Canva Unveils Agentic Makeover for Its Design Platform

Canva has launched an AI-centric overhaul to its 13-year-old graphic design platform.

Canva 2.0, announced Thursday (April 16), is being billed by the Australian company as its most significant update ever, turning Canva into “a conversational, agentic platform.”

“Rather than starting with a template or a blank page, you can now start with an idea, a goal, a brief, a rough sketch, even an unfinished thought – and work through it in conversation with Canva AI,” the announcement said.

“It assembles designs from individual components with layout, hierarchy, and brand built in from the first output.”

A report on the launch by Bloomberg News frames the update as a move to position Canva not a target of AI’s ability to disrupt the software industry, but as one of the disruptors.

“Sometimes there’s the things that you have to do,” Canva Co-founder Melanie Perkins told Bloomberg in an interview about the company’s artificial intelligence push. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes and it doesn’t matter what it costs.”

The report says the success of Canva 2.0 will be a crucial test for the company, which competes with Photoshop maker Adobe. The company is moving closer to going public at a time when investors are shifting away from software firms, driven by fears that AI will make these companies less relevant.

In addition to concerns about new AI tools, the report added, Canva also faces competition from a new wave of startups offering features like turning a selfie into a social video or creating entire studio photoshoots from a single image. There is also a threat of new design tools from tech giants like Google and Microsoft, Bloomberg pointed out.

This week also saw news that AI startup Anthropic is planning to release its new model Claude Opus 4.7 along with a new AI-powered design tool that can generate websites, landing pages and presentations using natural language prompts.

As noted here, Anthropic’s products until now had covered chat interfaces and developer tools, making this design tool is its first foray into visual and creative workflows.

“Design is an upstream input to digital commerce. Product interfaces and landing pages drive conversion,” PYMNTS wrote. “When a model generates those assets from a prompt, the cost and time of building digital products falls. Agencies and in-house teams that bill for design work face direct competition from the tool itself.”