For years, Canva was seen as a design tool.

In 2025, Canva quietly crossed a much bigger line.

With its Imagination Era keynote, Canva repositioned itself from a design platform to a full-stack, AI-powered marketing and creative operating system. This shift matters deeply for founders, marketers, strategists, and teams building brands at speed.

These updates are not cosmetic. They change how work moves from idea to execution.

Here’s what you need to know, and why it matters for modern marketing teams.

Canva Video 2.0: AI-Native Video Editing for Social-First Brands

Canva Video 2.0 introduces next-generation, AI-assisted video editing designed for today’s social platforms.

Key capabilities include:

• Smart auto-clipping and scene detection

• Dynamic text, effects, and soundtrack synchronisation

• A new timeline editor with mobile-first controls

• Zero watermarks and no creative paywalls

For brands producing Reels, TikToks, Shorts, and story-based content, this brings professional-grade video control with Canva-level simplicity.

This is Canva positioning itself as a serious alternative for fast, high-volume video creation, not just static design.

Canva Forms: Interactive Data Collection Built Into Design

With Canva Forms, data collection moves directly into the creative layer.

Teams can now:

• Build branded, drag-and-drop forms inside designs

• Collect registrations, feedback, and pre-orders without integrations

• Automatically route responses into Canva Sheets for real-time insights

For campaigns, webinars, and dashboards, this removes friction between design, data, and decision-making, something most marketing stacks still struggle with.

Data Meets Canva Code: No-Code, Data-Driven Creativity

One of the most strategic updates is Canva Code, where data meets interaction.

By connecting Canva Sheets to AI-powered Canva Code apps, teams can:

• Build quizzes, calculators, polls, and interactive designs

• Create data-driven assets without writing code

• Bridge the gap between designers and developers

This is Canva quietly moving into no-code product thinking, a major shift for marketing-led organisations.

Email Design Inside Canva: From Design to Send, Seamlessly

Canva now allows teams to design and export branded emails directly within the platform.

Features include:

• 100+ smart email templates

• Live previews

• One-click HTML export for any email platform

For marketing teams, this removes yet another tool from the stack and shortens the path from concept to inbox.

AI Where You Work: Canva as a Creative Sidekick

Canva’s AI is no longer an add-on. It is embedded directly into the workflow.

Capabilities include:

• Prompt-to-template design generation

• AI-generated photos, videos, and 3D assets

• Instant style matching for brand consistency

• Ask Canva, a context-aware AI assistant for copy, layout, and colour decisions

This is AI acting as a creative collaborator, not just a generator.

Canva Grow: An AI Marketing Studio Inside Canva

Canva Grow is Canva’s clearest move into marketing execution.

It offers:

• End-to-end campaign building

• Planning, design, publishing, and analytics in one dashboard

• AI-generated ads and assets aligned to your brand and website

• Direct publishing to Meta with built-in performance tracking

For small businesses and lean teams, this effectively becomes a marketing department living inside Canva.

The New Canva Brand System: AI-Managed Brand Consistency

Brand governance is often where scaling teams break.

Canva’s new brand system introduces:

• AI-synced fonts, colours, templates, and assets

• Personalised brand homepages and live style guides

• Enterprise-grade control with Canva simplicity

This ensures every creator, partner, and team stays on-brand without constant policing.

Ask Canva: Your AI Partner in Design Decisions

Ask Canva allows creators to chat with AI directly inside designs.

It helps with:

• Copy refinement

• Layout suggestions

• Colour harmony

• Real-time design improvements

For teams balancing speed and quality, this is AI acting as an always-on design reviewer.

Affinity × Canva: Professional Design Without Barriers

Canva’s acquisition of the Affinity Suite brings:

• Professional-grade pixel, vector, and layout tools

• Desktop and iPad support

• Zero subscriptions or access barriers

This move signals Canva’s ambition to serve advanced creators and professionals, not just casual users.

What Canva’s Imagination Era Really Means

Taken together, these updates signal a larger shift.

Canva is no longer competing on templates or ease of use. It is competing on workflow ownership.

For founders, marketers, and strategists, the real opportunity lies in this question:

Are you using Canva as a tool, or are you designing your entire creative and marketing workflow around it?

The brands that win will be the ones who treat AI as infrastructure, not novelty.

Final Thought

The Imagination Era is not about creating more.

It is about connecting thinking, creativity, execution, and measurement into one continuous flow.

And Canva is positioning itself right at the centre of that future.

Watch the full keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnqOzxpWHNA&t=861s

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