SYDNEY & LOS ANGELES - Thursday, 16. April 2026
Transforming Canva into the system at the centre of how work gets done, powered by Canva’s rapidly advancing frontier AI lab
(BUSINESS WIRE) -- Canva, the world’s leading visual communication platform, today announced its most significant evolution since launching in 2013 with the introduction of Canva AI 2.0, ushering in a new era of AI-powered creation as the company transforms itself into the system where work gets done.
Just over a decade ago, Canva ushered in a new generation of design, transforming complex, expensive desktop software into a simple, powerful, and interoperable platform in the browser. It replaced intimidating blank pages with millions of templates, and manual, pixel-by-pixel editing with intuitive drag-and-drop creation, becoming one of the most widely used platforms in the world, with more than a quarter of a billion people now using Canva every month. Today’s announcement, unveiled at the company’s flagship Canva Create event in Los Angeles, marks the beginning of the next era of creation.
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.
A Powerful New Architecture Layer
Canva AI 2.0 introduces a powerful new architecture layer that reimagines the entire design process, making it easier than ever to bring an idea to life. It marks Canva’s biggest shift since bringing design from complex desktop software into the browser.
Here’s what’s new:
Conversational Design brings ideas to life from natural language prompts or dictation. Creation is no longer limited to a blank page or the perfect template. Just describe an idea, goal, or rough structure, and Canva AI generates a fully editable design with structure, brand, and layout from the start. Unlike traditional AI tools that produce a single output and stop there, Canva AI 2.0 stays with you throughout the entire creative process. It maintains context as your ideas evolve, helping you brainstorm, refine, and iterate at every step.
Agentic Orchestration unlocks AI that finally works with you. Describe a goal, share a rough sketch, or provide a brief, and Canva AI brings it to life through a single conversation. Behind the scenes, a new orchestration layer brings together Canva’s full suite of tools to turn ideas into complete outcomes. It understands your intent, selects the right tools, and coordinates them to create everything you need, in every format. Ask it to “create a multi-channel campaign plan to launch our latest summer products,” and it will generate everything, ready to refine or publish.
Object-Based Intelligence enables precise editing without starting over. Ask Canva AI to change something, and only that changes. Swap an image, adjust a headline, or refine a font without affecting anything else. Powered by Canva’s foundational Design Model, everything Canva AI 2.0 creates remains layered and fully editable, just as if it were built in the editor from scratch. Teams can jump in to collaborate, comment, and iterate as the work evolves.
Living Memory gets smarter with you. With persistent memory, Canva AI understands how you work, keeping every project on brand, applying your style automatically, and evolving over time. It learns from your work and adapts to you and your team’s preferences and goals, becoming more helpful with every use. Personalise it with your existing designs to generate a custom memory library and an “About Me” profile that continuously tailors your experience.
Canva AI is available across the Visual Suite where it can be used to create and edit presentations, documents, spreadsheets, social media posts, and more through a simple conversational interface.
Intelligent New Workflows
Canva AI 2.0 goes beyond design generation to become the system at the centre of how work gets done. From a quick design to a full campaign, it brings everything together in one place, unifying tools, workflows, and outputs to supercharge everyday work, making Canva the place where teams start and end their day.
Connectors: Bring Your Work Together. Instead of being scattered across dozens of apps, Canva AI brings everything together, so you have everything you need to create. Connect tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, and Calendar, and Canva AI can draw on your conversations, content, and schedule to create exactly what you need. Generate meeting summaries from Zoom transcripts, turn customer emails into personalised sales pitches, or create company newsletters based on activity across Slack. Initial connectors include Slack, Notion, Zoom, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar, with more to come.
Scheduling: Work On Autopilot. Set tasks once, and Canva AI runs them automatically in the background, even while you’re offline. Generate a full batch of social content every Friday, tailored for every channel and translated into the top ten languages spoken in the United States. Or have Canva AI scan your emails each morning and create briefing documents for your upcoming meetings based on your calendar. The work gets done in the background, ready when you log in, compressing hours of effort into seconds.
Web Research: Insights, Built In. Web Research brings insights directly into your work. Run research on demand or schedule it in the background, and Canva AI gathers and structures information from across the web. From business proposals to market exploration, everything is delivered into your design as structured, editable content, ready to refine and share.
Brand Intelligence: On Brand By Default. Brand Intelligence ensures every design starts and remains on-brand. Just connect your data or describe what you need, and Canva AI automatically applies your fonts, colours, and style to every design. You can also instantly update existing work by asking Canva AI to apply your latest brand, turning hours of manual updates into a single step done in seconds.
Canva Code 2.0: Now with HTML Importing. Describe any interactive idea and Canva AI builds a complete, responsive experience, structured, interactive, and designed to work across every device. Now with HTML importing, Canva unlocks one of the fastest-growing AI formats. Instead of regenerating code for every change, you can bring any HTML file or AI-generated experience into Canva and edit it with Canva’s visual editor, no rebuilds required. From there, everything happens in one place. Add forms that collect responses in Canva Sheets, drop interactive elements into presentations, or publish to your own domain with SSO protection.
Sheets AI: Smarter Spreadsheets Without the Hassle. Describe what you need and Canva AI 2.0 generates a fully structured, beautifully-designed sheet, populated with real data and research. From budget trackers to project timelines, content calendars to research tables, your sheet arrives structured, designed, and with all of the right data.
Template Remix: An Infinite 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.
A Rapidly Advancing Frontier AI Lab
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:
Canva Proteus, which enables Style Transfer, is 2x faster and 23x cheaper.
Canva Lucid Origin, which enables image generation, is 5x faster and 30x cheaper.
Canva I2V, which enables image to video, is 7x faster and 17x cheaper.
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
Canva also announced the ability to bring AI-generated artifacts 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.
About Canva
Launched in 2013, Canva is the world’s leading all-in-one platform for visual communication and collaboration. Built to empower everyone to design, Canva serves the creative and design needs of enterprises, small businesses, consumers, and students in more than 190 countries worldwide. Whether you’re a novice taking your first steps in design, or a creative professional seeking powerful tools, Canva ensures users have what they need to transform an idea into something beautiful. Underpinned by the world's most comprehensive library of designer-made content, Canva is powered by a suite of products and proprietary AI tools that elevate how individuals and teams create, collaborate, and communicate with ease.
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