Canva Create - Canva takes automation up a gear with the launch of a spreadsheet and AI app builder

Fast-growing visual design vendor Canva has today launched new tools that expand its reach beyond design into data visualization, task automation and AI-driven application building — all infused with its trademark commitment to democratizing access to non-technical users. There's plenty of new design functionality for its core users too, much of it powered by AI.

Since last year's launch of its enterprise play, the company has expanded its presence to 780,000 teams and it claims to be in over 95% of the Fortune 500. It has now reached over $3 billion in annualized revenue and 230 million monthly active users, up almost 25% on a year ago. Today's announcements look set to continue that growth trajectory. 

The most important new product by far is the spreadsheet — although the AI app builder, which we'll get to below, will likely grab most of the attention. Canva Sheets adds a crucial missing structured data component to Canva, but in a way that's accessible to all users. As Cameron Adams, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, puts it:

At Canva, one of our values is making complex things simple. So we decided to take a complex area and make it even simpler by bringing the full power of data to Canva.

The Sheets app can bring in and organize all kinds of data, whether that's metrics for creating charts and other data visualizations, or for driving marketing campaigns. Adams says:

Canva Sheets provides the data layer that powers the rest of Canva. Sheets integrates seamlessly into all your designs, wherever you need to include a chart or any form of data or table. You can include it in a document, you can include them in a presentation, and that data moves seamlessly with your designs.

AI-powered Sheets

Sheets also has Canva AI built in, including a new tool that creates formulas based on a user's natural language prompts. AI can also be called on to automatically fill cells with data, or explain what the data is saying in a highlighted range of cells, and create charts to help visualize it. Those charts are a new feature in Canva, bringing in many of the capabilities of Flourish, the advanced data visualization app that Canva acquired in 2022, including the ability to connect to and pull in data from external sources including Google Analytics, Salesforce, Hubspot, Statista, or via manual uploads of popular spreadsheet file formats.

But most significant is that Sheets can be combined with Canva AI tools to perform multiple operations at scale. This can drive automations across rows and columns of data in Sheets, such as translating content into multiple languages, resizing multi-channel marketing materials for different formats, or creating regionalized and personalized marketing messages. This brings a new dimension of martech automation directly into Canva.

Canva AI has also had an upgrade, becoming a suite of capabilities that are available throughout the Canva platform, and integrated so that content and designs created with Canva AI are fully editable. Adams says:

We have the critical last mile in Canva, which enables you to take any design that you created through Canva AI and edit it just as you would with any design that you normally would in Canva. This lets you get it right on brand, right on message. It helps you collaborate with your teammates and get the exact output that you want after you've collaborated with your AI partner.

Also important is the new Visual Suite, which doubles down on Canva's integration of all its various design capabilities into a single platform. This now allows designers to switch between different design formats within a single design, so that presentations, documents, websites, social posts and other formats can all sit within the same design project — along with the new spreadsheet to add visualizations or connect elements through automations. Melanie Perkins, Co-founder and CEO of Canva, runs through some examples of how various teams will be able to use the new suite:

All of a sudden, marketing campaigns can be in one design, rather than having your brief and your brainstorm and your budget and your pitch all separate. You can have your full sales strategy in one design. You can have your board meeting in one design — something that I particularly like, not having my presentation and forecast and exec summary and financials all scattered in different documents.

And so companies around the world, and schools even, can get their entire team literally on the same page. So we're pretty excited how the future of work will be in one very cohesive design.

AI app builder

Finally, — unveiled with a 'one last thing' flourish — the most striking of today's announcements is the AI app builder, Canva Code. This new app is able to understand a user's natural language prompt and create the code for a fully working app or widget, on demand. The no/low-code app builder came out of early work on using AI for internal prototyping at Canva, as Adams explains:

When we were looking at ways to bring prototypes to life faster and to try out more ideas, we decided to start looking at AI and see what it could do. We started probing and prodding and trying to get it to produce code. And we found a lot of people internally were using AI fairly effectively to create some prototypes, but it could definitely be a better experience.

So we decided to try to start turning that into an actual product that we could release, because we saw the promise of putting coding in the hands of people and helping them bring their ideas to life. After a bit of tussling with the AI models and getting the right product experience down, Canva Code is what the result is.

We have been using it internally a hell of a lot, and it really reduces the time and the distance it takes to bring an idea to life. We're seeing people inside Canva use it, from product managers to designers to engineers, and they're all using it to try out new ideas, bring them to life, actually interact with them — make sure it works how they thought it was going to work, even putting it in front of users to do testing with it, to make sure it's going to be the right product when we eventually launch it. It's been fantastically useful.

Canva expects that customers will also use it for prototyping and ideation, for adding widgets and tools to websites, for educational games, and many other purposes.

My take

Today marks a step change in Canva's product-led market reach. So far, it has been an impressive and fast-growing player in the visual design market. Now it has broken out of that category in several directions. By unifying its platform, it is extending its ability to challenge traditional personal productivity suites such as Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. The addition of a data platform with Sheets adds significant workflow automation capabilities that extend its ability to compete with digital teamwork rivals. And the launch of an easy-to-use yet apparently powerful AI app builder puts it in contention with many other no/low-code application development platforms.

Does it not realize what category it plays in? The answer is a firm no. This is a vendor that has grown up in a period when the old application boundaries and document conventions are dissolving. Why should it play by rules that have become irrelevant? Instead, it's looking at what its customers want to do and what the technology enables, and simply putting the two together in its own way. So far, this has fueled remarkable growth, and there's no sign of that slowing down any time soon.