, then generates and schedules social media posts entirely on its own. "It can help you complete your whole job." The relaunch extends Canva beyond design into workflow automation, putting it in more direct competition with Microsoft $MSFT and Google $GOOGL Workspace, according to Bloomberg. The agents are capable of pulling information from Slack and Google Calendar, and can be configured to manage tasks like memos autonomously. The company has developed a proprietary AI model trained for design work, with capabilities that include per-object photo editing, multi-layer poster generation, and access to its extensive template library. According to the company, its AI infrastructure delivers speeds seven times greater and costs thirty times lower than what it calls comparable frontier models. Danny Wu, Canva's head of AI products, told Bloomberg the platform had handled upward of 50 trillion tokens over the past year, with March alone accounting for more than 10 trillion. To fund the overhaul, Canva has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into AI and acquisitions. Among its recent acquisitions are Leonardo AI, an image-generation startup purchased in 2024, along with agent-building platform Simtheory and marketing automation firm Ortto, both of which Fortune reported were bought within the past few weeks. Canva will offer tiered pricing for the new AI tools. Free users receive a limited credit allowance, while an "AI pass" tier at $100 a month unlocks a larger quota. At the top tier, enterprise customers -- a segment generating $500 million in annual recurring revenue -- are granted the broadest set of AI capabilities. The company, which reported $4 billion in revenue for 2025, is valued at $42 billion based on recent secondary share sales. CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins told Bloomberg she experienced the preceding two years as a 'long dark tunnel,' consumed by development work whose outcome remained uncertain. "The world is shifting," she said. Generative AI "is the biggest change in all of our lifetime." The announcement arrives at a moment when software valuations have been squeezed by market anxiety over what AI developers -- OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic among them -- could do to incumbents' revenue. Adobe $ADBE stock is down more than 30% over the past 12 months. Because Canva remains off public markets, its $42 billion valuation -- established through recent secondary share transactions -- has not been subject to the same investor pressure. "We've fortunately avoided being hit by that SaaS apocalypse," Obrecht told Fortune.

Canva can now automate repetitive tasks and help you build interactive experience without coding

New automation tools can handle recurring tasks in the background, while updated no-code features let you create and edit interactive projects using simple prompts. Canva's AI 2.0 update goes beyond its new conversational design workflow and app integrations. It also introduces automation and improved coding tools aimed at simplifying repetitive tasks and making it easier to create more advanced experiences without technical expertise. Automate recurring work in the background Canva's new scheduling system allows users to set up tasks that run automatically, even when they're offline. This includes generating batches of social media posts tailored for different platforms, preparing daily meeting briefings based on emails and calendar events, or translating content into multiple languages. Users can also schedule more complex workflows, such as generating weekly content or summarising incoming information on a recurring basis. These tasks run in the background and are ready when users return, effectively compressing hours of manual work into a few automated steps. Recommended Videos For example, a marketing team could schedule campaign assets across channels every week, while a manager could receive auto-generated summaries of upcoming meetings each morning. These automated workflows reduce the need for constant manual input and help ensure routine tasks are completed on time. Create and edit interactive projects without code The platform is also expanding its no-code capabilities with Canva Code 2.0, which allows users to generate interactive, responsive experiences using simple prompts instead of writing code. This includes things like forms, interactive elements, and embeddable content that can be used across presentations and websites. A new HTML import feature takes this further by letting users bring in existing or AI-generated projects and edit them visually within Canva. Instead of regenerating code for every change, users can refine specific elements directly in the editor, making iteration faster and more flexible. This approach is similar to emerging AI-powered coding tools like Rplit or Cursor, which generate functional apps from prompts. However, Canva focuses on making these outputs easier to edit, customize, and publish with a visual interface, lowering the barrier for non-technical users.

Two years in the making: Canva AI 2.0 required an entire re-architecturing effort, and its yours to try if you can find the easter egg

* Canva wants to be thought of as an AI-first platform that continues to democratize design * Asset generation and editing is about to get vastly better with layering * The AI is personalized with memory, but still stays within brand At its Create conference in Los Angeles, Canva lifted the wraps off a project two-or-more years in the making, Canva AI 2.0, marking a fundamental shift in how its software will get used. Four years after the business launched the Visual Worksuite (now just Visual Suite) with the then-new Docs and an updated version of Presentations, Canva now wants to become an AI platform with design tools, instead of a design platform with AI tools. In doing so, the company's going all-in on agentic AI and autonomy, which it sees as paramount to continuing its work to democratize design for all. Canva AI 2.0 is Canva's biggest shift yet Core to Canva AI 2.0 is a three-tiered approach to getting things done - sitting on top is the Visual Suite, which we've all become familiar with by this point. Beneath that, though, are AI and context. Some of the new tools being launched and refined in what is essentially Canva's "re-architecture" are the same conversational interface across the entire design journey and two crucial but overlooked asset generation benefits - layered object intelligence and iterative agentic editing. Speaking at the event, co-founders Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams criticized existing AI chatbots for having to re-generate entire pixels to make edits, trying their best to keep everything else the same. Conversely, Canva AI 2.0 builds out an asset in multiple layers and elements, so that each part can be edited by either the AI or a human worker. As for existing images, including those already generated by AI, importing them into Canva will automatically decipher them and generate layers for easier revisions. Crucially, Canva will also be able to generate a memory file for users, teams and orgs (which can be edited and refined) to personalize content better by preferences, while access to brand guidelines keeps fonts, colors and other rules get applied for maximum consistency. Canva AI 2.0 is launching today under research preview, and in true Canva style, it will become available to the first million users who discover it through an easter egg. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Canva Create - Canva launches its mission to democratize AI automation in the workplace

Canva yesterday set out its pitch to expand beyond visual design to become the agentic automation platform for all of your work. On the keynote stage at its annual Canva Create conference, the company's three co-founders described their ambition to broaden access to AI capabilities in the same way it has set out to put visual design in the hands of non-specialists. Cliff Obrecht, Co-Founder and COO, says: We're going to do what we've always done, which is essentially take what is constrained and not used by many and quite difficult, expensive and hard to figure out, and bring that to the masses -- make complex things simple. We did this with design many years ago, and we're going to do this with agentic AI -- really bring the full power of agentic AI to the people who don't currently access it. That vision is brought to life with the launch of Canva AI 2.0, a complete makeover of the Canva platform that puts agentic AI at its heart. There are five elements to the new agentic architecture. Some are new, some are adaptations of existing features: The most significant of the new intelligent workflows connects Canva AI into third-party applications, for example to bring in context and data from Gmail messages, GDrive files and calendar entries, or from Slack threads. The connectors available at launch or soon after also include Atlassian, Figma, HubSpot, Linea, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, Notion and Zoom. Co-Founder Cameron Adams, Chief Product Officer at Canva, explains: Today, most people have stuff spread out across a ton of different places, and Canva AI connectors enables you to go out to different different sources and incorporate those right into your Canva designs... [For example] you can ask Canva AI to actually go out to your calendar and get it to put together a doc based on the next meeting that you have, and it will produce a fully editable Canva design based off what is in your calendar. A similar workflow is called web research. This goes out to the Web and collects together research on whatever the user asks for, and then structures and formats it as editable content. Examples include compiling a business proposal, preparing competitive market research, or collating information about a B2B sales prospect. The above capabilities will often be coupled with scheduling, a workflow for setting up a repeatable agentic task or process that runs automatically at a set time every day, week or month. Examples include compiling a set of briefing documents for meetings on your calendar that day, generating a batch of social content every week automatically formatted for different channels and languages, or creating a monthly team newsletter with all of your latest news collected from Gmail and Slack, ready to edit before sending it out. Overshadowed by the AI announcements, but much-requested by existing Canva users, a new offline mode was also announced. Available as standard in both desktop and mobile apps, this lets users continue working on an existing design in Canva even when disconnected from the Web, for example when in transit or at other times when connectivity is patchy. Any changes sync automatically once reconnected. Canva also announced a deepened collaboration with Anthropic, embedding access to its visual design capabilities directly into Claude. Coming back to the main announcement, it's the ability to connect to other apps that people use in their day-to-day work, as well as out to the Web, that broadens Canva's reach beyond its traditional domain of design and allows it to target becoming "the place where work happens." Adams comments: I think we're the only scale platform that brings productivity and creativity together, and Canva AI 2.0 is the further expression of that sweet spot in the middle, because we're bringing more of your productivity into Canva. It's already a place that a ton of people do their work in. Docs has been one of our fastest growing design types of all time. We have 100 million people making presentations in Canva every single month. So there's a lot of work being done in Canva already, and having stuff like connectors and web research enables you to bring more of that work into Canva, where you can creatively express it and make amazing visual content that talks about your strategy, about your itineraries and your agenda, brings your team together and enables you to get your message out further. So we're not only the design platform now, we're an AI platform that's bringing your workflows together in an extremely visual way... Now you can do entire tasks in Canva that literally save you hours of work. Being able to pull in stuff like Slack, Gmail, Calendar context enables you to create designs that you probably wouldn't have tackled before. Those weekly newsletters that you send out to your internal team, [you] probably would have put it in the too hard basket because [it] took up too much time, took up too many people. Now you can do that in the space of minutes or even zero seconds, if you've scheduled it beforehand. It's workflows like that that are really exciting that Canva AI 2.0 is enabling. The recent introduction of the Canva Design Model, the vendor's own proprietary foundation model, has been the key to unlocking many of the features of the latest release. It's been part of a broader rearchitecting of the platform and the company as a whole over the past two years that's been necessary to accelerate product development. Obrecht explains: In order to get the product velocity we now have, we needed to replumb the whole organization and our technical stack. We also needed to set up a really robust research function, so we now have a research team of over 100 researchers -- and they're just the hardcore researchers, not the periphery and applied scientists and the delivery folk. And now, once they've got the bedrock of our foundational models built and are focusing on different areas, the velocity of their releases has gone from six months to three months to now every sort of two weeks. And now we're operating at the real pace and velocity of the true frontier AI labs. Whereas its first generation of models took over two years to develop, he says that research team is now able to train, evaluate and deploy new models in as little as a month, driven by advances in training infrastructure, model architectures, and closed-loop reinforcement learning systems. Adams adds: The last six months have enabled us to do stuff that we didn't think would be possible for five, maybe 10 years... Back in October, the Canva Design Model enabled you to generate designs in a pretty good fashion, but actually interacting with the designs themselves through AI was still a bit hard. We also launched Ask Canva at the time, so you could ask Canva through a comment to manipulate certain aspects of your design and also give you some advice on your design. But it couldn't really take action on all the elements in a design. One of the critical things that Canva AI 2.0 does now is it's a full end-to-end creative partner. It's there with you at every stage of the creative process. It's not just one prompt that you start with and then a bunch of manual editing that you have to do. It is there if you start your own design, or if you get it to generate a design when you're halfway through a pitch deck, you can ask it to tweak one slide, you can get it to introduce five slides. You can get it to create multiple social media posts. It's there at every stage with you, and it intimately understands not just this design, but also all of your Canva context. It knows other docs you've created, other content you've created, and it can bring that to bear as it's working with you in the current design. Canva's trademark zeal for taking unnecessarily complex technology and simplifying it down to the key essentials shines through in this announcement. That's not to denigrate the underlying technology, which is remarkably advanced and gives Canva a unique proprietary advantage in its core realm of visual design. There's nothing dumbed-down about either the foundation model or the AI capabilities that run on top of it. What Canva has engineered is on a par with what we're seeing from other enterprise application vendors that are leading the charge to reinvent their platforms for agentic AI -- the same conversational AI interface, deep orchestration capabilities, a collection of crucial skills and actions, connectors to other apps and knowledge stores, and a strong contextual framework for making sense of the user's intentions and delivering the outcomes they expect. It's just that Canva is making all of that available without its users having to understand any of how it all works under the hood, or have to figure out how to plug it all together. I was particularly impressed by the memory library, which stores the all-important context that will govern how Canva AI brings together knowledge and actions to deliver the outcomes users ask for. Setting the right context framework is fundamental to getting the best results from generative AI's probabilistic technology, but creating this requires a new approach and skills that differ from those required for the deterministic workflows of conventional software. It's something we're all having to learn. I think it's a genius move for Canva to start this off with a simple 'About Me' document that users can edit for themselves, easing them into this new way of working by intriguing them with curiosity about how they appear in the document. That learning through experience can then grow as the library expands over the coming months and years to encompass other context areas. Helping users in this way also helps Canva, because the more accurate its context framework becomes for each of its customers and users, the stickier its platform becomes. Canva has already proven in the visual design realm that it can capture enterprise market share by removing barriers to adoption of its design tools while still supporting enterprise governance. If it can pull off the same trick in the agentic AI realm, it will further cement its position. But this is a highly competitive field, with every enterprise vendor -- plus Anthropic and other AI-native players -- trying to achieve the same contextual lock-in to their own platforms. Succeeding in visual design is one thing. It's quite another proposition to persuade people to put a visual design platform at the center of their work -- in preference to, say, a document creation, content storage, team collaboration or business operations platform. On the other hand, who's to say that visual design can't prevail in a digital world that is, after all, becoming increasingly multi-modal? We'll have to wait and see how this all turns out.

Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, recasting its platform as an agentic system for work - SiliconANGLE

Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, recasting its platform as an agentic system for work Visual communication platform provider Canva Pty Ltd. today unveiled Canva AI 2.0, an overhaul of its platform that offers a conversational, agentic system aimed at becoming the place where teams start and end their workday. The release, announced at the company's Canva Create event in Los Angeles, is being pitched as Canva's biggest shift since its 2013 launch, when it moved design from desktop software into the browser. Canva AI 2.0 has been designed to transform Canva into a conversational, agentic platform where teams can go from idea to execution in one place and to deliver a creative partner across the entire process, from the spark of an idea to the final output. The new offering is built around four capabilities. The first capability, Conversational Design, generates fully editable designs from natural language prompts, while the second, Agentic Orchestration, coordinates Canva's suite of tools to execute multi-step goals such as building a multi-channel campaign from a single brief. The third capability, Object-Based Intelligence, allows for precise edits to individual elements without regenerating the full design and the fourth, Living Memory, provides persistent context that learns a user's style and brand preferences over time. Alongside the core platform advancements, Canva also introduced a set of workflow features designed to pull outside work into the editor. The new workflow features include connectors that link Canva to Slack, Notion, Zoom, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar to allow the assistant to draw on emails, transcripts and calendar entries to generate briefing documents, sales pitches and newsletters. A new scheduling feature runs tasks in the background on a set cadence and web research pulls structured, editable information into designs on demand. Other additions include Brand Intelligence for automatic brand application, Sheets AI for structured spreadsheet generation and Canva Code 2.0, which now supports HTML importing so users can bring AI-generated code into the visual editor without rebuilding it. Powering the new version of Canva AI is the company's in-house research group, Canva Original Research and Exploration (CORE), which the company said now employs more than 100 researchers. Canva claims its proprietary models are up to seven times faster and 30 times cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives. The models include Canva Proteus for style transfer, Canva Lucid Origin for image generation and Canva I2V for image-to-video. Lastly, Canva now allows artifacts generated by outside AI tools to be imported directly into its editor, where they become editable and collaborative through the platform's drag-and-drop interface and can be published as functional websites. The move is in response to a growing pattern of AI platforms integrating with Canva to give users a path from raw generations to structured, scalable output. Canva AI 2.0 is launching as a research preview today, before initially rolling out to the first one million users who discover it on the Canva homepage, with broader availability in the coming weeks.

Canva is officially 'an AI platform with design tools'

Canva built its 265-million-person audience by being the easy-to-use, template-friendly design tool for everyone. And when generative AI arrived, it quickly integrated the technology. Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it's building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it's launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it's announcing today. But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being "a design platform with AI tools" to becoming an "AI platform with design tools." Connecting with Canva's CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the motivation behind this repositioning. In this age of AI, much of the industry has been discussing what you could call either a flattening or a war between the roles of designers, product managers, and engineers. Was Canva responding to this trend?

Canva now integrates with your work apps so you can get more done without leaving the platform

New connectors let you pull in data from tools like Slack, Gmail, and Google Drive, allowing Canva's AI to turn conversations, files, and more into structured content. In addition to introducing a new conversational, AI-powered design workflow, Canva today announced that it is expanding beyond design with integrations that aim to help users access information from commonly used productivity tools without leaving the platform. The Canva AI 2.0 update is centered around reducing the need to switch between apps while creating and managing projects. Pull data from connected apps With new connectors, users can link Canva to services like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Zoom, and Notion. This allows its AI to pull in context from conversations, files, and schedules to generate relevant content. For example, users can turn meeting transcripts into summaries, convert email threads into structured documents, or generate newsletters based on team activity across Slack. The connectors aim to reduce the friction of moving information between apps and ensure nothing important gets lost in the process. By keeping everything within a single interface, the platform also aims to streamline workflows and save time. Recommended Videos Similar capabilities are already available in other AI tools, which can pull context from documents and conversations in connected apps. However, Canva's approach ties this directly into content creation, allowing users to act on that information without leaving the platform. Content stays consistent and structured across tasks Canva is also adding built-in web research, allowing users to gather and structure information from across the web directly into their projects. Furthermore, a new "Brand Intelligence" feature helps ensure that everything a user generates aligns with their brand's style, tone, and visual identity, reducing the need for manual edits. Additionally, a new "Sheets AI" feature can generate structured spreadsheets populated with relevant data, from project timelines to content calendars. These sheets arrive pre-filled and formatted, ready to use without any setup. Together, these features aim to elevate Canva from a design tool to a more unified workspace, where content creation, data, and context are connected rather than spread across multiple apps. Canva AI 2.0 is launching as a research preview starting today, rolling out to the first one million users who discovered it on the Canva homepage. The company says access will expand to more users over the coming weeks.

Canva AI 2.0 brings vibe design to the platform, letting you generate full designs from a text prompt

Google recently launched an AI tool for creating designs from descriptions. Now, Canva is going down a similar route. The company has announced Canva AI 2.0, a more powerful version of its AI assistant that it claims will fundamentally change how people think about design work. Canva AI 2.0 leans into the "vibe coding" idea but applies it to graphic design, letting users create fully editable designs from text prompts. Instead of starting with a blank canvas and building everything manually in a linear fashion, you just describe what you want, and the assistant calls the required tools and generates a few options to choose from. Whatever it generates is a layered, editable output that can be refined with manual tools or by continuing to chat with the assistant. Every visual element it generates sits on its own layer, giving you the flexibility to tweak anything individually. You can also generate content across multiple formats in one go, perfect for anyone running multi-channel campaigns. Canva has also built persistent memory into the tool, meaning the more you use Canva AI, the better it gets at understanding your personal taste and style. It also maintains a long enough context window to stay coherent all the way through to a final design. Beyond individual assets, Canva AI 2.0 can make changes across an entire project at once, or focus on a single element if that is all you need. The company is also adding integrations with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Zoom. This allows you to generate meeting summaries, turn customer emails into personalized sales pitches, or build a company newsletter straight from Slack activity. A web research skill is coming as well, letting the assistant browse the internet to gather information and complete tasks on your behalf. Canva AI 2.0 is available today as a research preview, with early access for the first 1 million visitors. It will roll out to more users in the coming weeks. The AI features are still part of Canva's free plan, though a new AI Pass add-on is coming for users who need higher rate limits.

Canva AI 2.0 targets Adobe and Figma with fully editable AI outputs

Canva has unveiled significant updates to its AI assistant, enabling users to create editable designs using text prompts, while streamlining workflows for design professionals. The enhancements aim to automate task execution, allowing the assistant to generate multiple design options based on user input and preferences. The new features are part of Canva's strategy to integrate its AI assistant into users' workflows, enhancing productivity for individuals, small teams, and enterprises. Competitors including Adobe and Figma are also expanding their AI offerings, intensifying the industry's competitive landscape. Cliff Obrecht, Canva's co-founder and COO, emphasized that businesses prefer editing and publishing their final products on Canva. "Many small businesses start and end their day in Canva," he said. He noted that while workflows are merging across platforms, the final editing step remains crucial for users. Canva's enterprise segment is rapidly expanding, growing 100% year-on-year, while the company's current valuation stands at $42 billion, according to PitchBook. Obrecht indicated that Canva is expected to go public next year. The updated AI assistant includes integrations with platforms such as Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Zoom, allowing the AI to build context from user interactions. Additionally, a web research feature will enable the AI to browse the internet for relevant information to complete tasks. Canva also introduced a scheduling feature, allowing users to set repeatable tasks that the AI will draft for review. Enhancements to existing AI tools include the ability for the AI code generator to import HTML and generate spreadsheets based on text prompts. Improvements to processing efficiency are also notable, with Canva claiming its Lucid Origin model is now 5x faster and 30x cheaper, while the 12V image-to-video model operates 7x faster and 17x cheaper. Canva AI 2.0 is launching in research preview this week, with broader availability planned for the coming weeks.

Canva AI 2.0 aims to reshape how you turn ideas into polished projects

The update introduces a more conversational, AI-driven workflow that helps users move from a rough idea to a full finished projects without switching tools. Canva today unveiled its AI 2.0 update, introducing a more conversational, AI-powered approach to designing and completing projects. The upgrade aims to take users from a rough idea to a polished result more seamlessly, without the need to switch tools. Create designs by simply describing ideas Instead of beginning with templates or blank pages, users can now describe what they want, and the platform generates a fully structured, editable design. This shifts the process from manual building to guided creation, reducing the need to piece things together from scratch. Behind the scenes, Canva's AI uses what the company calls "agentic orchestration" to understand the user's intent and coordinate different tools automatically. Rather than switching between features, users can stay in a single flow, asking the AI to generate things like a multi-channel campaign plan or refine an existing design with simple prompts. Designs stay editable and adapt to preferences The update also focuses on flexibility, allowing users to make targeted edits with natural-language commands. For example, users can ask the AI to swap an image, adjust a headline, or refine a font, and only those elements will change without affecting the rest of the design. This will make it easier to fine-tune outputs without starting over. A new "Living Memory" feature learns user preferences over time, helping keep their work consistent across projects. It can apply their unique style, branding, and past choices automatically, reducing repetitive adjustments. Together, these changes position the platform less as a design tool and more as a creative collaborator that evolves with the user. Recommended Videos Canva AI 2.0 is available as a research preview to the first million people who discovered it on the Canva homepage starting today. The company plans to expand access to more users in the coming weeks.

Canva's Upgraded AI Suite Brings Agentic Capabilities to Complete Design Tasks

* Canva AI 2.0 can now create multi-channel campaign plans * It is powered by the Canva Design Model * Users can also schedule design tasks on Canva Canva introduced a major upgrade to its artificial intelligence (AI) suite on Thursday. Dubbed Canva AI 2.0, the new suite brings an agentic system that understands layered design and can complete complex tasks using a conversational interface. The suite was first previewed at the Canva Create 2026 event, which was hosted at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, California. New features in the suite include multi-channel campaign design, memory, web research, task scheduling, and an improved overall experience. Canva AI 2.0 Is Here In a newsroom post, the Sydney-based visual communications platform introduced Canva AI 2.0. The upgraded AI suite comes with new features and improvements across all existing features. It is yet to roll out to subscribed users, but the company says that it will become available globally in the coming weeks. The biggest improvement is the introduction of an agentic layer across the entire suite. This turns the Canva AI chatbot from a simple generation tool to a conversational assistant that can perform tasks across the entire platform. Now users can share their design goals via text descriptions, voice messages, or sharing a rough sketch or a design brief, and the agentic chatbot finds the right tools to bring the idea to reality. The company says the chatbot can now maintain context, allowing users to iterate on a generated design in multiple steps. Canva's AI chatbot is also capable of generating multi-channel design projects with a single prompt, eliminating the need for separate prompts for separate designs. The recently released Magic Layers feature also allows the user to take charge of a generated design and make edits across the different layers to create the final output. Using the same architecture, Canva AI can also edit different elements in a design, and keep its actions limited to that single layer. This means if the user wants the chatbot to change the text font or the background lighting, only that element changes, leaving everything else the same. This capability is being called layered object intelligence. Another new introduction is Memory Library. Essentially, the chatbot gets persistent memory, which lets it remember the user's preferences, style guides, and other details in future tasks. Canva says the more a user uses the chatbot, the better it gets at surfacing suggestions and generating designs. Additionally, Canva is also introducing six new connector-based workflows that let the chatbot access third-party tools and their data to generate designs and assets. These include connectors to Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Zoom, and HubSpot. Canva is also bringing the ability to schedule posts to its AI suite. This will allow users to set a time when they need the design output, and even set it to repeat at fixed intervals. The chatbot continues to generate content even if the user is offline. The AI suite's usability will also be improved with the new web research feature. The chatbot can now source and collate information from the Internet and bring it to the user's design projects in a structured, editable format. Apart from this, the update also brings improvements to Canva AI's brand intelligence, Canva Code, and Sheets AI.

Canva unveils new platform, transitions to 'AI platform with design tools' from 'design platform with AI tools' - The Economic Times

Design software company Canva, on Thursday, announced its biggest platform shift to date, to an artificial intelligence (AI)-native stack powered by its own foundational models. The $42 billion company, which has scaled up to 265 million monthly active users and $4 billion in annualised revenue, is now taking the next big leap. Ahead of its reportedly planned listing on Nasdaq, the company unveiled Canva 2.0, marking the transition from being a "design platform with AI tools" to an "AI platform with design tools" as it looks to tap the next generation of users. Canva is already the third most used AI platform globally, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini, as well as the fastest-growing in customer spend on AI products among leading software companies, according to research by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the launch of Canva 2.0, a crowd of 6,000 cheered for Melanie Perkins, the 38-year old cofounder and chief executive of Canva who took the stage in a shimmering blue suit at the YouTube Theatre, Hollywood Park, alongside cofounders Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. ET explains Canva's strategic pivot and important features unveiled at the fourth edition of Canva Create conference in Los Angeles: What is Canva 2.0? Canva is bringing productivity and creativity together in a shared workspace. It is turning design into a chat-based experience where users can generate and edit using prompts. Web research is also built into the design process. It is also introducing 'Living Memory', a feature which remembers users' style, brand, past designs and automatically applies it to new projects. For businesses, brand intelligence can also be seeded into the AI. Using connectors, Canva is integrating with tools such as Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and Zoom, allowing it to pull data from work apps. How does that impact pricing? The platform shift has not changed Canva's core freemium monetisation model. It continues to offer the Pro subscription priced at $18/month and Teams/Business subscription at $25/month along with custom enterprise plans. With the new launch, Canva is also introducing a special AI Pass for $100 per month, which offers Pro users 40 times more AI and Business users 20 times more AI. This is essentially a "universal credit model" which grants more free credits as the user increases consumption. Earlier, users paid fixed plans to unlock features; now, they also get a pool of credits (or tokens) that are consumed as they use AI tools. Free users get limited access to try AI, while paid users receive more credits depending on their tier. For Canva, this means revenue is no longer just about subscriptions, it increasingly scales up with how much users actually use AI on the platform. The investments in AI Research Canva started re-architecting its platform in 2024, with the acquisition of Leonardo AI, an image generation platform. It also decided to step away from costly frontier AI models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic towards investing in its own AI research. Its AI division, the Canva Original Research and Exploration (CORE), has 300 employees including 100 in-house researchers. Canva's unique "design models" (which solve visual AI problems such as removing background) are up to seven times faster and 30 times cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives, the company said. It also invested in self-hosted training, large-scale reinforcement learning and optimised inference infrastructure to make these models compact and cost-efficient. Canva is also working with leading AI chipmakers to produce customised chipsets and has started deploying its AI models with some of those. The growth story Launched in 2013, Canva has raised roughly $612 million from marquee investors including Blackbird Ventures (largest institutional shareholder), Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, General Catalyst, JP Morgan, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton. The company achieved profitability in 2017 and unicorn status in 2018. In 2024, Canva acquired Affinity, a suite of professional creative software tools, and decided to make it free forever. The deal marked one of Canva's biggest strategic moves to compete with traditional Adobe tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Canva has crossed more than 265 million monthly active users globally, of which 31 million are paying users, up 4 million from 2025.. The company reported annualised revenue of more than $4 billion, growing at 40% year-on-year, with over $500 million contribution from the enterprise segment which is growing at 100% annually. Its global workforce has expanded to around 5,300 employees, with new office openings in Mexico, Türkiye and Italy. Canva is expected to list on the Nasdaq rather than the Australian ASX to access deeper liquidity. In 2024, it hired Zoom chief financial officer Kelly Steckelberg, signalling its preparation for public markets. In 2025, it made an employee tender offer which allowed staff to sell up to $3 million in vested equity, a common step taken 12-18 months before a public debut. (The reporter was at the Canva Create event in Los Angeles at the invitation of Canva)

Canva Launches Canva AI 2.0 with Smarter Creation and Productivity Tools

Template Remix: An Inflnite Library of Inspiration. Canva's template library has always been vast, but now, it's truly infinite. Canva AI 2.0 introduces an endless source of inspiration you can explore, remix, and make your own. Start with anything that catches your eye, then use Canva AI to shape it into exactly what you need. Every template becomes a starting point, not a limit. At the core of Canva AI 2.0 is Canva's rapidly advancing frontier AI lab, where more than 100 researchers across Canva Original Research and Exploration (CORE) are building a new class of multimodal foundation models purpose-built for design. This investment has unlocked a major acceleration in Canva's research velocity. The company's first generation of models took over two years to develop. Today, new models are being trained, evaluated, and deployed in as little as a month, driven by advances in training infrastructure, model architectures, and closed-loop reinforcement learning systems. Today, Canva's research efforts span the full stack of visual AI, from image, video, and style transfer to structured design generation and evaluation. The company's proprietary models are optimised not just for output quality, but for speed, editability, and real-world workflows. Canva's models are up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives: To support the scale of this work, Canva is building a vertically integrated AI stack, including self-hosted training, large-scale reinforcement learning pipelines, and optimised inference infrastructure to bring this technology to its more than a quarter of a billion monthly active users. Expanding Across the AI Ecosystem As part of today's launch, Canva also announced it has deepened its collaboration with Anthropic, bringing the power of Canva's Design Engine and Visual Suite directly into Claude. This marks the next chapter in a multi-year partnership between the two companies, and accelerates Canva's broader strategy to embed its platform across every surface where ideas are generated. Users can now bring artifacts from leading AI platforms, including Claude and ChatGPT, directly into Canva. From there, they become instantly editable and collaborative using Canva's simple drag-and-drop editor, and can be published as fully functional websites in just a few clicks. As AI reshapes how content is created, leading platforms are integrating Canva to help users move from draft generations to fully editable, structured, and scalable work. This growing demand has propelled Canva to become the third most-used AI platform in the world, and the fastest-growing in customer spend on AI products among leading software companies, according to new research from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Research Preview Launching April 16 Starting April 16, Canva AI will launch as a research preview, rolling out to the first one million people who discover it on the Canva homepage. From there, access will expand progressively to more users over the coming weeks.

Canva Unveils Agentic Makeover for Its Design Platform | PYMNTS.com

Canva 2.0, announced Thursday (April 16), is being billed by the Australian company as its most significant update ever, turning Canva into "a conversational, agentic platform." "Rather than starting with a template or a blank page, you can now start with an idea, a goal, a brief, a rough sketch, even an unfinished thought - and work through it in conversation with Canva AI," the announcement said. "It assembles designs from individual components with layout, hierarchy, and brand built in from the first output." A report on the launch by Bloomberg News frames the update as a move to position Canva not a target of AI's ability to disrupt the software industry, but as one of the disruptors. "Sometimes there's the things that you have to do," Canva Co-founder Melanie Perkins told Bloomberg in an interview about the company's artificial intelligence push. "It doesn't matter how long it takes and it doesn't matter what it costs." The report says the success of Canva 2.0 will be a crucial test for the company, which competes with Photoshop maker Adobe. The company is moving closer to going public at a time when investors are shifting away from software firms, driven by fears that AI will make these companies less relevant. In addition to concerns about new AI tools, the report added, Canva also faces competition from a new wave of startups offering features like turning a selfie into a social video or creating entire studio photoshoots from a single image. There is also a threat of new design tools from tech giants like Google and Microsoft, Bloomberg pointed out. This week also saw news that AI startup Anthropic is planning to release its new model Claude Opus 4.7 along with a new AI-powered design tool that can generate websites, landing pages and presentations using natural language prompts. As noted here, Anthropic's products until now had covered chat interfaces and developer tools, making this design tool is its first foray into visual and creative workflows. "Design is an upstream input to digital commerce. Product interfaces and landing pages drive conversion," PYMNTS wrote. "When a model generates those assets from a prompt, the cost and time of building digital products falls. Agencies and in-house teams that bill for design work face direct competition from the tool itself."

Canva AI 2.0 with conversational design and agentic workflows announced

Canva has introduced Canva AI 2.0, marking its most significant update since its launch in 2013. With this release, the company is expanding beyond design tools toward becoming a platform where users can manage and complete work using AI. Over the past decade, Canva shifted design workflows from complex desktop software to a browser-based experience built around templates and drag-and-drop editing. Now, with more than 250 million monthly users, the platform is moving into its next phase focused on AI-driven creation and integrated workflows. The announcement was made at the Canva Create event in Los Angeles. At the core of this update is a new architecture layer designed to support conversational and task-based workflows. Built on Canva's in-house AI research and design-focused models, the system enables users to move from an initial idea to a final output within a single interface. Unlike traditional tools that generate one-time results, Canva AI 2.0 maintains context throughout the process. This allows users and teams to refine, iterate, and complete work without restarting or switching between multiple tools. Canva AI 2.0 introduces a set of foundational features that reshape how designs and content are created and edited. Beyond design, Canva AI 2.0 brings workflows and data into a single environment, reducing the need to switch between apps. It supports integrations with tools such as Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Zoom, and Google Calendar. Using these connectors, the platform can pull in existing data and turn it into usable outputs. The platform also includes built-in web research, allowing users to gather and structure information directly into documents and designs. In addition, Brand Intelligence ensures that outputs follow consistent fonts, colours, and styles, while also enabling quick updates to existing work. Canva AI 2.0 also expands its toolset with features focused on interactive content and structured data. These tools are designed to keep both creation and editing within the same workflow. The update is powered by Canva's CORE AI lab, which focuses on multimodal models for design, including image generation, style transfer, and structured layout creation. According to the company, its models offer improvements in both speed and cost: The company also notes that model development timelines have been reduced from over two years to around one month. This is supported by a vertically integrated AI stack that includes training infrastructure and inference systems. Canva is also expanding its role within the broader AI ecosystem through deeper integrations. The company has extended its collaboration with Anthropic to bring Canva's design tools into Claude. It also supports importing outputs from platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude, allowing users to convert generated content into structured, editable, and publish-ready formats within Canva. Canva cites external research indicating that it is among the most widely used AI platforms globally and one of the fastest-growing in AI-related product usage. Canva AI 2.0 is launching as a research preview starting April 16. It will initially be available to the first one million users accessing it through the Canva homepage, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks.

Canva AI 2.0 can create an entire brand campaign from a text prompt

The frontier of creative software is becoming a battle of the AI assistants. With Adobe already making bold claims about its Firefly AI Assistant, Canva's now launched Canva AI 2.0, which it thinks will change the way we think about design work. Canva AI 2.0 is a new conversational orchestration layer that serves as a hub for the browser-based platform's tools. Instead of starting a project with a blank page or canvas and using specific tools to create a design in linear fashion, users dive straight into conversation with the AI assistant, telling it what they want to create. This is intended to save time compared to using individual tools manually, while making it easier to populate and modify a collection of design assets at once. From the initial text prompt, Canva AI 2.0 will generate layered, editable output, which can be modified with manual tools or by continuing to interact with the chatbot. It's like vibe coding for graphic design. You can start out with a clear objective or brief, or try out an incomplete thought and see where it takes you. You can instantly generate content in multiple formats, making it a potential time-saver for multi-channel campaigns. The output comprises individual components with layout, hierarchy, and, Canva says, consistent branding throughout. "Object-based intelligence" means that every element remains editable, so you can continue to refine any individual asset, taking manual control when needed. A key strength is that Canva AI 2.0 can take coordinated action across the entire project, so you can change various assets simultaneously, or you can ask it to modify a single asset. It also allows collaboration, so members of a team can work on a project together. The platform also has what Canva's calling a Memory Library. It can remember styles, helping to keep projects on brand. It also learns from the design decisions you make, which Canva says makes its suggestions more useful the more you use it. Web research lets you gather information from the web and bring it into a design, while Canva Code 2.0 lets you design interactive apps from text prompts. New Connectors can plug into apps like Slack, Google Drive and Zoom, so you can do things like generate meeting summaries from Zoom transcripts. turn customer emails into personalised sales pitches, or build a company newsletter from activity on Slack. Canva AI 2.0 is currently available as a research preview. You can find our more on the website.