Amidst the flurry of announcements, anyone looking closely at the finer details will know that big tech often leaves a few things to discover. Perhaps an intention, a direction, or how the company positions itself in the broader ecosystem. In a briefing on the sidelines of this year’s Canva Create keynote, Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer, described artificial intelligence (AI) as something that is not a defensive hedge, but something that is more akin to an all-in pivot.
“We now have this saying that Canva is more AI, less UI,” he says. Historically, Canva has always had the edge among casual and professional users because the user interface (UI) was the most intuitive. This was not an easy balance to achieve without compromising functionality. For example, especially a casual user may have found Canva easier to navigate than any of Adobe’s apps over the years. Obrecht believes the focus should be on goals rather than design.
To replace manual drag and drop in a design or content creation with agentic intent, context, and layered editing options, it seems like a definite attempt at existential maneuvering. There has been a significant element of reengineering for the platform at a fundamental level, and there is a belief that three pillars are critical to this re-architecture – foundational model development, agentic AI for workflows, and easy access including voice to get the work done. This is not an overnight change, but one that has happened over time, with Canva trying to stay ahead of the curve.
Steps with the Creative OS transition, Canva Code, and major AI acquisitions in recent months have marked a trajectory that is now clear for everyone to see.
The analogy Obrecht uses is one that marked the shift from desktop to mobile apps around the world a few years ago. He says that if Canva had not built a world-class mobile app in its early days, a mobile-native competitor would have captured user attention. “Every time there is a major change in technology, like with mobile phones, if we didn’t create a mobile app there would be a competitor on mobile. Like AI, we need to embrace this technology because it can really help achieve the user’s goals,” he says.
The movement of generative AI over the past few years, especially since OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought it to everyone’s attention in November of 2022, is that its scope extends far beyond generating images, video, or audio. It’s got an intersection, though there can be debate about accuracy and lucidity, that includes a writing assistant, editing tools, something that can create presentations that would otherwise take hours, summarize web pages and long documents, transcribe a meeting with key points, or assist with coding.
The Web Research element is more than a shadow of the search for diversity relevance that is part of the Canva AI 2.0 update. It will search the web and other sources for information that may be useful to the task in progress, and can be done either on demand or on a scheduled basis. The results, based on specific quick guidelines and memory aspect, can be delivered in structured and editable formats.
Canva has struck a balance between speed and cost, led by efforts from its leading AI lab. The Canva Proteus model, which enables style transfer capability, is 2x faster and 23x more cost-effective than a comparable Frontier model. Canva Lucid Origin, which is the basis for all image creation in Canva, is said to be 5x faster and 30x less expensive than the Frontier model. Canva I2V, which prepares images for video generation, is 7x faster and 17x less expensive to use.
It’s understandable why Canva would want to pivot now. There’s speed and scale, with more than 265 million monthly active users, of which more than 31 million are paid subscribers (that number is up from 24 million at the same time last year). The company has reported $4 billion in annual revenues. Industry analysts say Canva is behind only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in the global AI usage hierarchy, and ahead of DeepSeek, Grok and Cloud.
Obrecht says that “People don’t wake up in the morning saying they want to create a design, but rather want to achieve a goal, whether it’s creating a presentation to help them raise money, or whether it’s creating a social graphic to help them grow their business.” He says AI gives Canva an expanded feature set that users may find useful in achieving this. This is a clear shift from an output centric product position to a goal oriented position.
Obrecht emphasizes that the reason for ‘head-first’ adoption of AI is problem solving. He says, “The technology that has come out with AI has essentially given 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 for creating visual content.”
As we know, combining everything that Canva brings to the AI 2.0 suite, whether it’s the connector, or the ability to schedule content delivery, web research, memory, and better brand intelligence, as well as increased support for HTML files in the magic layer, all point in one direction – Canva wants to be the go-to solution for an end-to-end solution.
