Acknowledging that users have varying comfort levels with AI, Canva has integrated its powerful new features as a distinct, optional "AI tab" within the existing interface. This allows traditional users to continue their workflow unchanged, preventing alienation while encouraging gradual adoption.
Instead of picking a single AI tool "winner" for internal use, Canva intentionally gives its teams access to a wide array of models and platforms. This encourages constant experimentation and upskilling, ensuring the company's talent adapts quickly to the fast-changing AI landscape.
The ability for Canva's AI to orchestrate complex designs across documents, presentations, and videos wasn't a recent development. It was built on a decade of investment in a single, flexible design format, which provided the necessary architectural foundation for a design-focused foundational model.
Canva dogfoods its AI by integrating it into core business processes. Employees can now dictate thoughts to Canva's AI, which automatically structures the input into the company's standardized "Complex Decision Making" template, complete with goals, options, and pros/cons.
Canva views its AI as the third evolution of design interfaces. The first was pixel-based (e.g., Photoshop), the second was object-based (classic Canva), and the new era is concept-based, where users describe an idea and the AI generates an editable first draft.
While Canva had been researching AI for years, a specific internal technical breakthrough became the catalyst for the company to "go all in." This single event prompted a rapid re-organization, pulling hundreds of people onto a centralized AI team to commercialize the new capability.
Instead of being a monolithic model, Canva's AI works by orchestrating its entire suite of existing, specialized features like background remover. A single user prompt can trigger multiple tools in sequence to generate a complex, layered design, leveraging years of product development.
Canva avoids competing with giants like OpenAI on foundational models. Instead, it partners with them for general tasks while focusing its 100-person research team on specialized models for core design problems, like its 'Magic Layers' feature, where no adequate external solution exists.
When asked about competitors like Adobe, Canva's CEO consistently redirects the conversation away from a zero-sum battle for market share. Instead, she frames the company's strategy as identifying and solving a user problem: the need for a simple, integrated platform for creativity and productivity.
Unlike many AI tools that produce a final, unchangeable output, Canva's AI generates a standard, multi-layered file. This lets users treat the AI's output as a first draft that they can refine using familiar drag-and-drop tools, bridging the gap between generation and creation.
Canva's CEO views "one-shot generation" as the first, limited phase of AI. The next frontier, or "AI 2.0," involves iterative and agentic orchestration where the AI acts as a creative partner, helping to refine a design through a series of adjustments rather than just creating a single final output.