265 million people use Canva every month. Starting today, most of them will be talking to it instead of clicking through it.
Canva announced AI 2.0 on April 16 — its most significant architectural change since the company launched in 2013. The update replaces the template-first workflow that made Canva famous with something closer to a full creative agent: you describe what you want, and the system figures out which tools to use, in what order, to get there.
The technical shift underneath is a new proprietary foundation model — Canva calls it the Canva Design Model — built specifically to understand visual hierarchy, layout structure, and brand consistency. Unlike generic image generators that produce flat files, everything this model outputs is fully layered and editable from the start. It’s a meaningful distinction. You don’t get an image you then have to reconstruct; you get a working design.
But the foundation model is really just the engine. What Canva is betting on is the layer above it: agentic orchestration. Describe a goal — say, a newsletter based on last week’s Slack activity — and the AI pulls the relevant messages through a connector, assembles a layout, applies your brand guidelines from memory, and hands you something usable. COO Cliff Obrecht said the team “had to rearchitect the whole Canva platform” to make this work, and the claim checks out. This is not a chatbot bolted onto a design tool.
The Memory Library is one of the more underrated pieces. It tracks how you work, stores your brand assets, and applies your visual style automatically to new projects. The practical effect: the more you use it, the less you have to explain yourself each time.
Canva’s timing is deliberate. Adobe’s shares are down 30% over the past year and Figma’s valuation collapsed 85% from its IPO peak as AI image and video tools eroded the case for traditional design software. Canva, meanwhile, has quietly become the third most-used generative AI web product in the world — behind Google Gemini, ahead of DeepSeek. Its proprietary models run at costs Canva says are 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives. That cost structure is what makes the $42 billion private valuation defensible.
AI 2.0 launches today as a research preview, capped at the first million users who sign up. Connectors cover Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Zoom, and Google Calendar. New workflows include scheduling, web research, brand intelligence, Sheets AI, and Canva Code 2.0.
The company that spent a decade getting 265 million people to make things in a browser is now asking them to just say what they want.
Sources
Canva Newsroom Fortune TechCrunch 9to5Mac
This article is AI-generated.
