EXCLUSIVE: Inside Canva AI 2.0 with CPO Cameron Adams

Good morning {{first_name| Artificial intelligence lovers}}. Most AI design tools give you a score and stop there. You get a final image, and then you’re on your own, dialing in circles to get it closer to what you actually mean.

Canva is betting that the real value isn’t in the generation, but in what comes after. Company only Fired Canva AI 2.0, turns its platform into a native AI environment where created designs are fully editable, and the AI ​​improves with you instead of handing over a flat image and stepping back.

We sat down with Cameron Adams, Canva co-founder, CPO, and designer himself, in an exclusive QandA session to understand what this actually unlocks, where it’s still lacking, and what it means for people whose jobs revolve around making things.

Rundown: Understanding what a user actually means, not just what they type, is a big problem in creative AI, Adams says. Canva addresses this problem by training its model not only on the language, but also on the sequence of actions that lead to the final design.

Cheung: If you ask to create a simple ad that has “negative space tension”. Do Canva AI 2.0 Do you really understand what negative space tension means?

Adams: Most AI systems learn from the final output…what they can’t see is everything that came before. We trained our core model, the Canva design model, on structured data, millions of designs, and the actual sequence of edits used to build them.

Understanding how people actually get to good work (Canva has over 265 million monthly users), the hesitations, the pivots, and the moments of clarity, is what separates creative intelligence from the generation. Instead of remaining outside the creative process, Canva’s design template lives in the editor itself, shaped by the same typography systems, layout rules, branding sets, and collaborative workflows our users work in every day.

If you were to use this prompt in Canva AI 2.0, you would see that it shares its thought process on how to approach design. It combines language model inference to interpret a vector with design training to implement it… and it doesn’t repackage templates, it generates new, fully editable elements (coming from Canva’s 2024 acquisition of Leonardo.i) to achieve your vision.

Why it matters: While it remains to be seen how well Canva AI 2.0 will capture the design nuances that professionals often use, this is a step toward a future where you spend less time in the loop of prompting over and over again, and arrive at a usable result with much less effort.

Rundown: As AI-driven design makes creativity accessible to anyone, Adams says there will always be room for the “greats” to excel with their judgment, empathy, and knowledge of what will strike a chord with an audience.

Cheung: Canva AI 2.0 You can now create and edit in Class level – Text, elements and colors. This means that anyone with a vision can implement it without touching any tool. Is the gap between a great designer and an average designer shrinking?

Adams: When it comes to creativity, there will always be room to stand out from the “greats,” but the skills you need to stand out are constantly evolving. When you think about other eras of creative change, democratization always makes room for greater expression, but it also enables the best in the field to move forward.

When anyone can produce something polished, what separates the work is the thinking behind it and the message it contains. Judgment and empathy become more important: strength of idea, sensitivity to context, intuition about what will resonate, and the fundamentals of creating connection with others. These are things that only humans can bring, which is why we built an agent experience that keeps the user at the center.

This is powerful for designers, but even more important for those who need to create visuals but are not designers: the marketer creating campaign materials, the wedding planner designing a seating chart, or a student’s school project.

Why it matters: For anyone in a creative role wondering what AI has in store for them and how to shine, this is the answer. Artificial Intelligence takes care of the implementation. What can’t be replicated are the harder things: knowing your audience, your instinct, and getting what will actually work. The better you get at it, the more successful you will be in the age of artificial intelligence.

Rundown: From data searches to cleaning up documents and slides, Adams says he uses it Canva Artificial Intelligence To handle personal and professional creative tasks, as well as the small fixes around them – AI sometimes detects problems well before we even notice them.

Cheung: You are a designer. What’s something you’ve created with Canva AI that surprised you?

Adams: I love doing scavenger hunts for my kids, but they often take a long time… Canva AI is really great at doing scavenger hunts if you give it a list of places around your house. He can design a fuzzy visual guide for each of them and present it as a final design ready for me to print and place around the house.

Then, in my business, having a design partner on call is invaluable for editing the sets and documents I’m already working on. Being able to call up Canva AI and ask it to tidy up some of the chaos I created while I was brainstorming a slide, or inserting a table into a document I’m writing that researched the latest market statistics, is an invaluable time saver.

Adams added: He constantly improves his own skills and tackles tasks that we have not experienced or improved before. One example of this was when it started getting really good at converting ASCII charts into almost flawless designs.

Why it matters: When AI starts picking up what you’re missing before you even notice it, and continues to improve over time, the relationship with the tool changes. Less effort is spent on discovering errors and fixing inconsistencies. But that same trust can also create blind spots, where both user and AI miss something – and the output is quietly interrupted.

Rundown: Adams says Canva is actively testing its AI model by intentionally breaking designs, while also positioning the platform as the “last mile” of the creative process, complementing ideas started by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.

Cheung: In creative work, a small mistake can turn into a long trip back and forth. How can you improve the accuracy of your AI when it comes to design?

Adams: We “disrupt” designs, intentionally breaking spacing or hierarchy, to train the model to recognize and record those errors. Additionally, we evaluate against broad patterns of real-world usage, such as alignment, readability, and brand consistency. It all culminates in what we call proxy editing: a system designed to catch small errors and improve them with you.

Cheung: As AI assistants like ChatGPT now create, edit, and publish ad campaigns from chat, what are the most important elements of the creative canvas, and how does Canva remain the destination?

Adams: We don’t see the rise of AI assistants as a crossover; We see it as a huge expansion of how people start their creative journey. By including Canva in AI ecosystems People use it – ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, and now Google Gemini – we built Canva as the ultimate visual layer for the AI ​​ecosystem.

The design board will still be necessary because most AI assistants are great at ideation, but are often a dead end for implementation. If you want to make a subtle change, collaborate with your team, or make sure every pixel is strictly on-brand, you’ll eventually hit a wall in the chat box. You end up in a loop of prompts instead of just grabbing an item and moving it.

Why it matters: While AI enthusiasts may consider chatbots to be the starting point for creative tasks, the reality is that these tools are great for starting ideas, but not for finishing them. The gap between instant design and ready-to-publish design is still wide, and this is where Canva is planting its flag, testing its AI to pick up where the assistants leave off.

Rundown: The real story isn’t that teams are getting smaller, Adams says, but that every team in the company is suddenly gaining design ability that they didn’t have before. The most important roles are shifting towards creative strategy and brand management.

Cheung: Do you see design teams shrinking with AI in the loop? What roles do you think will become vital in this age of artificial intelligence?

Adams: I was actually flipping the hypothesis. This isn’t actually a story about the small size of design teams. It’s that every team in the company suddenly has the ability to design that they didn’t have before.

A marketing coordinator, sales leader, or founder gives a presentation at 11 p.m. They’re already doing this work in Canva, and now they have a permanent partner to produce work that scales to a much larger scale, without waiting in a design queue.

The ability to think about campaigns and projects with much greater scope and higher impact is now what teams should strive for, and it allows teams to stretch beyond their traditional boundaries and limitations.

Adams added: Roles that are becoming vital are those that focus on creative strategy and brand management. You need people who can define the vision and formulate components of the brand portfolio that AI will then use to scale your capabilities.

We already anticipated this overlap and built Canva as a platform where anyone can create visual work, while staying connected to a full productivity suite that includes your team’s context, connects to customer data, and integrates with other business tools like Slack.

Why it matters: When agent teams deliver, the professional advantage shifts from producing work to directing it. Adams’ formulation is useful: it’s not about shrinking teams, it’s about the ability of design to spread across the entire company. The people who thrive are those who move to creative strategy – setting a vision that AI can then scale.

What’s the one design task that AI wouldn’t do better than a human?

Adams: Deciding not to do something. Knowing which idea to follow and which idea to leave on the table is a purely human vision. AI can give you options, but it won’t have any gut feeling to tell you that none of them are as good as the one idea you have.

Who keeps you up at night – Adobe, Figma, or OpenAI?

Adams: People often ask me about Adobe and Figma, but we’re in a completely different (and much larger) market for them. We bring design to the entire world, not just a subset of professionals.

On the other hand, as the only workgroup that truly combines creativity and productivity with AI, we are also more than just a chatbot. People need a place where they can collaborate with their team and turn AI-generated content into real, usable work. So I’m sleeping soundly at the moment.

What Canva usage data tells you about how people use AI in design?

Adams: The biggest surprise is how much people want to control the output. Not full automation, not a magic “make it for me” button. They want options, they want to suggest modifications, and they want to describe what they’re looking for in their own, often completely subjective, words. “Make it look a little more premium” or “something a little warmer,” and they expect the tool to understand that.

The other thing that’s become really clear is that most people don’t really care about the model running under the hood. They’re not shopping for AI, they’re trying to get something done. What matters is whether it fits with the way they already work.