← Back to home

News / Sep 1, 2026

Google’s answer to Canva is an AI tool where you prompt instead of design

With Google Pics, Google is pushing deeper into the creative software market dominated by Canva and Adobe, but with a distinctly AI-first approach. Google is entering the creative design market with a new image-creation and editing tool called Google Pics, which will become a part of its Google Workspace suite for business customers and premium Google AI subscribers.

What happened

Google is entering the creative design market with a new image-creation and editing tool called Google Pics, which will become a part of its Google Workspace suite for business customers and premium Google AI subscribers. The company says the product, which is powered by Google’s Nano Banana image-generation model, will roll out over the coming weeks to most Workspace customers and those who pay for Google AI Pro or Ultra.

Similar to popular design tools like Adobe Express and Canva, Google’s new product is meant to be used for the sort of everyday design tasks you might come across at work and sometimes in your personal life. For instance, you could use Google Pics to create a poster, social media posts, and other visuals and illustrations.

But unlike Canva, where artists, illustrators, and photographers can publish templates, graphics, photos, and other art to a marketplace where they earn royalties, Google Pics is about creating things based on AI, which was trained on artists’ work.

The important details

And unlike Adobe Express, a tool creators often use to make that work in the first place, Google Pics is a tool where you prompt to create, not where you design something new from scratch. The app also includes other editing tools, like those to isolate and transform objects, modify or translate text inside images, and others.

Plus, it supports collaborative editing and the ability to create several different generations of the image you’ve requested, so you can pick the best one. The software will be built into Google Workspace, initially starting with Docs and Slides, which rolls out today.

It will later come to Google Drive, the company says.

Context and impact

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

The startup community will gather to answer a pivotal question: How do you build sustainably in the AI era? Microsoft tests fix for latest hours-long Outlook outage MapQuest’s app surges to No.

1 in Navigation after refusing to rename Lake Ontario Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem Nvidia’s AI advantage is moving beyond the GPU Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation.

What comes next

Watch for follow-on benchmarks, developer adoption, pricing changes, and reliability feedback.

Key signals

  • Similar to popular design tools like Adobe Express and Canva, Google’s new product is meant to be used for the sort of everyday design tasks you might come across at work and sometimes in your personal life.
  • Plus, it supports collaborative editing and the ability to create several different generations of the image you’ve requested, so you can pick the best one.
  • 1 in Navigation after refusing to rename Lake Ontario Musk’s faster path to more gas turbines comes with pollution problem Nvidia’s AI advantage is moving beyond the GPU Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation.

What to watch

Watch for follow-on benchmarks, developer adoption, pricing changes, and reliability feedback.