The rise of AI marks a significant shift away from decades of information-chasing and toward an emphasis on greater computing power.
Canva co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams refers to this early time as the “Imagination Era.” Meaning: Individuals and enterprises should be able to put creativity into action with AI.
Canva hopes to position itself at the center of this change with a comprehensive new set of tools. The company’s new Creative Operating System (COS) integrates AI into every layer of content creation, creating a single, comprehensive creativity platform rather than a simple, template-based design tool.
“We are entering a new era where we need to rethink how we achieve our goals,” Adams said. “We’re enabling people’s imagination and giving them the tools they need to take action.”
An ‘engine’ for creativity
Adams describes Canva’s platform as a three-layer stack: the top visual suite layer that includes designs, images, and other content; a collaborative Canva AI plane in the center; And a fundamental ownership model is holding it together.
At the heart of Canva’s strategy lies its Creative Operating System (COS). This “engine”, as Adams describes it, integrates documents, websites, presentations, sheets, whiteboards, videos, social content, millions of photos, images, a rich sound library, and numerous templates, charts, and branded elements.
Adams explained that CoS is getting a 2.0 upgrade, but the key advancement is the “middle, critical layer” that fully integrates AI and makes it accessible across different workflows. It gives creative and technical teams a single dashboard to create, edit, and launch all types of content.
The underlying model is trained to understand the “complexity of the design” so that the platform can create different elements – such as photos, videos, textures, or 3D graphics – matching the branding style in real-time without the need for manual adjustments. It also supports live collaboration, meaning teams across departments can co-create.
With unified dashboards, a user working on a specific design can, for example, create a new piece of content (e.g., a presentation) within the same workflow, without switching to another window or platform. Plus, if they create an image and aren’t happy with it, they don’t have to go back and create the image from scratch; They can start editing, changing colors or tones immediately.
Another new capability in COS, “Ask Canva,” provides direct design advice. Users can tag @Canva to receive copy suggestions and smart edits; Or, they can highlight an image and instruct an AI assistant to modify it or generate variants.
“It’s a really unique conversation,” Adams said, noting that this AI design partner is always present. “This is a real collaboration between people and AI, and we think it’s a game-changer.”
Other new features include a 2.0 video editor and interactive form and email designs with drag-and-drop tools. Additionally, Canva is now included with Affinity, its unified app for pro designers incorporating vector, pixel, and layer workflows, and Affinity is “free forever.”
Automating intelligence, supporting marketing
Branding is important for an enterprise; Canva has introduced new tools to help organizations consistently showcase their performance across platforms. The new Canva Grow Engine integrates business objectives into the creative process so teams can workshop, create, distribute and improve ads and other content.
As Adams explained: “It automatically scans your website, figures out who your audience is, what assets you use to promote your products, what message you need to send, what format you want to send it in, it creates a creative for you, and you can deploy it directly to the platform without leaving Canva.”
Marketing teams can now design and launch ads on platforms like Meta, track insights, and refine future content based on performance metrics. “Your brand system is now available inside the AI you’re working with,” Adams said.
Success metrics and enterprise adoption
The impact of Canva’s CoS is reflected in remarkable user metrics: more than 250 million people use Canva every month, of which more than 29 million are paid customers. Adams reports that 41 billion designs have been created on Canva since launch, which equates to 1 billion per month.
“If you break it down, it turns out to be a crazy number of 386 designs being created every single second,” Adams said. Whereas in the early days, it took users about an hour to create a design.
Canva’s customers include Walmart, Disney, Virgin Voyages, Pinterest, FedEx, Expedia, and EXP Realty. DocuSign reported that it unlocked over 500 hours of team capacity and saved over $300,000 in design hours by fully integrating Canva into its content creation. Meanwhile, Disney uses translation capabilities for its internationalization work, Adams said.
Competitors in design field
Canva works within an evolving landscape of professional design tools, including Adobe Express and Figma; AI-powered challengers led by Microsoft designers; and direct-to-consumer options like Visme and Piktochart.
Adobe Express (Starting at $9.99 per month for premium features) is known for its ease of use and integration with the broader Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. It features access to professional-grade templates and Adobe’s extensive stock library, and includes Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash image model and other General AI features so designers can create graphics through natural language prompts. Users with some design experience say they prefer its interface, controls, and technical advantages over Canva (such as the ability to import high-fidelity PDFs).
Figma (Starting at $3 per month for professional plans) is known for its real-time collaboration, advanced prototyping capabilities, and deep integration with development workflows; However, some say it has a faster learning speed and high-precision design tools, making it better suited for professional designers, developers, and product teams working on more complex projects.
Microsoft Designer (free version available; although Microsoft 365 subscription starting $9.99 per month Unlocks additional features) Benefits from Microsoft’s AI capabilities, its integration with CoPilot layout and text generation and Dell-E powered image generation. The platform’s “Inspire Me” and “New Ideas” buttons offer design variations, and users can also import data from Excel, add 3D models from PowerPoint, and access images from OneDrive.
However, users report that its stock photos and template and image libraries are limited compared to Canva’s extensive collection, and its visuals can look dated.
Canva’s advantage appears to be its extensive template library (over 600,000 ready-to-use) and asset library (over 141 million stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio elements). Its platform is also praised for its ease of use and friendly interface for non-designers, allowing them to get started quickly without training.
Canva has also expanded into different types of content – documents, websites, presentations, whiteboards, videos, and more – making its platform a broader visual suite than just a graphics tool.
Canva has four pricing tiers: Canva free for one user; Canva Pro at $120 per year for one person; Canva Teams $100 per year per team member; and custom-priced Canva Enterprise.
Key Takeaways: Be Open, Embrace Human-AI Collaboration
Canva’s COS is based on Canva’s Frontier model, an in-house, proprietary engine based on years of R&D and research partnerships, including the acquisition of visual AI company Leonardo. Adams says Canva works with top AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
For technology teams, Canva’s approach offers important lessons, including a commitment to openness. “There are a lot of models floating around,” Adams said. He advised that it is important for enterprises to recognize when they should work with top models and when they should develop their own.
For example, OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced integration with Canva as a visual layer because, as Adams explained, they realized they didn’t have the ability to create editable designs in the same way as Canva. This creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
Ultimately, Adams said: “We have this underlying philosophy that the future is in people and technology working together. It’s not an either-or. We want people to be at the center, to be the creative spark, and use AI as a collaborator.”
