Why IT leaders should pay attention to Canva’s ‘imagination era’ strategy
The rise of AI marks a crucial shift away from decades marked by the pursuit of information and a drive for ever more computing power.
Canva co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams calls this dawning era the “imagination age.” Meaning: Individuals and companies must be able to turn creativity into action with AI.
Canva hopes to position itself at the center of this shift with a sweeping new suite of tools. The company’s new Creative Operating System (COS) integrates AI into every layer of content creation, creating one comprehensive creativity platform rather than a simple, template-based design tool.
“We are entering a new era where we must rethink how we achieve our goals,” said Adams. “We stimulate people’s imagination and give them the tools they need to take action.”
An ‘engine’ for creativity
Adams describes Canva’s platform as a stack with three layers: the top Visual Suite layer with designs, images and other content; a collaborative Canva AI plane in the center; and a fundamentally unique model that maintains everything.
The core of Canva’s strategy is the underlying Creative Operating System (COS). This “engine,” as Adams describes it, integrates documents, websites, presentations, spreadsheets, whiteboards, videos, social content, hundreds of millions of photos, illustrations, a rich sound library, and countless templates, charts, and branding elements.
The COS is getting a 2.0 upgrade, but the crucial advancement is the “middle, critical layer” that fully integrates AI and makes it accessible across workflows, Adams explains. This gives creative and technical teams a single dashboard for generating, editing and launching all types of content.
The underlying model is trained to understand the ‘complexity of design’ so that the platform can build out different elements – such as photos, videos, textures or 3D images – in real time, matching the brand style without the need for manual adjustments. It also supports live collaboration, meaning teams from different departments can co-create.
For example, a unified dashboard allows a user working on a specific design to create a new piece of content (e.g. a presentation) within the same workflow, without having to switch to a different window or platform. And if they generate an image and aren’t happy with it, they don’t have to go back and start all over again; they can immediately start editing and changing the colors or tone.
Another new feature in COS, ‘Ask Canva’, offers instant design advice. Users can tag @Canva to get copy suggestions and smart edits; Or they can highlight an image and tell the AI assistant to adjust it or generate variations.
“It’s really a unique interaction,” says Adams, noting that this AI design partner is always present. “It’s a true collaboration between humans and AI, and we think it’s a revolutionary change.”
Other new features include a video editor 2.0 and interactive form and email design with drag-and-drop tools. Additionally, Canva is now integrated into Affinity, the unified app for professional designers that integrates vector, pixel, and layer workflows, and Affinity is “free forever.”
Automate intelligence, support marketing
Branding is crucial for businesses; Canva has introduced new tools to help organizations showcase their products consistently across platforms. The new Canva Grow engine integrates business objectives into the creative process, allowing teams to edit, create, distribute and refine ads and other assets.
As Adams explained, “It automatically scans your website, finds out who your audience is, what tools you use to promote your products, the message you want it to send, the formats you want to send it in, creates creative for you, and you can deploy it directly to the platform without having to leave Canva.”
Marketing teams can now design and launch ads on platforms like Meta, track insights as they happen, and refine future content based on performance metrics. “Your brand system is now available within the AI you work with,” Adams noted.
Success metrics and business adoption
The impact of Canva’s COS is reflected in remarkable user statistics: more than 250 million people use Canva every month, of which just over 29 million are paying subscribers. Adams reports that 41 billion designs have been created on Canva since launch, which equates to 1 billion designs per month.
“If you break that down, you get to an insane number of 386 designs created every second,” Adams said. While in the beginning it took about an hour for users to create a single design.
Canva customers include Walmart, Disney, Virgin Voyages, Pinterest, FedEx, Expedia and eXp Realty. For example, DocuSign reported that it unlocked more than 500 hours of team capacity and saved more than $300,000 in design hours by fully integrating Canva into content creation. Disney, meanwhile, is using translation capabilities for its internationalization work, Adams said.
Competitors in the design space
Canva plays in an evolving landscape of professional design tools, including Adobe Express and Figma; AI-powered challengers led by Microsoft Designer; and direct-to-consumer alternatives such as Visme and Piktochart.
Adobe Express (from $9.99 per month for premium features) is known for its ease of use and integration with the broader Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. It features professional templates and access to Adobe’s extensive stock library, and includes Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash image model and other generation AI features so designers can create images through natural language prompts. Users with some design experience say they prefer its interface, controls, and technical benefits to Canva (such as the ability to import high-fidelity PDFs).
Figma (from $3 per month for professional plans) is praised for its real-time collaboration, advanced prototyping capabilities, and deep integration with development workflows; However, some say it has a steeper learning curve and higher precision design tools, making it preferable for professional designers, developers, and product teams working on more complex projects.
Microsoft Designer (free version available; although a Microsoft 365 subscription starts $9.99 per month unlocks additional features) benefits from integration with Microsoft’s AI capabilities, Copilot format and text generation, and Dall-E powered image generation. The platform’s “Inspire Me” and “New Ideas” buttons offer 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 stock photo, template, and image libraries are limited compared to Canva’s extensive collection, and the images can appear outdated.
Canva’s advantage seems to lie in its extensive template library (over 600,000 ready-made) and asset library (over 141 million stock photos, videos, images and audio assets). The platform is also praised for its ease of use and interface friendliness for non-designers, allowing them to get started quickly without training.
Canva has also expanded into a variety of content types – documents, websites, presentations, whiteboards, videos and more – making the platform a more comprehensive visual package than just a graphics tool.
Canva has 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 the custom-priced Canva Enterprise.
Key takeaways: Be open and embrace human-AI collaboration
Canva’s COS is supported by Canva’s Frontier Model, an internal, proprietary engine based on years of R&D and research partnerships, including the acquisition of visual AI company Leonardo. Adams notes that Canva works with top AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
For technology teams, Canva’s approach offers important lessons, including the commitment to openness. “There are so many models floating around,” Adams noted; It’s important for companies to recognize when to work with top models and when to develop their own, he advised.
For example, OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced integrations with Canva as a visual layer because, as Adams explained, they realized they didn’t have the ability to create the same types of editable designs as Canva. This creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
Ultimately, Adams noted, “We have an underlying philosophy that the future is about people and technology working together. It’s not either or. We want people to be at the center, to be the ones with the creative spark, and to use AI as a collaborative partner.”
