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IgniteAI Agent now available for instructors in the U.S. and Latin America

In January, we announced that IgniteAI Agent was available for administrators in the United States and Latin America. Since then, admins at hundreds of institutions have used it to simplify everyday tasks in Canvas.

Today, I’m excited to share that IgniteAI Agent is now also available for instructors in those regions. Anyone with an Admin-, Teacher-, or Designer-based role can be granted access to the Agent.

So if you’re an instructor new to IgniteAI Agent – welcome! The Agent is a conversational AI assistant built directly into Canvas. Instead of navigating multiple menus or completing repetitive steps, you can simply describe what you want to do. The Agent can then take action on your behalf.

For example, use IgniteAI Agent to:

Update course settings or materials with a single prompt
Extend assignment deadlines across multiple modules
Generate Canvas-ready content including pages, discussion prompts, and more
Perform multi-step course management tasks more quickly

By turning complex workflows into simple prompts, IgniteAI Agent helps instructors spend less time managing course logistics and more time focusing on supporting students and creating engaging learning experiences.

Flexible admin controls

Institutions can roll out IgniteAI Agent in a way that aligns with their policies and readiness.

Administrators can enable or manage access at the following levels:

Root account
User role

This flexibility allows institutions to pilot the agent with specific departments, programs, or courses before expanding access more broadly. Read the latest release notes for more information on new Agent feature flags.

Instructor choice and flexibility

When IgniteAI Agent is enabled by an administrator, instructors will see the Agent within their Canvas experience. However, educators always remain in control. Instructors who prefer not to use the Agent can follow these instructions to opt out at any time.

Free access and upcoming pricing details

To give all customers an opportunity to use it, IgniteAI Agent will be available at no cost for a limited time:

U.S. customers: Free access through June 30, 2026
Customers outside the U.S.: Free access through September 30, 2026, reflecting the staggered rollout across regions

We’ll share more information about IgniteAI Agent long-term pricing during the New & Next showcase on April 21 and April 22.

Expanding globally

We’re continuing to expand IgniteAI Agent availability worldwide. Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), as well as Australia and New Zealand, are next in our rollout plans, with additional updates coming soon.

Getting started

Administrators can enable IgniteAI Agent through account settings. Once enabled, instructors will see the Agent within Canvas and can begin using it to streamline everyday tasks. We encourage you to share these resources with instructors to help them get started:

We’re excited to bring IgniteAI Agent directly into educators’ workflows and look forward to seeing how instructors use it to simplify course management and save time.

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Comments

dtod

We're used to feature flags only being available at the root (although it's preferred when not), but having a role permission only be available at the root makes testing with a subset of courses/teachers more difficult.

jchapes

Hello! I'm unsure with how this feature flag and permission was released how we can only release this feature to certain sub-accounts or teachers. It seems like we have to turn it on for everyone or not at all.

Deepa Prasad

Hi @dtod @jchapes thank you for flagging this! Because the Agent can be assigned by role, the easiest approach is to create a custom teacher role and use that for access control. In Admin → Permissions, create a new role based on Teacher (for example, “Teacher – IgniteAI Agent”), then configure the feature to be available to that role. From there, you can assign that role to the specific teachers who should have access to the Agent.

I imagine that many other admins are wondering the same, so we're creating some documentation around this. Thanks again!

jchapes

@Deepa Prasad If we create a custom Teacher role with this permission, theoretically wouldn't anyone who currently has permission to add users with the Teacher role to their Canvas course be able to add user with that custom role to their course? Is there a way to hide the custom Teacher role from users while retaining the ability to add the standard Teacher role?

Deepa Prasad

At this time, there isn't a way to omit a custom Teacher role but still allow users to invite others into standard Teacher roles. If you don't want to turn off that ability, I'd recommend having users start in your Beta environment to test the Agent.

jchapes

Thanks for the reply! It would be great to have greater granularity with the permission could be added. For example if we could enable the IgniteAI Agent permission on the teacher role within a specific sub-account instead of just at the root account would give us the ability to manage access in the way that we'd desire.

Deepa Prasad

You should definitely submit this as a contribution on our new collaborative roadmap: https://community.instructure.com/en/categories/platform-collaborative-roadmap

This is the new way Product Managers will be tracking feature requests.

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