The rise of AI marks a critical shift away from decades defined by information-chasing and a push for more and more compute power. Canva co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams refers to this dawning time as the “imagination era.” Meaning: Individuals and enterprises 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 across every layer of content creation, creating a single, comprehensive creativity platform rather than a simple, template-based design tool.“We’re entering a new era where we need to rethink how we achieve our goals,” said Adams. “We’re enabling people’s imagination and giving them the tools they need to take action.”An ‘engine’ for creativityAdams describes Canva’s platform as a three-layer stack: The top Visual Suite layer containing designs, images and other content; a collaborative Canva AI plane at center; and a foundational proprietary model holding it all up. At the heart of Canva’s strategy is its Creative Operating System (COS) underlying. This “engine,” as Adams describes it, integrates documents, websites, presentations, sheets, whiteboards, videos, social content, hundreds of millions of photos, illustrations, a rich sound library, and numerous templates, charts, and branded elements.The COS is getting a 2.0 upgrade, but the crucial advance is the “middle, crucial layer” that fully integrates AI and makes it accessible throughout various workflows, Adams explained. 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 the platform can build out various elements — such as photos, videos, textures, …
