Canva’s ‘Creative Operating System’ is actually a marketing workspace

Canva is introducing new digital marketing and video-editing tools, built around what the company is calling a “world-first” design-focused AI model. These launches are part of an overhaul to the design platforms Visual Suite workplace products, which Canva describes as a “Creative Operating System” for marketing teams.

To be clear, this isn’t an operating system in the traditional sense. Canva is using the term as a collective reference for its various task-specific tools, the AI that powers them, and its wider platform interface. “We thought about a couple of different phrases and operating system just really resonated with us. It’s a true system of operations,” Canva co-founder Cameron Adams told The Verge. “It’s moved beyond just being an application layer, and it’s truly how you can run your entire creative process and workflows.”

With that confusion out of the way, here are some changes that users will actually notice. Canva has redesigned its video editor to make it easier to use without experienced editing skills, adding a new template library and a simplified timeline for trimming, syncing, and layering footage. Forms, a tool for collecting feedback similar to Google Forms, has also been added, allowing users to bring that data directly within Canva and automatically import it into Canva Sheets.

The company is going all-in on marketing tools, launching a new Canva Grow marketing platform that lets marketers design and launch ads, and track how they’re performing, using AI that “learns from performance data to make every campaign smarter and more effective over time.” A new Email Design product allows marketing teams to create and export branded email campaigns without coding or switching to dedicated email marketing platforms like Mailchimp.

These features are all powered by a new in-house AI model that has been specifically trained “to understand the complexity of design,” according to Canva. The company says its upgraded AI experiences — most of which are locked behind premium subscriptions — have now been deeply embedded into every part of the platform’s design process.

Canva has come a long way from being a web-based graphic design platform. While it’s certainly rooted in providing easy creative tools for marketers, most of its products now focus on providing alternatives to Google or Microsoft’s workplace apps. And because the experience is offered as an entirely unified service, paying users have no way of selectively picking the products they’ll actually use. I asked Adams if Canva was considering such a system, given backlash around using AI to justify hiking subscription prices, but he says the company has no current plans to do so.