The rise of artificial intelligence marks a critical departure from decades defined by the pursuit of information and the pursuit of ever greater computing power.
Canva co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams calls this emerging time the “age of imagination.” Importance: Individuals and businesses must be able to turn creativity into action through AI.
Canva hopes to be at the center of this change with a comprehensive fresh set of tools. The company’s fresh Original Operating System (COS) integrates artificial intelligence at every level of content creation, creating a single, end-to-end creativity platform rather than a plain template-based design tool.
“We are entering a new era in which we must rethink how we achieve our goals,” Adams said. “We capture people’s imagination and give them the tools they need to take action.”
The “engine” of creativity
Adams describes the Canva platform as a three-layer stack: the top tier of the Visual Suite, which contains designs, images, and other content; in the middle, Canva’s collaborative AI plane; and the underlying, proprietary model that sustains it all.
At the heart of Canva’s strategy is the Original Operating System (COS). This “engine,” as Adams describes it, integrates documents, websites, presentations, spreadsheets, boards, videos, social content, hundreds of millions of photos, illustrations, a luxurious audio library, and numerous templates, charts, and branding elements.
COS is getting an update to version 2.0, but the key advancement is a “middle, key layer” that fully integrates AI and makes it available across workflows, Adams explained. This gives artistic and technical teams a single dashboard for generating, editing, and launching all kinds of content.
The core model is trained to understand “design complexity,” so the platform can create different elements – such as photos, videos, textures or 3D graphics – in real time, matching the brand’s style without the need for manual adjustments. It also supports live collaboration, which means teams from different departments can co-create.
With a unified dashboard, a user working on a specific project, for example, can create fresh content (say a presentation) within the same workflow without having to switch to a different window or platform. Plus, if they generate an image and aren’t ecstatic with it, they don’t have to go back and create from scratch; they can immediately start editing, changing colors or tones.
Another fresh feature in COS, “Ask Canva,” provides direct design advice. Users can tag @Canva for copy suggestions and intelligent edits; or they can highlight an image and instruct an AI assistant to modify it or generate variants.
“It’s a really unique interaction,” Adams said, noting that this AI design partner is always present. “It’s a true collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence, and we think it’s a game-changer.”
Other fresh features include a video editor 2.0 and interactive forms and email designs with drag-and-drop tools. What’s more, Canva is now connected to Affinity, the unified app for professional designers that enables vector, pixel, and layer workflows, and Affinity is “always free.”
Intelligence automation, marketing support
The brand is crucial to the enterprise; Canva has introduced fresh tools to facilitate organizations present their products consistently across platforms. The fresh Canva Grow engine integrates business goals with the artistic process, so teams can work on workshops, create, distribute and refine ads and other materials.
As Adams explained: “It automatically scans your website, determines who your audience is, what assets you use to promote your products, what message it needs to send, what formats you want to send it in, creates a creative for you that you can deploy directly to the platform without having to leave Canva.”
Marketing teams can now design and run ads on platforms like Meta, track real-time analytics, and refine future content based on performance metrics. “Your brand system is now available in the AI you work with,” Adams noted.
Success measures and enterprise adoption
Canva’s COS impact is reflected in significant user metrics: over 250 million people employ Canva every month, of which just over 29 million are paid subscribers. Adams reports that 41 billion designs have been created on Canva since launch, equating to 1 billion designs per month.
“If you break it down, you get a crazy number of 386 projects being created every second,” Adams said. Whereas in the beginning, it took users about an hour to create a single project.
Canva’s clients include Walmart, Disney, Virgin Voyages, Pinterest, FedEx, Expedia and eXp Realty. DocuSign, for example, reported that it unlocked over 500 team hours and saved over $300,000 in design hours by fully integrating Canva into content creation. Meanwhile, Disney is leveraging translation opportunities in its internationalization efforts, Adams said.
Competitors in the design space
Canva fits into the evolving landscape of professional design tools, including Adobe Express and Figma; Artificial Intelligence Rivals Led by Microsoft Designer; and direct-to-consumer alternatives such as Visme and Piktochart.
Adobe Express (starting at $9.99 per month for premium features) is known for its ease of employ and integration with the broader Adobe Original Cloud ecosystem. Featuring professional templates and access to Adobe’s extensive library of assets, it also includes the Google Gemini 2.5 Flash image model and other generation AI features so designers can create graphics using natural language prompts. Users with some design experience say they prefer its interface, controls, and technical advantages over Canva (such as the ability to import high-quality PDF files).
Figma (starting at $3 a month for professional plans) is praised for its real-time collaboration, advanced prototyping capabilities, and deep integration with developer workflows; however, some argue that it requires a steeper learning curve and more precise design tools, making it the preferred solution for professional designers, developers, and product teams working on more intricate projects.
Microsoft Designer (free version available; although Microsoft 365 subscription starts at $9.99 per month unlocks additional features) benefits from integration with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence capabilities, Copilot and text generation, and image generation with Dall-E. The platform’s “Inspire Me” and “New Ideas” buttons provide design variations, and users can also import data from Excel, add 3D models from PowerPoint, and access images from OneDrive.
However, users report that the site’s stock photos and libraries of templates and images are constrained compared to Canva’s extensive collection, and the visuals may seem dated.
Canva’s advantage seems to be its extensive template library (over 600,000 ready-to-use) and asset library (over 141 million stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio elements). The platform is also praised for its ease of employ and user-friendly interface for non-designers, so they can get started quickly without training.
Canva has also expanded its offerings to include a variety of content types—documents, websites, presentations, whiteboards, videos, and more—making its platform an all-in-one visual suite, not just a graphics tool.
Canva has it four price levels: Canva Free for one user; Canva Pro for $120 per year for one person; Canva Teams for $100 per year for each team member; and Canva Enterprise custom pricing.
The most critical conclusions: be open, start cooperation between humans and artificial intelligence
Canva’s COS platform is built on Canva’s pioneering model, an in-house, proprietary engine built on years of R&D and research collaboration, including the acquisition of artificial intelligence company Leonardo. Adams notes that Canva works with leading AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
For technology teams, Canva’s approach offers critical lessons, including a commitment to openness. “There are so many models,” Adams noted; it is critical for companies to know when they should cooperate with top models and when to develop their own, original models, he advised.
For example, OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced integration with Canva as a visual layer because, as Adams explained, they realized they didn’t have the ability to create the same editable designs as Canva. This creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
Ultimately, Adams noted, “Our core philosophy is that we have a future where people and technology work together. It’s not an either-or thing. We want people to be at the center, to have the creative spark, and to use AI as a collaborator.”