Drupal Canvas is one of the most exciting additions in Drupal CMS 2. Turn on the AI Assistant recipe and Canvas becomes smarter instantly. Discover how Canvas AI works, how to get the most from it, and best practices from one of the people who built it.
Understanding of Drupal site building fundamentals.
Drupal CMS 2 introduces Drupal Canvas, a modern page builder experience for Drupal. When the AI Assistant recipe is enabled, Canvas becomes AI-powered and can help create React components, generate SEO-friendly titles and metadata, build page sections, and even generate complete page templates from a single prompt.
While still experimental, Canvas AI already ships with powerful capabilities and a flexible architecture based on Drupal’s AI ecosystem and agents. In this session, you will learn how Canvas AI works under the hood, how agents are designed and provided context, and how you can extend Canvas with custom AI agents for your own page-building workflows.
Key topics
- Overview of Canvas AI in Drupal CMS 2 and what it enables today
- How Canvas AI uses Drupal’s AI ecosystem
- Agent architecture in Canvas
- Which agents are involved
- What each agent is responsible for
- Tools used by agents
- What agents use as context, and how agent output becomes real Canvas components on the page
- Giving agents the right context for custom SDC components
- How to make AI output consistent with your component library
- Making your design system Canvas AI-ready
- Adding your own custom AI agents for Drupal Canvas
- How custom agents plug into Canvas workflows
- Integrating custom agents with the AI chatbot
- Improving reliability
- Best practices for better results, minimal hallucinations.
- Common pitfalls, failure modes, and how to avoid them
This session is a deep dive into the internals and practical usage of Canvas AI. Attendees will learn the conceptual model behind agent-based page building, how to guide Canvas AI with structured context, and how to extend the system with custom agents. The session concludes with a live demo showing all available AI features.
- Understand how Canvas AI is implemented and how it interacts with Drupal’s AI ecosystem
- Identify which agents Canvas uses, what their responsibilities are, and how they use tools to complete tasks
- Provide high-quality context so Canvas AI can correctly use custom SDC components in page generation
- Implement a custom AI agent specifically for Drupal Canvas workflows
- Apply practical techniques to reduce hallucinations and improve output consistency and safety
- Confidently use Canvas AI for real site-building workflows, including component generation and page creation
