Canva is getting major AI surgery.

On Thursday, the company unveiled Canva 2.0, an update it claims is its most significant evolution since its launch in 2013. The update includes around a dozen new features that aim to use AI to solve some of Canva users’ most common issues, such as re-prompting, dispersed brand elements, manual formatting, and lost context.

The company’s AI tools are powered by a mix of frontier models, including those from OpenAI and Claude, to get AI features to market quickly. Canva is also constantly A/B testing different models to pick the best one for user experience, and in the meantime, developing its own models.

In a meeting with press last week, Cameron Adams, Canva’s co-founder and chief product officer, told The Deep View that the company has achieved significant reach with its AI tools thus far, with its AI products being used 27 billion times to date, with Canva AI usage tripling in the past year alone. It’s also the top app used on Claude and ChatGPT. Still, Adams said, “It's a wave that hasn't crested yet.”

Here’s how Canva plans to ride that wave:

• Upgrades to the architecture layer include adding voice-based prompting, layered object intelligence that’s easily editable, agentic editing for back-and-forth design iteration, the ability to delegate end-to-end tasks, and a “memory library” that gets to know you from your data and documents.
• Upgrades to intelligent workflows include connectors with dozens of new work apps, task scheduling capabilities, web research, brand intelligence that lets users adhere to their brand designs, and Canva Code 2.0, a new code-based tool within Canva.

Adams noted that, outside the Bay Area AI bubble, the vast majority of people aren’t using AI beyond free tools, repelled by the complexity of tools like agents. Canva’s goal with this update and beyond is to reduce that complexity so that non-tech-savvy users can leverage complex AI tools without the hassle.

“I think this represents a huge opportunity, because it's complicated right now,” Adams said. “We have built our business on removing complexity from what people do.”

Our Deeper View

When Canva first started, its goal was to simplify design, a traditionally complex domain, and make it attainable for the average person. In this quest, the company has managed to garner more than 265 million monthly users, the company told The Deep View. Now, it seeks to do the same thing with AI. Though Canva is niche in its use of AI, its hold on the design market and its existing experience in simplifying complex technology might give it a fighting chance to boost the tech’s adoption. It could also serve as a lesson to other AI tool builders that, sometimes, less is more.