Canva just mic-dropped 10 new AI tools, and they don’t cost extra

Canva has just launched an entire suite of new AI tools called Magic Studio. And it’s confidently presenting it as a game changer for enterprise customers.

Canva launched a precursor to Magic Studio back in March with its Magic Edit and Magic Design features. And it was smart timing, landing in the same 24-hour period of Adobe launching its own Firefly and Sensai AI tools.

But that was clearly just an appetiser, with Canva unveiling 10 new generative AI tools as part of Magic Studio.

Canva’s AI Magic Studio tools

Canva has been clever about the release of Magic Studio. While most companies are drip-feeding users new AI tools (and to be fair, so did Canva as we previously mentioned) it is now dropping a whole ton of them at once — all designed to work together and make the user experience as convenient as possible.

Let’s check them out:

• Magic Switch: This converts designs into a range of formats with one click. For example, you could turn a presentation into an executive summary or blog post. It will also let you translate it into over 100 languages. More on that here.
• Magic Media: This allows text-to-image and video functionality.
• Magic Design: This lets you turn a prompt or your own media into fully designed and customisable videos.
• Brand Voice: Canva’s Magic Write copywriting assistant can now write in your brand’s tone of voice in any design or document. Simply add guidelines to your Brand Kit to generate on-brand content.
• Magic Morph: You can transform words and shapes into new colours, textures, patterns and styles with your own prompts.
• Magic Grab: This can select and separate any subject in a photo so that you can edit, reposition, or resize it.
• Magic Expand: This can save zoomed-in images or turn a vertical shot horizontal by recovering whatever’s outside the frame.
• AI Apps on Canva: This puts popular AI-powered design and productivity tools in one place. This includes Dall-E, Imagen by Google, MurfAI, Soundraw and more.

Canva showed off the new tools in a briefing to journalists earlier in the week. And it was smart in this approach, too.

All three Canva founders — Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams — gave live demos of them in action, including some impromptu ones off the back of our questions.

It was risky, but certainly spoke to their confidence in the product. And it quite simply… worked.

“I think it will be a breakthrough moment for the ability for busy people inside big enterprises and large businesses who normally don’t have enough time to learn new tools and figure out how to create visual content to be able to rapidly do it now and to use AI to help them along the way,” Canva co-founder and chief product officer, Cameron Adams, said on a media call.

“It’s these really high-level workflow pieces where you can move from very simple documents through to a fully-fledged presentation or video with a click of a button and also in the little creative bits along the way.”

It was also accompanied by a slew of other news, including a new $200 million AI royalty program for Canva users. Considering the sheer amount of controversy around art and books being stolen to train LLMs, this was a necessary move. It’s also one we also saw from Adobe earlier this year.

The company went on to announce Canva Shield, an enterprise-grade security, privacy and indemnification platform “to provide teams and organisations with peace of mind when creating content”.

Considering that increasingly more security and ethical questions are being raised around AI — especially as we wait on regulations — this was another necessary and clever move on the part of Canva. Because how a company rolls out AI is becoming just as — if not more — important as it doing it quickly.

Business customer-focused and designed to keep you on one platform

While Canva is utilised by a whole range of different people the world over — with the company revealing it surpassed 150 million active monthly users last week — Magic Studio screams enterprise users.

That’s not to say that these tools won’t be useful for individuals, students and content creators — but when you look at the tools as a whole you can see a strong narrative for business customers.

What was also clear is that Canva is keen to keep users on-platform — something we have also seen from Slack this year as it has integrated more partners and tools into its own client.

For Canva, that means offering a mixture of in-house AI as well as AI partners. In fact, one of the new tools is AI Apps on Canva, which allows users to access the likes of OpenAI’s DALL-E and Google’s Imagen right there and then.

“Our approach to AI is threefold. We have our proprietary AI models where we’ve really had to deeply invest in research. We’ve [also] been integrating state-of-the-art AI models — which is applied through all of our product teams,” Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins, said on the call.

“And then we have built an app ecosystem to be able to bring the best of the best into the Canva platform to ensure that our community of 150 million people around the globe have the best AI at their fingertips in the Canva ecosystem.”

And Canva it certainly isn’t the first software giant to encourage this. Last month Salesforce made a big deal of encouraging businesses to utilise multiple LLMs as they experiment and rollout AI.

Canva Magic Studio price

But perhaps the smartest move of all here is the pricing. There will be no additional charge for Magic Studio for Canva Pro and Canva For Teams, which starts at $19.99 per month for Pro and $39.99 per month for Teams.

Some restricted freemium access will also be available for:

• Magic Write
• Magic Media
• Translate
• Magic Edit
• AI App Marketplace
• Magic Design

Canva founders said that the motivation behind the pricing, and pushing into generative AI in general, was to democratise content creation and opportunities for people.

“What we want to do is take it all into one single platform and make it accessible to the whole world,” Perkins said.

She brought up the example of Canva’s rewrite feature in Magic Studio she says can take a piece of writing and apply perfect grammar and prose.

“I’m extraordinarily excited about the ability of that to help people with accessibility because you can imagine someone that might not be able to read or write very clearly — they are able to create a resume and truly level the playing field between every single person on this planet,” Perkins said.