Canva is officially ‘an AI platform with design tools’

FastCompany: 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.” [Image: Canva] 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? In response, Perkins pulls up an old idea from 2011 called Canvas Chef, which looks a lot like the Google Search page but with wood paneling and some kitchen kitsch.

“From the very early stages, we always believed that you could just be able to type in whatever you want and kind of get kickstarted straight away,” she says. “Obviously, it has been a very long journey to get to this point in time, but really, that is actually what we’re launching today.” Canva AI 2.0 looks like Perkins’s 15-year-old vision, and also the Canva you already know. The real difference now is that Canva’s existing AI tab—which is pretty much a search bar—has been supercharged with more capabilities. A big upgrade is around connecting services.

You can now link Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, Zoom, and Notion—plus it’ll crawl for an answer on the web, or even search your old Canva projects—allowing Canva to bring in relevant information that I imagine will be particularly valuable to marketers . [Image: Canva] Whereas you used to be able to create a somewhat generic deck from a prompt, now you can infuse that deck with data that’s lurking in your emails or spreadsheets. Other upgrades allow you to do a lot more when AI-editing that deck. Formerly, it was a one-shot, generate-the-whole-thing-for-me ask.

Now, you can actually edit individual slides with AI prompts instead of starting over. Similar capabilities exist for brand templates. Before, if you didn’t start a project with your brand standards, you couldn’t always update them retroactively. Now, AI will transform any design you throw at it to be more on-brand. [Image: Canva] And of course, Canva will develop interactive projects, too, which publish straight to the web. “When we launched Canva, the huge innovation was we went from pixel editing, where you had to very deeply know the tools, to object editing, where you could just lay things out,” says Perkins.

“And now with Canva AI 2.0 we’re actually moving into concept editing, where you can put in a concept it can then assemble it for you on the fly.” That said, Canva isn’t removing any of the physical tools people are used to. For this big update and grand repositioning, Canva’s vibe is largely unchanged. The more radical updates live under the hood, developed by Canva’s 100+ person AI research team. Multi-agents made invisible Behind the scenes, Canva provides this upgraded AI toolset by offering AI agents to its users—but those users never actually see them.

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Canva's rebranding to emphasize AI integration is significant for the design industry, showcases a notable shift in strategy, and provides actionable insights for brand strategy professionals focused on digital transformation.