Canva's New AI Features: What You Need to Know

A Practical Guide for Business Owners and Communicators

Canva did its normal drop of all the amazing new features, and it's going to be really interesting to see when these are rolled out completely.

This year it's been really amazing with some of the things they've come out with. It's going to make your experience with Canva so much more intuitive. It's going to save a lot of time and just make it really easy. They've clearly listened to users about the really laborious parts of Canva.

Let us walk you through what's actually new and what it will mean for your business.

Design Through Conversation

Firstly, you can now go into Canva and just prompt it to create what you want. Say you want to create a Facebook post. You go into where it gives you the shape and the canvas for that, and then you can just prompt it in there.

You can type in what you want and it starts to create it for you. Then you can also edit it as well. Once at that stage, you can write in instructions rather than having to go and find all the stuff yourself.

The thing is, clearly the longer and the more detailed the prompt, the better the output's going to be. If you remember from previous webinars, we often use an AI tool like ChatGPT to create the prompts that we give to images. We'll probably experiment with that as well at a later time, so watch this space.

Connect All Your Apps

Another new feature is you'll be able to connect all your apps to your Canva account. If you want to do this, of course there's always a security risk, but if you want to bring in your meetings and your emails, and your Google Drive, and so on, it'll be able to get in and access different materials for you.

What this means for content like newsletters is pretty amazing. One of the hardest jobs when you are pulling together a newsletter or an item for your website is actually getting people to give you the content.

Now what it can do, if you're going to allow access of course, is you'll be able to connect up your email, Slack, or whatever sort of communication channels that you're using internally, and it will just go off and find that information and then give you a suggestion of what you could use.

And not only that, you could actually schedule it ahead of time. So you keep coming to work on a Monday and rather than having to go and find all that stuff yourself, have a rough draft there for you to be able to have a look at. This feature is clearly going to save so much time.

AI-Powered Editing

Rather than you doing all the editing, you can tell it and prompt it to do the editing. So in the first design, you could say "change the blue to red and the person in the image to be a man." By doing this, it means that you are not having to complete the tasks yourself.

You'll be able to do that with any design that you have, in any document or any content. Again, huge time-saver, right there.

Generate Your Own Elements

Before this update, you were restricted to use what was there in the Elements section. For example, you wanted a pink donut. You could really only change the colours on the variety of donut templates. But now you can actually prompt the AI within Canva in Elements to create whatever it is that you want.

Remember those times when you spent hours trawling through the elements trying to find that perfect thing or that perfect colour? Now you can just describe what you want. Pink donut with gold sparkles and a unicorn on it. And there it is.

Watch the full webinar recording below where Dr Karen demo these new features and walk you through exactly how they work:

Now that you've seen the demos, let us cover a few more features that we think are particularly exciting for businesses.

Brand Intelligence

This will allow you to keep an even more consistent brand. The Canva templates are wonderful in terms of the brand kits because you can just bring in a logo and then it identifies the font and it identifies the colours from the logo.

However, this new update is going to take it to the next level. Canva brand kits are now connected to Affinity. This means you can craft with precision and create brand assets in Affinity, then move them seamlessly into Canva, and then you can set up brand templates for the entire business to use.

Canva has been rolled out into many large organisations. And that can be a bit of a problem. Marketing and branding professionals often worry about people going off and creating all their own templates and content, causing mayhem in the business. This feature will allow a consistent brand across a large organisation.

Web Search and Research

Canva also added web search and web research. It means that now, you just say you want to include a statistic in a piece of content, and it will actually find that statistic for you on the internet.

This is pretty exciting because normally you would have to go and find all that information and then bring it in, and now it can actually do it for you.

Memory

One of the most amazing new updates is that your Canva account is going to have a memory. Rather than you having to reprompt it over time and give it all your elements, it's actually going to remember you.

You'll be able to actually personalise it so that you're not having to redo everything all the time. We love the idea that you don't have to keep explaining, that’s for sure.

Scheduling Tasks

Now, you can actually schedule tasks. You can get it to, for example, put together the newsletter on a Monday morning at a certain time. Because it remembers what you want and because it will be connected to all of your apps and information, it'll just be able to pull together a draft and have it there ready for you to have a look at. Absolutely brilliant.

Canva Code 2.0

Canva Code was launched in the last Canva Create, which was about this time last year, and it was pretty amazing. You could do things like create online quizzes to put on your website and calculators, and web pages, and so on.

At the moment they've taken it off because they're clearly improving it to then relaunch. The next iteration of it can create a fully interactive website from scratch. And not just any old website, but something custom built.

What this means, particularly with the coding side of things, is you don't need to know how to code. It's really going to come down to your own imagination about what you want to build and how you want to build it.

We would recommend refining your prompts in maybe another AI tool just to get what you want. While Canva Code is really good, it's like any AI tool. If you're going to prompt it, you need to give it very specific clear prompts and provide context.

Because if you don't have really clear instructions or the context, you'll go back and forth. Trust us, it'll get very frustrating, so get those prompts in tip-top shape before starting your web project.

Magic Layers

This is quite new. In this feature, the AI is focusing on the image and identifying all the different elements in it. Pretty soon you're going to be able to move and change anything in that image.

Magic Layers break up all the layers and separate things so you can move things around in the photo, in any photo. This, of course, creates many amazing opportunities, if used correctly and ethically.

A Word of Caution

The thing that we’re finding is being comfortable with any AI tool having access to your emails and all of the information that you normally need to make it more specific and usable for you. And that's a real paradox.

We’re finding that you'll get better outputs when you do that and you allow it to have access. But then you've got to think about the security and the privacy measures around that as well.

Do you really want it to have access to your email? Do you want it to have access to your Slack conversations? It will work for better outputs, but you've got to be very careful, particularly within your organisation, around approved tools and the different policies you have for AI.

Just make sure that you're not doing anything against those policies.

The Rollout

Of course, all this is going to take a while to roll out, and what we find is that it's staggered. They tend to do it in countries as well. It might take a little while to get everything, but you'll just start noticing bits and pieces.

We also must mention, sometimes when they first roll these features out, they're a bit clunky. But they do get better very quickly. It's the same with any new tech really.

What This Means for You

Overall, we think it's getting much more intuitive. What it means is you'll be able to spend more time on Canva without having to pull things in. It's just now so much more embedded and integrated throughout the whole platform.

Key takeaways:

• Design through prompts rather than manual creation

• Connect your apps for automatic content gathering

• Use AI-powered editing to make changes without doing it yourself

• Generate custom elements rather than trawling through libraries

• Maintain brand consistency across your organisation

• Let Canva do web research for you

• Schedule tasks so the work doesn't stop when you do

• Build interactive tools without knowing how to code

What Canva feature are you most excited to try? And do you have concerns about connecting your apps to AI tools?

If you want support integrating AI strategically into your business, here are some ways we can help:

• Join Dr Karen's AI Integration Sprint - helping senior leaders do the strategy work to integrate AI into their teams, certified by the AI Centre of Excellence

• Join our free Facebook community - where we share different AI tools and articles, and go live every Friday afternoon talking about what's happened in AI this week

• Book a chat with Dr Karen - let's talk about how AI can work for your specific situation

Because AI adoption without strategy creates noise. AI adoption with structure creates advantage.