THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW
New capabilities launched in Canva at the end of 2025 allow designers to tag Canva’ s intelligent AI assistant directly in a design comment – for example, asking it to reword a headline or adjust the colours of a visual element – making AI a team player, not a creative director.
How AI is closing the data storytelling gap Canva may be going full steam ahead with AI, but none of this is possible without a solid baseline of data. When Canva acquired Flourish in 2022, it significantly enhanced the former’ s data storytelling capabilities, allowing users to seamlessly integrate sophisticated, interactive data visualisations – like animated charts – from Flourish directly into Canva’ s design ecosystem. In turn, users are now able to create richer presentations and reports and Canva’ s European presence grew exponentially.
Canva’ s Beyond the Numbers report itself tells a compelling, data-driven story and highlights a worrying paradox – that 66 % of people feel anxious when facing a data‐heavy task.“ Everyone acknowledges that data storytelling is important, but there’ s this gap between significance and capability,” Duncan says.“ What we’ ve been trying to do at Canva is unlock data storytelling for everyone so that you can produce better data graphics that are designed to engage, be explored and be interactive. You can add filters, animations, but, most importantly, they’ re also on brand. We think that data is such a core part of communication now that it needs to be treated as a core part of visual communication.”
This means that a deck is no longer a static presentation but an interactive narrative. Updates to Canva’ s data connectors now allow users to pull live data from platforms like Google Analytics, HubSpot or even the World Bank, keeping designs dynamically in sync.
“ It’ s like breaking down the distinction between a deck, which is the normal currency of day-to-day work in a company, and a dashboard – which is more technical, generally slower to load and more to preserve the data scientists.”
34 February 2026