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This graphic design platform boosted its power with generative AI
Canva partnered with OpenAI and Stable Diffusion to create potent new idea-generating tools.
A key part of Canva’s appeal is its elegance, and in the decade since launching, the graphic-design platform has retained its simple UI while continuously integrating powerful new technologies. Last year, Canva unveiled an upgrade (Visual Worksuite) that includes a virtual copywriting assistant: Magic Write. It harnesses the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 to generate text for users’ documents, based on their prompts—everything from meeting-agenda bullet points to marketing briefs.
It also allows users to experiment with ideas. “Being able to brainstorm when someone’s not there in the room with you is the core use case we’ve seen,” says cofounder and chief product officer Cameron Adams. An integration with Stable Diffusion’s open-source image-generating AI similarly lets users quickly turn written ideas into illustrations for documents. Visual Worksuite also includes a no-code website builder, new tools for video, and a whiteboarding product that added 10 million users within two months of its August launch.
A new marketplace enables third-party companies to add features and integrate existing software into Canva; more than 300 developers have built apps. Canva claims 85% of Fortune 500 companies as clients, including FedEx, L’Oréal, and Salesforce. In 2022, the company reported a 144% increase in Teams subscriptions from organizations with more than 500 employees, a sign that its products are increasingly gold-standard design tools for large enterprises.