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

Google is pushing into everyday design work with Google Pics, a new image creation and editing tool for Workspace customers and paid Google AI subscribers. The company says it’s powered by its Nano Banana image generation model, and it should reach most Workspace users, plus people on Google AI Pro or Ultra, over the coming weeks.

The pitch is familiar if you’ve used Canva or Adobe Express. Google says Pics is meant for the sort of quick visual jobs people do at work and sometimes for themselves: posters, social posts, and other illustrations. But the way it gets there is different. Canva has a marketplace full of templates and assets made by artists and photographers. Google Pics instead starts from AI trained on artists’ work. Adobe Express, meanwhile, is the sort of tool people use to build something from scratch. Pics is more about typing what you want and letting the model do the first draft.

There’s more than image generation here, too. Google says the app can isolate and transform objects, change or translate text inside images, and do other editing tasks. It also supports collaborative editing, along with multiple versions of the image you asked for so you can choose the one that works best.

The rollout starts inside Google Workspace, beginning with Docs and Slides today. Google says it will come to Drive later. That makes Pics less like a standalone creative app and more like a feature creeping into the places people already work, which is usually how these things get their real audience.