As it reshapes its core creativity products around AI, Canva is also hoping more prosaic productivity features can drive subscriptions.
Canva says it has pushed out 100 updates to its Visual Suite productivity tools this year as it seeks to boost enterprise subscriptions while grappling with AI’s challenge to its traditional model.
The design giant is making a push into Microsoft and Google’s turf, with usage of its Docs word processor and Sheets spreadsheet app rising 83 per cent and 59 per cent year-over-year among enterprise customers.
“We think as much work as possible should happen in Canva,” said co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams. “We made a bet a long time ago that creativity, productivity and intelligence need to coexist in the same platform.”
Canva’s productivity apps were introduced in 2022, in what it called “the biggest changes to Canva in almost a decade,” as its first major foray beyond design and into collaborative tools like Whiteboards and Docs.
Since then the tools have been shaped with the enterprise crowd in mind, as Canva attempts to woo white collar types with the promise that information can move from spreadsheets, documents, social media posts and presentations all within its platform.
Canva is hoping to snag customers from Microsoft Office 365, the gorilla of the category with 450 million Office paid seats, and Google Workspace, for which 11 million organisations pay. Visual Suite contains on-brand capabilities like a website designer, video editor and Presentations app, but also prosaic tools like a printing assistant, email exporter and Excel-esque Sheets.
“The updates span everything from AI-generated presenter notes to new website navigation tools and new items you can print,” Adams said. “That said, it’s less about any one update and more about the velocity we’ve maintained throughout 2026 and the focus we continue to place on improving the Visual Suite experience as a whole.”
It comes as AI offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic have made prompt-based design accessible to billions of users, forcing Canva to reassert itself as a design champion for the masses.
The company in April introduced Canva AI 2.0, a two-year rebuild of its platform which centred on conversational design where customers ask for what they want and Canva assigns models and tools to get the job done.
But the company in July told investors that delays to product rollouts due to rising AI costs would come alongside revenue growth of 20 per cent for the year, according to the AFR, a markdown from earlier projections of 30 per cent growth.
“When we launched, or tried to launch, our AI product at Canva Create in April, we launched with a lot of frontier intelligence,” co-founder Cliff Obrecht said in August. “They were amazing at what they did, but they were also very expensive… since we launched in April, we actually had to really slow down that rollout whilst we get those costs in check, but whilst also hitting quality and latency goals as well.”
The company has been working on designing its own AI models to control costs. Adams said the growth of Visual Suite fits into that broader strategy.
“Many AI tools just hand you an output without any way to tweak it or publish it,” he said. “As we’ve been investing in AI and building our own models, we’ve also been investing in building a platform where AI becomes real, usable work for people.”
The company counts 265 million users, of which around 31 million pay. It is hoping corporate customers will boost the paying ratio in its favour. It counts Docusign, Reddit and Employment Hero among its enterprise clients, and says 1,000 Docs are created a minute.
“Our freemium flywheel helps with bottoms-up adoption,” Adams said. “As people use more of the Visual Suite and see the value, moving to a paid plan becomes the natural next step.”
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