Canva has launched what it calls the Creative Operating System, which it says will evolve the platform into a comprehensive hub for design, collaboration, and marketing, promising to streamline how marketers create, publish, and measure their campaigns.
With a reimagined Visual Suite, powerful new AI tools, and an evolved suite of products for brand growth and management, Canva is positioning itself as the ultimate one-stop shop for marketers, combining creation, collaboration, publishing, and performance under one roof.
Speaking with B&T prior to Canva’s World Tour presentation last night, Kristine Segrist, global head of consumer marketing at Canva said that the platforms vision is a “creative operating system for the AI era”.
“Everything we’re doing is about how we take people’s creativity and accelerate it, level it up, and use AI to power their ideas and help close the gap from everything they can imagine to what they can build.”
Canva’s new Creative Operating System brings together over a decade of innovation, merging every part of the creative process, from design and collaboration to publishing and performance, into a single, intelligent ecosystem.
Built on the company’s Design Model, it represents a leap forward in how AI supports creativity, with an emphasis on human imagination amplified by technology.
With more than 260 million monthly users and a valuation of $42 billion, Canva’s influence in the marketing world is undeniable. CEO Melanie Perkins described this next chapter as part of “the Imagination Era,” a time when creativity has never been more critical to growth and communication.
“As knowledge becomes more and more accessible, we believe we’re moving from the Information Era to the Imagination Era, a time when creativity has never been more critical,” Perkins said.
“We’ve been thinking about how we can empower our community to succeed in this era, which is why we’re incredibly excited to unveil our biggest launch yet with the all-in-one Creative Operating System. From major upgrades to our Visual Suite with Video, Email, and Forms, to a powerful new AI layer and tools to grow your brand and business, we can’t wait to see how people use all of these new products to bring their ideas to life”.
Supercharged Tools for Marketers
At the heart of the Creative Operating System lies an upgraded Visual Suite, expanding what’s possible across every format, from Video 2.0, Email Design, and Forms, to Canva Code and Sheets integrations. For marketers, these tools are designed to remove friction and complexity from every step of the content lifecycle.
Among the releases is Video 2.0, a fully rebuilt video editor that combines professional-grade tools with Canva’s trademark simplicity, making it easier than ever to produce high-quality, engaging content across platforms. The new editor features a redesigned timeline, automatic syncing, trimming, and layering tools, along with Magic Video, which can generate polished clips from a single prompt. It also includes automated captions, on-trend templates, and AI-powered editing suggestions, giving marketers more control and speed without the steep learning curve of traditional software.
Meanwhile, the introduction of Email Design brings email creation directly into Canva for the first time. Marketing teams can now design, customise, and export fully branded emails in minutes, all within the same platform where they already create social posts, presentations, and ads. The feature allows users to export designs as HTML files compatible with their preferred email platforms, ensuring a seamless workflow and consistent visual identity across every channel.
Segrist explained that the team set out to solve a universal pain point for marketers: tool overload.
“Previously, it’s always kind of felt a bit linear – you’re creating in one place, publishing somewhere else, moving again to get results and insights. There’s a real cost in toggling between tools,” she said.
“We wanted to create an end-to-end solution where a marketer could go all the way from being inspired to editing to understanding what’s working, and then using AI to help you tweak, optimise, and bring that work to life.”
For marketers, the biggest development might be Canva Grow, a fully-fledged marketing platform that combines creation, publishing and analytics. The tool enables users to launch ads across platforms like Meta, track insights, and refine creative based on real-time performance, all within Canva.
Segrist said this evolution reflects the demands of modern marketing teams. “We’re listening to marketers all the time, and one thing we hear loud and clear is that everybody has to do more with less,” she said.
“We want to create a tool that allows people to have more output in a world governed by visual communication.”
AI That Understands Design
Canva’s AI innovation sits at the core of this evolution. Following years of investment, the company has introduced the world’s first Design Model, a foundation trained to understand the complexity of design itself. This means Canva’s AI does so much more than generate visuals; it understands composition, hierarchy, colour theory and balance and can be a useful tool for designers needing a sounding board.
“There are a lot of foundational models, but ours has design at the heart,” said Segrist. “Our model understands design and font and colour composition and hierarchy. So when you’re asking your assistant for help or suggestions, it’s really dialled in on what good design looks like and how that can help bring your idea to life”.
The new Ask @Canva feature lets users collaborate with AI in real time, providing design feedback, copy suggestions, or smart edits without breaking creative flow. Segrist likened it to “another partner in the room,” turning AI into an active creative collaborator.
Canva Grow’s brand-aware AI also learns from campaign performance to make future content smarter, closing the loop from creation to conversion. And with Brand System, assets like logos, fonts, and colour palettes are now applied automatically across every design, ensuring brand consistency at scale.
Democratising Creativity for Everyone
Despite all the evolution, Segrist said Canva’s core mission remains the same as it always has: to empower the world to design, and that includes everyone, regardless of budget or background.
“We mean everybody,” she emphasised. “That means we have to have a great free offering and a really robust free offering. Even many of the tools we announced today are available for free”.
“Creativity shouldn’t be the domain of the elite in the few”.
That philosophy extends to Affinity, Canva’s professional design suite, which is now completely free, forever. Designed by pros for pros, Affinity brings vector editing, advanced layout, and image manipulation tools into Canva’s ecosystem, bridging professional and everyday creativity like never before.
“We’re really excited about what people will create when everybody has access to the most premium design tools,” Segrist said. “Regardless of where they are in the world or their budget, they’re able to design with that level of fidelity.”
Ultimately, Canva’s Creative Operating System marks a new era for creativity, one where AI amplifies, not replaces, human imagination.
“We’re at an inflection point,” said Segrist. “The last era was governed by ubiquitous information, but moving forward, there’s incredible power around imagination and harnessing the human imagination to design the world we all want to be part of.”
With its new AI-powered tools, professional-grade integrations, and marketer-focused platform, Canva is on the path to redefine how creativity drives business growth in the AI age.
