Canva's AI Assistant Takes a Giant Leap Forward with New Features and Integrations

Canva's AI assistant has been a game-changer for designers, allowing them to create custom designs with ease. The latest update takes it to the next level, enabling users to create editable designs with text prompts and integrate with popular productivity tools.

Canva's AI assistant is designed to make design more accessible and efficient. With the latest update, users can now describe what they want it to make, and the bot will call the required tools and come up with a few options. The assistant uses layers to make designs, which gives users the flexibility to tweak different aspects of the final product as they see fit.

The update comes as Canva has been working on making its AI assistant central to users' workflows and adding more features such as image generation and website generation. Canva's competitors, including Adobe and Figma, are also working towards a similar goal.

"I think a lot of small businesses start and end their day, and they'll do a lot of their workflows completely, in Canva," said Canva's co-founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht. "We also work incredibly well with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, so if someone is doing their agentic workflows in those products, they can call Canva, get content, and they can get it back into those LLMs. But they always need to end up doing the final mile of editing, collaboration and deployment. That's where we really are strong," Obrecht added.

The update also adds integrations with Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Zoom, so users can choose to allow the AI bot to build context by reading email, conversations, files, and meeting data. The company is also adding a web research skill, so the AI bot can browse the internet to do tasks for you.

Canva is refining its existing AI tools, too. Its AI code generator can now import HTML, and users can use text prompts to describe the kind of spreadsheets they want to generate. The company says that it has improved its AI models' efficiency, claiming that its Lucid Origin image-generation model is now 5x faster and 30x cheaper, and its 12V image-to-video model is 7x faster and 17x cheaper.

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

"We're excited to bring these new features and integrations to our users," said Canva's CEO, Melanie Perkins. "Our goal is to make design more accessible and efficient, and we believe that our AI assistant is a key part of that."