A look at Canva's newest feature, the Dream Lab. Handout from Canva

MANILA -- Online design platform Canva is eyeing more businesses with its launch of new artificial intelligence (AI) features.

In a statement, Canva said it has launched Dream Lab, which can produce different types of photos and graphics from a simple text instruction. The platform said this comes after it bought AI image generator Leonardo.Ai.

"What it allows you to do is create incredibly precise images with extended prompting," said Jen Thompson, head of product marketing at Canva. 

"It lets you choose the style. You can upload the reference image to actually show, sort of like, what you want the output to kind of look familiar with...and then a range of different options as well."

"We were so blown away by this that we couldn't wait to get it in the hands of our Canva community, and use our distribution to sort of up the up, and so what we're really excited to be introducing as one of our big launches is Dream Lab."

Canva said the new Dream Lab can help businessmen explore different product mockups, and allow marketers to quickly create graphics for their different advertising campaigns.

Canva said a lot of companies are now using its software to create designs that improve their operations and sales since its launch in May. The firm said 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Canva.

In the country, Maxicare Healthcare Corporation and Manulife Philippines are just two of the companies that use Canva. Thompson said using Canva for business helps companies save and make money.

"By using Canva, you have the ability to both consolidate your tooling as well as consolidate your spend," she said. "A lot of the creation that you would otherwise need to outsource to an agency, all would be reliant on very specific individuals within your organization," she said.

She also noted how Canva can help employees collaborateon graphics their companies need.

"If you're actually using Canva, one platform that everyone's in, you're able to collaborate in it, even if it's done by a professional designer. Small tweaks can then be made really simply: little text changes, little image changes, it's a lot faster. So on the cost saving side, there's a lot of both time and money saved there," she said.

She also said that Canva helps companies tailor their marketing or sales materials for different audiences in a more efficient way.

"Because it is Canva, it's more visually [appealing], which means that a lot of the time it's easier to decide something that looks really high fidelity or really professional, and therefore you're more likely to get someone's attention or close that deal."

Aside from Dream Lab, Canva also said it is boosting its Whiteboards feature with AI-powered sorting and summarizing, along with interactive reaction stickers to help teammates vote on ideas in real-time.

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The design firm also said it launched new, interactive chart types to help users better present data.

Thompson stressed, however, that they still hope to do more for businesses.

"A lot of the things that we're hearing from enterprise and business is a bit a bit higher order, a bit higher level than specifics around features," she said.

"For example, some of the themes that we're hearing at the moment, in particular from organizations who focus on marketing and using Canva for marketing, is this need to be incredibly customer centric, and the expectations of customers is increasing over time. They're expecting things to be more personal, more about them," she said.

"So one of the big things that we're doing is allowing people to create huge amounts of content or huge amounts of material at scale in a really customized or bespoke way...so that you can do multiple things at one or create your materials to be super specific to different customers," She explained.