In an effort to define the leap that Canva AI 2.0 represents, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins takes us down the memory lane. The year 2011, to be precise, and something called the Canvas Chef. An early prototype of artificial intelligence (AI), essentially as a simple prompt box to design a brochure or a phonebook. “We love to make complex things simple, and just like a decade ago, we think there is always a better way,” she tells us. As a creative platform that now harbours ambitions of evolving into a full-fledged productivity suite, a dual approach that intersects new features within an architecture layer and intelligent workflows, underlines the strategy.

The Canva AI 2.0 update, which intends to fill the void between generation and execution, adds conversational design capabilities, iterative agentic editing within an existing design or visual element, memory based functionality, as well as layered object intelligence for precise elements. Canva is also introducing Code 2.0 that success the initial Canva Code generation from a year ago. Also new are connectors with a number of web apps and services including Google’s Gmail, Drive and Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, Notion, Slack, Zoom and Hubspot. As well as a web research module.

The company says the research preview of Canva AI 2.0 is rolling out now, and will progressively expand to more users in the coming weeks.

Canva is particularly confident about the Agentic Orchestration, which Perkins says will make the platform into a “true creative partner” and “with tools to turn ideas into complete outcomes”. A single prompt can be used to generate not just multiple elements or types of content, but also help with tweaks later. It understands a user’s intent, helps select the right tools, and leverages them to create the content a user has asked.

This also ties in with the Memory Library, will should be particularly relevant for enterprise customers and teams workflows, where Canva AI models learn from designs as they are made and can reference a certain set of styles and preferences. Called Living Memory, personalisation will be a continuous process.

“AI can learn from you and your designs and adapting to your style and preferences. It will get smarter and more helpful every time you use it. You can personalise based on all of your existing signs, and can build your memory library over time,” explains Perkins. This new infrastructure layer works across the entire visual suite, including presentations, documents, social posts and other content.

Connectors will be useful for not just business and teams users, but also individuals, because it adds the option to collect context from other apps that one may have connected with Canva. For instance, if connected with the Google Calendar, it can be used to summon details of an upcoming meeting scheduled and create a presentation based on the agenda points.

“Today, most people have their work context scattered across dozens of different apps. With connecters, everything is on one place,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva.

Last month, Canva introduced Magic Layers as a public beta, which converted static images including those generated by AI tools, into fully editable and layered designs. Adams says that in the few weeks since, Magic Layer has already been used 9 million times by subscribers. This ties in with the Canva Code 2.0 update. This had an initial compatibility limited to .png and .jpg file formats, the support for HTML files arrives with the new update.

“You can make interactive designs even more powerful by adding a form to collect data that flows directly into the data layer of Canva Sheets,” Adams points out.

A context of momentum and relevance

The announcements at the company’s Canva Create keynote come on the back of strong momentum, which now sees Canva 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), reported $4 billion in annualised revenue and more than $500 million of that pie coming from the growing B2B business.

“We also are the third most used AI product in the world in terms of user volume according to a16z, and when it comes to how much customers are spending on AI tools, Canva is seeing the fastest growth of any major software company. Our AI products have been used over 27 billion times,” notes Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and Chief Operations Officer at Canva.

American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) notes that Canva sits behind only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in global AI usage hierarchy, and ahead of Deepseek, Grok and Claude. Data by a16z and market research and analytics firm YipitData suggests that in terms of customer spends year on year, Canva with a 101% uptick leads globally, ahead of Replit (78%), Vercel (72%), Hubspot (63%), Box (60%) and Figma (47%).

Obrecht describes Canva’s transition as one from a “design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools”. It also means the platform is now competing with a rather wide range of tech companies and platforms in the process, and not just tools that find relevance with design and creative workflows. A big step was the Creative OS direction, announced late last year.

The fragmented competition? Design template platforms including Vecteezy and Free Vector, font sources such as Font Space and FontFreak, stock photography libraries including Shutterstock and Getty Images, design programs that encompass Microsoft 365 suite as well as Adobe Illustrator, editing software including Photoshop and Seashore, publishing services such as Shutterfly and FedEx Office, and content management platforms including Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft OneDrive, Gmail as well as Box.

“Over the first decade of Canva’s existence, we took the full fragmented ecosystem and brought it together into one perform and made it accessible to the world. And we’re doing that exact same thing again,” says Perkins. “The process of creation today is fragmented across lots of different tools, workflows and it’s becoming more disparate. We see this as a huge opportunity to bring that all into one platform and make it accessible to the world again.”