The key 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 leans into this paradigm in the latest version of the Canva AI assistant, which uses the AI model to allow users to create editable designs with text prompts. Users can describe what they want it to build and the bot will call up the required tools and find some options. The assistant uses layers to make designs, which gives users the flexibility to modify different aspects of the final product as they see fit.
The update comes as Canva works to make the AI assistant central to users’ workflows and add more features like image creation and website creation.
Canva’s competitors also seem to be working towards a similar goal. This week, Adobe released a Firefly AI assistant that can use the company’s various apps to do tasks, and Figma last month supported AI agents on its platforms with MCP server.
Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht noted that while many companies are trying to merge workflows, businesses prefer to perform the final steps of editing and publishing in Canva.
“I think a lot of small businesses start and end their day, and will do a lot of their workflows entirely, in Canva,” Obrecht said. “We also work incredibly well with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, so if someone is doing their agent workflows in those products, they can call Canva, get content, and bring it back into those LLMs. But it always has to end up doing the last mile of editing, collaboration, and development. That’s where Obrech is really strong.”
While a large portion of Canva’s revenue comes from individuals and small teams, its business is showing promising 100 percent year-over-year growth, Obrecht said. He added that the company, most recently valued at $42 billion, per PitchBookit will probably be released 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 let the AI bot create context by reading emails, chats, files, and meeting data. The company is also adding a web research skill so the AI bot can browse the web to do tasks for you.
The update also adds scheduling as a feature, so you can tell the AI bot to schedule recurring tasks to run in the background. However, this feature will only create a draft that you can review and publish.
Canva also improves existing AI tools. Its AI code generator can now input HTML, and users can use text messages to describe the kind of spreadsheets they want to create.
The company says it has improved the efficiency of its AI models, claiming that the Lucid Origin image generation model is now 5x faster and 30x cheaper, and the 12V image-to-video model is 7x faster and 17x cheaper.
Canva AI 2.0 is in research preview this week, and the company plans to make it available to all users in the coming weeks.
