Canva has launched Canva AI 2.0, described as the platform’s “biggest launch ever” and what CEO Melanie Perkins has labelled “the most significant moment in Canva’s history”.
The company says the update takes Canva from being a design platform into what it calls “the system at the centre of how work gets done”.
“Just over a decade ago, Canva ushered in a new generation of design,” Perkins said during a recent media briefing. “But today the problem has expanded far beyond design itself. The entire process of creation is broken across so many tools and tabs and workflows.”
She said this has resulted in users being forced to jump between apps, copy and paste content, lose context, and constantly re-prompt AI tools. “We think there is a better way,” she said.
According to Perkins, that “better way” is Canva AI 2.0, a system the company says turns Canva into a conversational, agentic platform powered by its frontier AI lab.
Rather than simply generating static outputs, Canva AI is designed to stay with users throughout the entire workflow. As Perkins put it, “just describe an idea and then it would just instantly appear,” referencing an early internal prototype that has now been rebuilt using modern AI systems.
A key part of Canva AI 2.0 is what the company calls “conversational design.” Users can now speak or type what they want, and Canva generates a fully structured, editable design. Perkins demonstrated this idea in practice, explaining that users can start with a rough goal and “watch as that comes to life,” then continue refining it through conversation rather than restarting the process each time.
Alongside this is what Canva describes as “agentic orchestration,” which moves the platform beyond assistance into execution.
As co-founder Cameron Adams explained during the briefing, Canva AI can now “take actions on your behalf inside any Canva design”.
Instead of manually building each asset, users can delegate outcomes such as full campaign creation. “It can actually create, access, and tweak every element in your designs,” he said, including layout, fonts, colours and positioning. In one example, Canva AI builds an entire multi-channel campaign in seconds, with Adams noting that this allows teams to “focus on everything else”.
The company is also introducing what it calls “object-based intelligence,” which allows AI to make precise edits without regenerating entire designs. Adams explained that users can ask Canva AI to change a headline or adjust an element, and “that is the only text that’s going to change,” with everything else remaining intact. This, he said, ensures outputs remain fully editable and collaborative, just like work created manually in Canva.
Another major addition is “living memory”, which Perkins described as a system that “learns from you and your designs,” adapting over time to individual and team preferences. The idea is that Canva AI becomes increasingly personalised, building what she called a “memory library” so that work stays on brand and aligned with user behaviour. “It gets smarter and more helpful every time you use it,” Adams added.
Beyond design generation, Canva AI 2.0 introduces a series of what the company calls “intelligent workflows” that aim to centralise the entire creative and marketing process. One of the most significant is “connectors,” which brings external tools like Slack, Gmail, Notion, Zoom and Google Drive directly into Canva. Adams said this allows users to pull context from across their work, summarising conversations and turning them into outputs. “This is hours of work now done in under a minute,” he said during a demonstration where a full presentation is generated from calendar and messaging data.
The platform also introduces scheduling, which allows users to automate repetitive work. As Adams explained, users can “set tasks to run automatically, putting work on autopilot even when you’re offline,” such as weekly newsletters or recurring content creation. In parallel, “web research” brings structured information from the internet directly into Canva designs, reducing the need for manual research and copy-pasting between tools.
A further pillar of the release is “brand intelligence,” which ensures that every output is automatically aligned with a company’s visual identity. Perkins said the goal is to make everything “on brand by default,” whether generating new designs or updating existing materials. “You can just pick a brand template and Canva AI instantly generates an on-brand presentation ready to share,” Adams added.
Canva also expanded into more technical territory with Canva Code 2.0, which now includes HTML importing. Adams described this as a major step forward for interactive content, explaining that users can now bring in HTML or AI-generated experiences and edit them visually inside Canva. “Just bring any HTML or code file into Canva and it becomes fully editable in our simple drag and drop editor,” he said. This enables interactive websites, forms, animations and embedded experiences without writing code, all within the Canva ecosystem.
Underpinning all of this is Canva’s rapidly expanding AI infrastructure.
Cliff Obrecht highlighted that Canva AI has already been used more than 27 billion times and described the company as “the third most used AI product in the world.” He added that Canva is seeing “the fastest growth of any major software company” in AI-related customer spend, positioning the business at the centre of the AI productivity shift.
Obrecht also stressed that the majority of users are still not using AI to its full potential.
“Roughly two-thirds of the world are not using AI at all,” he said, arguing that Canva AI 2.0 is designed to bring more advanced, agentic capabilities to a much broader audience. We are making agentic AI simple and accessible,” he said, describing Canva’s evolution from a design platform into an AI-first operating layer for work.
Taken together, Canva AI 2.0 represents a shift in ambition as much as product.
As Perkins summarised, Canva is moving from helping people create individual designs to helping them complete entire workflows. “Rather than losing memory and context… we now have your memory library,” she said.
