Amidst a flurry of announcements, anyone looking closely at the finer details will notice big tech often leaves some things for discovery. Perhaps an intention, a direction, or how the company places itself in the broader ecosystem. In a briefing on the sidelines of this year’s Canva Create keynote, Cliff Obrecht, who is co-founder and Chief Operations Officer, described artificial intelligence (AI) as something that isn’t a defensive hedge but something that’s akin to an all-in pivot.
“We have a saying now that Canva is more AI, less UI,” he says. Historically, Canva has always held an advantage with casual as well as professional users, because the user interface (UI) was most intuitive. It wasn’t an easy balance to achieve, without compromising functionality. A casual user in particular, over the years, would have found Canva easier to navigate than any of Adobe’s apps, for instance. Obrecht believes the focus should be on the goal, rather than the design.
There is a definitive attempt to make this seemingly existential manoeuvre, to replace manual drag and drop in a design or a content creation, with agentic intent, context and layered editing options. There has been a significant element of rebuilding at a foundational level for the platform, and there is a belief three pillars are key for this re-architecture—foundational model development, agentic AI for workflows and easy access including voice to get work done. It’s not an overnight shift, but one that’s happened in due course, with Canva trying to stay ahead of the curve.
The moves with Creative OS transition, Canva Code and key AI acquisitions in recent months, marked a trajectory that’s now clear for everyone to see.
The analogy that Obrecht uses is one that marked a worldwide shift from desktops to mobile apps, a few years ago. He points pout that if Canva hasn’t built a world-class mobile app in its early days, a mobile-native competitor would have taken that share of user attention. “Every time there’s a huge shift in technology, like with the mobile phone, if we didn’t create a mobile app there would be a competitor on mobile. Just like with AI, we needed to adopt this technology because it can really help achieve a user’s goals,” he says.
The movement of generative AI in particular over the past couple of years, since OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought this to everyone’s attention in November of 2022, is that its scope encompasses much more than generating images, video or audio. It has found an intersection, though there can be a debate about accuracy and hallucinations, in much more including as a writing assistant, editing tool, something that can create presentations that would otherwise take hours, summarise web pages and lengthy documents, transcribe a meeting with key pointers, or assist with coding.
There’s more than a shade of that search for diversified relevance in the Web Research element that is part of the Canva AI 2.0 update. This will search the web and other sources for insights that may be useful to the work in progress at the time, and can either be done on demand or scheduled. The result, based on specific prompt guidelines and the memory aspect, can be delivered in structured and editable formats.
Canva has adapted, and found the balance between speed and costs, led by efforts of its frontier AI lab. The Canva Proteus model, which enables the Style Transfer capability, is 2x faster and 23x more cost effective than comparable frontier models. The Canva Lucid Origin, the basis for all image generation in Canva, is said to be 5x faster and 30x less costly, when compared with frontier models. The Canva I2V, which does image to video generations, is 7x faster and 17x less costly to use, in comparison.
It is understandable why Canva wants to make the pivot now. There is momentum and scale with more than 265 million monthly active users of which more than 31 million are paid subscribers (this number is up from 24 million, at this time last year). The company has reported $4 billion in annualised revenue. Industry analysts note that that Canva sits behind only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in global AI usage hierarchy, and ahead of Deepseek, Grok and Claude.
Obrecht says that “people don’t wake up in the morning saying they want to create a design, but with a goal to achieve, whether that’s creating a presentation to help them raise funds, or whether it’s creating a social graphic in order to help them grow their business.” AI, he says, gives Canva an extended feature set that can be useful to users in achieving that. It is a clear shift from an output focused product positioning to a goal oriented one.
The reason for adopting AI ‘head-first’, Obrecht insists, is problem solving. “The technology that has come to fruition with AI, has given essentially the world superpowers. It’s our job as a product company to solve our customers’ problems as best we can and be the number one platform to create visual content,” he says.
The addition of everything that Canva AI 2.0 brings to the suite as we know it, be it the connectors, or the ability to schedule content delivery, web research, memory and improved brand intelligence as well as extending support for HTML files in Magic Layer, all point in one direction—Canva wants to become an end-to-end solutions ready workspace.