Google takes aim at Canva

On Tuesday Google began rolling out Pics, an image-generation and editing app built on Nano Banana, its image model, to most Google Workspace customers and to subscribers of its AI Pro and Ultra plans. It lives inside Docs and Slides from day one, with Drive to follow. The pitch is the one Canva, the Australian design company, has made for thirteen years — anyone can make a poster, a social post, a flyer — with one change in the verb. Canva asks you to pick a template and design. Pics asks you to describe what you want, then click on any object or line of text and tell it what to change. There is no template library and no marketplace of paid creators. There is a prompt box, an editor and a place in the suite three billion people already use.

Canva is not a soft target. It finished 2025 with more than 265 million monthly users, 31 million of them paying, and $4 billion in annual recurring revenue, up roughly 43% and profitable since 2017; a share sale last August marked it at $42 billion, and Cliff Obrecht, its co-founder and operating chief, has said it will go public within a couple of years. Its fastest-growing business is the one Google is now aiming at: accounts with 25 or more seats doubled last year to $500 million in recurring revenue. Canva also saw the prompt box coming. It relaunched this year as an AI-first platform — Obrecht describes it as "a cursor for design" — and it has embedded itself inside every major assistant, including Gemini, where a user can type @Canva and get an editable file back.

Google's bet is that none of that decides the enterprise seat. It is that once a competent image model can produce a finished graphic from a sentence, the design tool stops being a destination and becomes a feature of wherever the work already happens, and that the company which owns the document owns the feature.