Canva’s AI assistant can now call up numerous tools to create designs for you

The primary promise of new AI platforms is that you can describe your task to an AI assistant, and let it plan the task and use relevant tools for you, keeping your preferences in mind for future tasks. This is especially important for design professionals, as they want an automated, predictable workflow for creating content and media assets.

Canva is leaning into this model in the latest version of its Canva AI Assistant, which uses its AI model to let users create editable designs with text prompts. Users can describe what they want it to do, and the bot will call up the required tools and present some options. Assistant uses layers to make designs, giving users the flexibility to modify different aspects of the final product as they see fit.

The update comes as Canva works to prepare it Central AI assistant for users’ workflow And adding more features like creating images and creating websites.

Canva’s competitors also appear to be working towards a similar goal. Adobe launched this week Firefly AI Assistant Which can use the company’s various applications to carry out tasks, and last month Figma introduced support for artificial intelligence clients in its platforms With MCP server.

Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva, noted that while many companies are trying to integrate workflows, companies prefer to do the final steps of editing and publishing on Canva.

“I think a lot of small businesses start and end their day, and they’ll do a lot of their workflows completely in Canva,” Obrecht said. “We also work very well with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, so if someone is doing an agent workflow in those products, they can connect to Canva and get the content, and they can put it back into these LLM programs. But they always have to end up doing the final stage of editing, collaborating, and publishing. That’s where we’re really strong,” Obrecht added.

While a significant portion of Canva’s revenue comes from individual and small teams, its enterprise business is showing promising 100% year-over-year growth, Obrecht said. He added that the company, whose value recently reached $42 billion, Per PitchbookIt is likely to be released to the public next year.

As part of this update, Canva is also adding integrations with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Zoom, so users can choose to let the AI ​​bot build context by reading email, chats, files, and meeting data. The company is also adding a web search skill, so 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 recurring tasks to run in the background. This feature will just create a draft that you can review and publish.

Canva is improving its existing AI tools as well. Its AI code generator can now import HTML, and users can use text prompts to describe the type of spreadsheets they want to create.

The company says it has improved the efficiency of its AI models, claiming that its Lucid Origin image generation model is now five times faster and 30 times cheaper, and its 12V image-to-video conversion model is 7 times faster and 17 times cheaper.

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