Canva, Adobe, and the Race to Build the Brain of Creative Work
Vaishnavi Iyer
Tools
10
10
min read
Nov 6, 2025
Nov 6, 2025
Canva, Adobe, and the Race to Build the Brain of Creative Work
The Creative Operating System Era Begins
Last week, Canva unveiled something they're calling a "Creative Operating System," complete with a Design Foundational Model that fundamentally understands visual hierarchy, layout, and design structure. If you thought this was just another product announcement, think again. This is the opening move in a battle that will reshape how creative work gets done in the age of artificial intelligence.
But Canva isn't alone in this race. Adobe recently acquired Invoke AI, a node-based AI workflow platform that gives creators unprecedented control over generative AI processes. Perplexity, the AI search company, acquired Visual Electric, a tool that proved AI could integrate seamlessly into professional design workflows. The pattern is unmistakable, and the implications are staggering.
From Tools to Infrastructure
For decades, the creative industry has operated on a simple premise: master individual tools, then string them together into a workflow. You learned Photoshop for photo editing, Illustrator for vector graphics, InDesign for layouts, and maybe Figma for collaborative design. Each tool was a silo with its own interface, learning curve, and limitations. Moving between them meant constant context switching, file exports, and inevitable friction that slowed down creative momentum.
What we're witnessing now is a fundamental shift in creative infrastructure. The acquisitions and product launches aren't random—they're coordinated moves in a chess game where the prize is becoming the central nervous system of creative work. Adobe's acquisition of Invoke AI signals their recognition that the future isn't about making Photoshop smarter with AI features bolted on top. It's about reimagining creative work as interconnected workflows where AI agents handle tedious transitions while humans focus on creative direction and decision-making.
Invoke AI brought something crucial to Adobe: node-based workflows that make model chaining accessible to creatives who want more control than a simple prompt box provides, but less technical complexity than traditional compositing software demands. This isn't just a feature add—it's a recognition that the entire paradigm is shifting beneath our feet.
Figure 1: Canva's Unified Creative Interface
Canva's redesigned workspace consolidates design tools (left sidebar), the creative canvas (center), and AI assistance (Ask @Canva comments) into a single environment. Rather than context-switching between Photoshop, Figma, and separate AI tools, creatives accomplish all tasks within one unified platform—the defining characteristic of a creative operating system.
*Source: Canva Creative Operating System - Ask @Canva Feature*
The Agent Economy of Creative Work
Perplexity's acquisition of Visual Electric's team tells an even more intriguing story. Visual Electric proved something critical in the market: that AI-generated imagery could be professional-grade and workflow-integrated, not just novelty content. The team's experience in building tools that designers actually trust is invaluable as Perplexity pivots toward building AI agents that don't just search and summarize information, but actually create, produce, and deliver finished work.
The next battleground in artificial intelligence won't be about who answers questions best. It will be about who can build agents that genuinely get work done.
What Exactly Is a Creative Operating System?
The term "operating system" isn't accidental marketing speak—it's a precise analogy that reveals where this technology is heading. Just as iOS and Android became platforms that unified communication, entertainment, productivity, and commerce into coherent experiences, a creative operating system aims to unify every aspect of creative production into a single, AI-powered environment.
Canva's vision includes a Design Foundational Model that doesn't just generate images based on text prompts. It understands design principles at a structural level: visual hierarchy, color theory, layout composition, and brand consistency. More importantly, it embeds these capabilities throughout the entire workflow, bringing generative AI into every moment where a creator might need assistance, inspiration, or automation.
“As knowledge becomes more and more accessible, we believe we're moving from the Information Era to the Imagination Era, a time when creativity has never been more critical...we're incredibly excited to unveil our biggest launch yet with the all-in-one Creative Operating System.” — Melanie Perkins, Canva Co-Founder and CEO
This represents a profound shift from how we've thought about creative software. Traditional tools gave you capabilities: brushes, filters, alignment tools, typography controls. A creative operating system gives you intelligence. It understands context, anticipates needs, maintains consistency across projects, and orchestrates complex multi-step processes that would traditionally require jumping between multiple applications.
The node-based workflow approach that Invoke AI championed is particularly revealing. Instead of treating AI as a black box where you input a prompt and hope for the best, node-based systems let creatives build sophisticated pipelines where different AI models handle different aspects of creation. One model might generate the initial concept, another refines the composition, a third handles style transfer, and a fourth ensures brand consistency. The creative directs this orchestra rather than trying to coax everything from a single prompt.
Figure 2: Invoke AI Node-Based Workflow Architecture A visual representation of multi-step AI workflows where different models and processes are orchestrated through connected nodes. Each node performs a specific function (model loading, prompting, scaling, latent processing), and the creative professional designs the pipeline rather than relying on a single prompt. This is what Adobe acquired when they brought Invoke AI into their ecosystem.
*Source: Invoke AI Workflow Editor Documentation | invoke-ai.github.io*
Why This Is Happening Now
The convergence of several technological and market forces makes this moment unique in creative software history. First, AI models have matured to the point where they're genuinely useful in professional contexts, not just impressive demos. The quality bar has been crossed. Designers, marketers, and content creators can now rely on AI-generated assets in client work and commercial projects without constant anxiety about quality or consistency.
Second, the cost of AI inference has plummeted dramatically. What once cost significantly more per million tokens now costs a fraction of that amount. This economic shift makes it viable to embed AI throughout creative workflows rather than treating it as an occasional, expensive resource. When AI is cheap enough to run constantly in the background, it stops being a tool you occasionally invoke and becomes ambient intelligence that's always available.
Figure 3: AI Inference Cost Decline, 2022-2024 The cost to query an AI model with GPT-3.5-equivalent performance dropped from $20.00 per million tokens (September 2022) to $0.07 per million tokens (October 2024)—a 280-fold reduction in just 18 months.
*Source: Epoch AI, 2025 | Chart: R&D World Online | Data: Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2025*
Third, businesses are demanding measurable returns on their AI investments. The experimentation phase is over. Companies want reduced costs, demonstrable ROI, and efficiency gains that show up on balance sheets. This pressure is pushing vendors toward comprehensive workflow solutions rather than point solutions that deliver marginal improvements.
Enterprise adoption is accelerating because organizations recognize that individual AI-powered tools create integration headaches. Every new AI service means another API to manage, another data pipeline to secure, another interface for employees to learn. A unified creative operating system promises to consolidate these capabilities into governed, manageable platforms that IT departments can actually control and secure.
What Dies and What's Born
This transformation will be creative destruction in its purest form. Some skills that creatives have spent years mastering will become less valuable, while entirely new competencies will emerge as critical differentiators in the job market. The era of tool mastery as a competitive advantage is ending. Being the fastest Photoshop user in your agency or the most technically proficient Illustrator expert won't carry the same weight when AI can execute technical tasks with superhuman speed and consistency. The value shifts from execution to direction, from technical proficiency to creative judgment, from knowing how to use tools to knowing what to build and why.
What's being born is the discipline of workflow orchestration. Creatives will need to become adept at designing AI pipelines, understanding which models excel at which tasks, and architecting complex multi-step processes that leverage AI's strengths while compensating for its weaknesses. This is part prompt engineering, part systems thinking, part creative direction, and part project management—a hybrid skillset that doesn't quite exist in today's job descriptions.
Brand consistency and creative governance will become more important, not less. When AI can generate unlimited variations of creative assets, the challenge shifts from production capacity to maintaining coherent brand identities across thousands of AI-generated touchpoints. Companies will need frameworks, guidelines, and oversight mechanisms that simply don't exist today.
The Competitive Landscape
The race to build the definitive creative operating system is intensifying, and the competitors bring different strengths to the battle. Adobe enters with decades of creative industry relationships, professional-grade tools, and the trust of enterprises worldwide. Their acquisition strategy shows they understand that owning the workflow layer matters more than owning individual capabilities.
Canva approaches from a different angle: accessibility and ease of use. They've already democratized design for millions of non-designers, and their creative operating system vision extends this philosophy into the AI era. Their bet is that the winning platform won't be the one with the most sophisticated capabilities, but the one that makes sophisticated capabilities accessible to the broadest audience.
Perplexity represents the wild card: a company known for AI-powered search pivoting toward creation and production. Their acquisition of Visual Electric's talent signals ambitions beyond information retrieval. If they can build AI agents that seamlessly move from research to creation to production, they could leapfrog traditional creative software companies entirely.
We should expect more acquisitions, more partnerships, and more platform plays in the coming months. Companies with valuable workflow IP, node-based systems, or specialized AI models will become acquisition targets. The logic is simple: building a creative operating system from scratch is nearly impossible, but assembling one from best-in-class components is achievable.
Getting Fluent in What's Coming
For creative professionals, business leaders, and anyone who produces content as part of their work, the imperative is clear: start building fluency in AI workflows now, before the platforms fully mature.
Experiment with node-based AI tools that let you build multi-step workflows. The specific tool matters less than developing an intuition for how to orchestrate AI processes. Learn to think in terms of pipelines rather than individual operations. Understand which AI models excel at which tasks and why. This knowledge will transfer regardless of which creative operating system eventually wins market share.
Develop your creative judgment and strategic thinking because these remain uniquely human contributions that AI cannot replicate. As AI handles more execution, the value shifts entirely to the quality of creative direction, the insight behind strategic choices, and the ability to evaluate whether AI output actually serves the intended purpose.
Organizations should start thinking about governance frameworks for AI-generated creative work. What are your brand guidelines in a world where AI generates thousands of variations? How do you maintain quality control when production scales exponentially? Who reviews AI output, and what criteria do they apply? These aren't technical questions—they're organizational design questions that require leadership attention now.
The Future Is Already Here
We are witnessing something genuinely historic: the birth of a new category of software that will be as transformative for creative work as spreadsheets were for finance or CAD was for engineering. The creative operating system isn't a distant future concept—it's being built right now by companies racing to define what creative work looks like in the AI era.
The professionals and organizations that thrive in this transition will be those who recognize that this isn't just about new tools. It's about a fundamental reimagining of creative processes, skills, and value creation.
The sandbox where you do everything in the same software isn't coming eventually—it's arriving in the next twelve to twenty-four months. The question isn't whether creative operating systems will replace today's tool-centric workflows.
The question is which platforms will win, how quickly adoption will happen, and whether you'll be fluent in these new systems when they become the industry standard. The time to start building that fluency is now, while the platforms are still taking shape and the competitive advantages of early adoption are still available.
The creative infrastructure revolution is here. Are you ready?
References and Further Reading
Perplexity Acquires Image Generation App Visual Electric to Rival
Perplexity AI's Bold Leap: Acquiring Visual Electric to Revolutionize
Canva Launches Creative Operating System." Business Wire, October 29, 2025.
Canva's new Creative Operating System wants to be your one-stop shop for AI design.
Adobe Expands Creative Possibility with AI for Every Creator at Adobe MAX 2025.
Adobe Firefly Foundry Delivers Proprietary and On-Brand Custom Generative Models.
Canva's new 'Creative Operating System' is actually a marketing workspace.
Most Impressive AI Workflows We've Seen So Far in 2025 - AI Isn't a Tool Anymore.
Agentic AI Orchestration in 2025: Automating Workflows at Scale
LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks
Top 10 AI Orchestration Tools for 2025: A Comparison of Features and Benefits.
AI's great compression: 20 charts show vanishing gaps but still soaring costs.
The 2025 AI Index Report." Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), April 2025.
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 (PDF)." Stanford HAI, February 2025.
Disclaimer: The tools, links, and opinions shared in this post reflect general experiences and should be regarded as suggestions, not endorsements. Individual results with AI tools will vary. Always use your judgment and consult course or institutional policies where appropriate.
Canva, Adobe, and the Race to Build the Brain of Creative Work
The Creative Operating System Era Begins
Last week, Canva unveiled something they're calling a "Creative Operating System," complete with a Design Foundational Model that fundamentally understands visual hierarchy, layout, and design structure. If you thought this was just another product announcement, think again. This is the opening move in a battle that will reshape how creative work gets done in the age of artificial intelligence.
But Canva isn't alone in this race. Adobe recently acquired Invoke AI, a node-based AI workflow platform that gives creators unprecedented control over generative AI processes. Perplexity, the AI search company, acquired Visual Electric, a tool that proved AI could integrate seamlessly into professional design workflows. The pattern is unmistakable, and the implications are staggering.
From Tools to Infrastructure
For decades, the creative industry has operated on a simple premise: master individual tools, then string them together into a workflow. You learned Photoshop for photo editing, Illustrator for vector graphics, InDesign for layouts, and maybe Figma for collaborative design. Each tool was a silo with its own interface, learning curve, and limitations. Moving between them meant constant context switching, file exports, and inevitable friction that slowed down creative momentum.
What we're witnessing now is a fundamental shift in creative infrastructure. The acquisitions and product launches aren't random—they're coordinated moves in a chess game where the prize is becoming the central nervous system of creative work. Adobe's acquisition of Invoke AI signals their recognition that the future isn't about making Photoshop smarter with AI features bolted on top. It's about reimagining creative work as interconnected workflows where AI agents handle tedious transitions while humans focus on creative direction and decision-making.
Invoke AI brought something crucial to Adobe: node-based workflows that make model chaining accessible to creatives who want more control than a simple prompt box provides, but less technical complexity than traditional compositing software demands. This isn't just a feature add—it's a recognition that the entire paradigm is shifting beneath our feet.
Figure 1: Canva's Unified Creative Interface
Canva's redesigned workspace consolidates design tools (left sidebar), the creative canvas (center), and AI assistance (Ask @Canva comments) into a single environment. Rather than context-switching between Photoshop, Figma, and separate AI tools, creatives accomplish all tasks within one unified platform—the defining characteristic of a creative operating system.
*Source: Canva Creative Operating System - Ask @Canva Feature*
The Agent Economy of Creative Work
Perplexity's acquisition of Visual Electric's team tells an even more intriguing story. Visual Electric proved something critical in the market: that AI-generated imagery could be professional-grade and workflow-integrated, not just novelty content. The team's experience in building tools that designers actually trust is invaluable as Perplexity pivots toward building AI agents that don't just search and summarize information, but actually create, produce, and deliver finished work.
The next battleground in artificial intelligence won't be about who answers questions best. It will be about who can build agents that genuinely get work done.
What Exactly Is a Creative Operating System?
The term "operating system" isn't accidental marketing speak—it's a precise analogy that reveals where this technology is heading. Just as iOS and Android became platforms that unified communication, entertainment, productivity, and commerce into coherent experiences, a creative operating system aims to unify every aspect of creative production into a single, AI-powered environment.
Canva's vision includes a Design Foundational Model that doesn't just generate images based on text prompts. It understands design principles at a structural level: visual hierarchy, color theory, layout composition, and brand consistency. More importantly, it embeds these capabilities throughout the entire workflow, bringing generative AI into every moment where a creator might need assistance, inspiration, or automation.
“As knowledge becomes more and more accessible, we believe we're moving from the Information Era to the Imagination Era, a time when creativity has never been more critical...we're incredibly excited to unveil our biggest launch yet with the all-in-one Creative Operating System.” — Melanie Perkins, Canva Co-Founder and CEO
This represents a profound shift from how we've thought about creative software. Traditional tools gave you capabilities: brushes, filters, alignment tools, typography controls. A creative operating system gives you intelligence. It understands context, anticipates needs, maintains consistency across projects, and orchestrates complex multi-step processes that would traditionally require jumping between multiple applications.
The node-based workflow approach that Invoke AI championed is particularly revealing. Instead of treating AI as a black box where you input a prompt and hope for the best, node-based systems let creatives build sophisticated pipelines where different AI models handle different aspects of creation. One model might generate the initial concept, another refines the composition, a third handles style transfer, and a fourth ensures brand consistency. The creative directs this orchestra rather than trying to coax everything from a single prompt.
Figure 2: Invoke AI Node-Based Workflow Architecture A visual representation of multi-step AI workflows where different models and processes are orchestrated through connected nodes. Each node performs a specific function (model loading, prompting, scaling, latent processing), and the creative professional designs the pipeline rather than relying on a single prompt. This is what Adobe acquired when they brought Invoke AI into their ecosystem.
*Source: Invoke AI Workflow Editor Documentation | invoke-ai.github.io*
Why This Is Happening Now
The convergence of several technological and market forces makes this moment unique in creative software history. First, AI models have matured to the point where they're genuinely useful in professional contexts, not just impressive demos. The quality bar has been crossed. Designers, marketers, and content creators can now rely on AI-generated assets in client work and commercial projects without constant anxiety about quality or consistency.
Second, the cost of AI inference has plummeted dramatically. What once cost significantly more per million tokens now costs a fraction of that amount. This economic shift makes it viable to embed AI throughout creative workflows rather than treating it as an occasional, expensive resource. When AI is cheap enough to run constantly in the background, it stops being a tool you occasionally invoke and becomes ambient intelligence that's always available.
Figure 3: AI Inference Cost Decline, 2022-2024 The cost to query an AI model with GPT-3.5-equivalent performance dropped from $20.00 per million tokens (September 2022) to $0.07 per million tokens (October 2024)—a 280-fold reduction in just 18 months.
*Source: Epoch AI, 2025 | Chart: R&D World Online | Data: Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2025*
Third, businesses are demanding measurable returns on their AI investments. The experimentation phase is over. Companies want reduced costs, demonstrable ROI, and efficiency gains that show up on balance sheets. This pressure is pushing vendors toward comprehensive workflow solutions rather than point solutions that deliver marginal improvements.
Enterprise adoption is accelerating because organizations recognize that individual AI-powered tools create integration headaches. Every new AI service means another API to manage, another data pipeline to secure, another interface for employees to learn. A unified creative operating system promises to consolidate these capabilities into governed, manageable platforms that IT departments can actually control and secure.
What Dies and What's Born
This transformation will be creative destruction in its purest form. Some skills that creatives have spent years mastering will become less valuable, while entirely new competencies will emerge as critical differentiators in the job market. The era of tool mastery as a competitive advantage is ending. Being the fastest Photoshop user in your agency or the most technically proficient Illustrator expert won't carry the same weight when AI can execute technical tasks with superhuman speed and consistency. The value shifts from execution to direction, from technical proficiency to creative judgment, from knowing how to use tools to knowing what to build and why.
What's being born is the discipline of workflow orchestration. Creatives will need to become adept at designing AI pipelines, understanding which models excel at which tasks, and architecting complex multi-step processes that leverage AI's strengths while compensating for its weaknesses. This is part prompt engineering, part systems thinking, part creative direction, and part project management—a hybrid skillset that doesn't quite exist in today's job descriptions.
Brand consistency and creative governance will become more important, not less. When AI can generate unlimited variations of creative assets, the challenge shifts from production capacity to maintaining coherent brand identities across thousands of AI-generated touchpoints. Companies will need frameworks, guidelines, and oversight mechanisms that simply don't exist today.
The Competitive Landscape
The race to build the definitive creative operating system is intensifying, and the competitors bring different strengths to the battle. Adobe enters with decades of creative industry relationships, professional-grade tools, and the trust of enterprises worldwide. Their acquisition strategy shows they understand that owning the workflow layer matters more than owning individual capabilities.
Canva approaches from a different angle: accessibility and ease of use. They've already democratized design for millions of non-designers, and their creative operating system vision extends this philosophy into the AI era. Their bet is that the winning platform won't be the one with the most sophisticated capabilities, but the one that makes sophisticated capabilities accessible to the broadest audience.
Perplexity represents the wild card: a company known for AI-powered search pivoting toward creation and production. Their acquisition of Visual Electric's talent signals ambitions beyond information retrieval. If they can build AI agents that seamlessly move from research to creation to production, they could leapfrog traditional creative software companies entirely.
We should expect more acquisitions, more partnerships, and more platform plays in the coming months. Companies with valuable workflow IP, node-based systems, or specialized AI models will become acquisition targets. The logic is simple: building a creative operating system from scratch is nearly impossible, but assembling one from best-in-class components is achievable.
Getting Fluent in What's Coming
For creative professionals, business leaders, and anyone who produces content as part of their work, the imperative is clear: start building fluency in AI workflows now, before the platforms fully mature.
Experiment with node-based AI tools that let you build multi-step workflows. The specific tool matters less than developing an intuition for how to orchestrate AI processes. Learn to think in terms of pipelines rather than individual operations. Understand which AI models excel at which tasks and why. This knowledge will transfer regardless of which creative operating system eventually wins market share.
Develop your creative judgment and strategic thinking because these remain uniquely human contributions that AI cannot replicate. As AI handles more execution, the value shifts entirely to the quality of creative direction, the insight behind strategic choices, and the ability to evaluate whether AI output actually serves the intended purpose.
Organizations should start thinking about governance frameworks for AI-generated creative work. What are your brand guidelines in a world where AI generates thousands of variations? How do you maintain quality control when production scales exponentially? Who reviews AI output, and what criteria do they apply? These aren't technical questions—they're organizational design questions that require leadership attention now.
The Future Is Already Here
We are witnessing something genuinely historic: the birth of a new category of software that will be as transformative for creative work as spreadsheets were for finance or CAD was for engineering. The creative operating system isn't a distant future concept—it's being built right now by companies racing to define what creative work looks like in the AI era.
The professionals and organizations that thrive in this transition will be those who recognize that this isn't just about new tools. It's about a fundamental reimagining of creative processes, skills, and value creation.
The sandbox where you do everything in the same software isn't coming eventually—it's arriving in the next twelve to twenty-four months. The question isn't whether creative operating systems will replace today's tool-centric workflows.
The question is which platforms will win, how quickly adoption will happen, and whether you'll be fluent in these new systems when they become the industry standard. The time to start building that fluency is now, while the platforms are still taking shape and the competitive advantages of early adoption are still available.
The creative infrastructure revolution is here. Are you ready?
References and Further Reading
Perplexity Acquires Image Generation App Visual Electric to Rival
Perplexity AI's Bold Leap: Acquiring Visual Electric to Revolutionize
Canva Launches Creative Operating System." Business Wire, October 29, 2025.
Canva's new Creative Operating System wants to be your one-stop shop for AI design.
Adobe Expands Creative Possibility with AI for Every Creator at Adobe MAX 2025.
Adobe Firefly Foundry Delivers Proprietary and On-Brand Custom Generative Models.
Canva's new 'Creative Operating System' is actually a marketing workspace.
Most Impressive AI Workflows We've Seen So Far in 2025 - AI Isn't a Tool Anymore.
Agentic AI Orchestration in 2025: Automating Workflows at Scale
LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks
Top 10 AI Orchestration Tools for 2025: A Comparison of Features and Benefits.
AI's great compression: 20 charts show vanishing gaps but still soaring costs.
The 2025 AI Index Report." Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), April 2025.
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 (PDF)." Stanford HAI, February 2025.
Disclaimer: The tools, links, and opinions shared in this post reflect general experiences and should be regarded as suggestions, not endorsements. Individual results with AI tools will vary. Always use your judgment and consult course or institutional policies where appropriate.
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