Canva’s AI assistant can now call a variety of tools to create designs for you

The main promise of new AI platforms is that you can describe your task to an AI assistant, let it plan the task and use the right 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 relies on this paradigm in the latest version of its Canva AI assistant, which uses its own AI model to allow users to create editable designs with text commands. Users can specify what they want it to do, and the bot will call up the necessary tools and come up with several options. Assistant uses layers to create designs, giving users the ability to change different aspects of the final product as they see fit.

The update comes as Canva has been working to make its AI assistant more central to users’ workflows and adding more features like image generation and website creation.

Canva’s competitors also seem to be working toward the same goal. This week, Adobe introduced the Firefly AI assistant that can use the company’s various applications to perform tasks, and Figma last month baked to support AI agents on its platforms with MCP server.

Canva’s founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht, noted that while many companies are trying to integrate workflows, businesses are choosing to do the final editing and publishing steps on Canva.

“I think a lot of small businesses start and end their day, and will do most of their work entirely, in Canva,” Obrecht said. “We also work very well with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, so if someone is doing their agent workflow in those products, they can call Canva, get the content, and they can bring it back to those LLMs. But they always need to end up doing the last mile of planning, collaboration and deployment. That’s where we’re really strong,” added Obrecht.

Although the majority of Canva’s revenue comes from individuals and small groups, its business shows promising growth of 100% year over year, Obrecht said. He added that the company, recently valued at $42 billion, per PitchBook, is likely to go public within the next year.

As part of this update, Canva also adds integration with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Zoom, so users can choose to let an AI bot create context by reading email, chats, files, and meeting data. The company is adding the ability to research the web, too, so that the AI ​​bot can browse the Internet to do tasks for you.

The update also adds scheduling as a feature, so you can tell the AI ​​bot to schedule repetitive tasks to run in the background. This feature will only create drafts that you can review and send, though.

Canva is refining its existing AI tools, too. Its AI code generator can now import HTML, and users can use text input to define the type of spreadsheets they want to create.

The company says it has improved the efficiency of its AI models, saying its Lucid Origin generation model is now 5x faster and 30x cheaper, and its 12V photo-to-video model is 7x faster and 17x cheaper.

Canva AI 2.0 launched in research preview this week, and the company plans to make it available to all users in the coming weeks.