The main promise of the new AI platform is that you will be able to explain your tasks to the AI assistant, have the AI assistant plan the task, use related tools, and remember your preferences for future tasks. This is especially important for design professionals who require predictable and automated workflows for creating content and media assets.
Canva leans into this paradigm with the latest version of its Canva AI assistant, using AI models to allow users to create editable designs with text prompts. Users describe what they want to create, and the bot calls up the necessary tools and presents several options. The Assistant uses layers to create designs, giving users the flexibility to adjust different aspects of the final product as needed.
The update comes as Canva works to make its AI assistant central to users’ workflows, adding features such as image generation and website generation.
Canva’s competitors appear to be working toward similar goals. Adobe this week announced its Firefly AI assistant, which can perform tasks using the company’s various apps, and Figma last month built in support for AI agents on its platform with MCP Server.
Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, noted that while many companies are trying to consolidate workflows, companies prefer to perform the final steps of editing and publishing in Canva.
“Many small businesses start and end their day in Canva, and I think many workflows will be done entirely in Canva,” Obrecht said. “We also work really well with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, so if someone is running agent workflows in those products, they can call Canva to grab the content and bring it back to their LLM. But ultimately, you always have to do that last mile of editing, collaborating, and deploying, and that’s where we’re really strong,” Obrecht added.
Although the majority of Canva’s revenue comes from individuals and small teams, Obrecht said its enterprise business is showing encouraging 100% year-over-year growth. He added that the company, which was last valued at $42 billion according to PitchBook, is likely to go public next year.
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As part of this update, Canva is also adding integrations with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Zoom, so users can choose to allow AI bots to read and build context on their email, conversations, files, and meeting data. The company is also adding web research skills, which will allow AI bots to browse the internet and perform tasks on your behalf.
This update also adds scheduling functionality, allowing you to instruct your AI bot to schedule repeatable tasks to run in the background. However, this feature only creates drafts that you can review and post.
Canva is also improving its existing AI tools. Its AI code generator can now import HTML, and users can now use text prompts to describe the type of spreadsheet they want to generate.
The company says it has improved the efficiency of its AI models, claiming that Lucid Origin’s 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 was released as a research preview this week, and the company plans to make it available to all users in the coming weeks.
