Shipping use cases matters more than the hype cycle
Gemini 3.5 is here. Flash is enough. Ship one AI workflow this week.
Hi there,
If you’re new here, I’m Brennan McDonald and I write about the people side of AI transformation. This newsletter grows through word of mouth and your recommendations. If you enjoy this, please share it with a friend today, it’s always appreciated. If you have any feedback, you can reply to this email.
- Brennan
Google just released their new model, Gemini 3.5, and it’s a good model.
I like the fact that there are more than just two US competitors in the AI realm.
It’s clear that in the scientific and multimodal space, Google DeepMind have real strengths.
Do you need to care about Gemini 3.5 though?
Only if you want to spend the time and only if you have already implemented a number of AI use cases in your business.
I published a video yesterday on my YouTube channel where I spoke about reasons why AI projects fail. You can watch it over there:
One of the things I spoke about was the need for people who are leading AI transformation or sitting in roles like “Head of AI transformation” need to be testing things themselves and developing taste and opinions about which models suit which tasks best.
Why getting use cases shipped matters more
I think that getting use cases shipped matters more than knowing what every model does.
I’ve started to realise how my own technical optimism makes me overestimate how interested leaders and business owners are in the low-level technical details.
You definitely need to become more technical and have an awareness of all of this stuff. I realise that a lot of people are not going to be running their own private evals every time a new model gets released.
That’s why one of the easiest ways to test out a model if you want to is to try and build something and ship it.
The relaunch of Google’s agent tool called Antigravity is one opportunity to test this out. The move away from CLIs for prosumers and enterprise users towards the desktop apps like Claude Desktop, Codex and Antigravity is definitely a trend at the moment.
One improvement here is the addition of scheduled tasks, and better use of subagents.
So what do I actually do with this?
Go check out Gemini
Share a business problem you face with it
Ask for an action plan to solve it
Assess whether it is any good at all based on your subjective opinion
Go back to work on transforming your operating model to get more out of AI
There’s really not much to it. You could, if you’ve been working with Claude Desktop or Codex, download Antigravity and give it a go for some agentic tasks or setting up automations on a schedule, but chopping and changing models is probably not the right thing. Especially if you are working in a small business where it was hard enough to get your people to accept that they even need to be thinking about using AI. Let alone learning a whole new tool.
I’m looking forward to seeing what 3.5 Pro looks like. I think that for businesses that are already in the Google ecosystem, more of them are going to get more than enough of what they need from the Gemini model family. That is good from a competition perspective.
The reality is that for almost all business use cases today, if you break them down clearly and coherently into their component tasks and subtasks, a model like Gemini 3.5 Flash is more than good enough.
I think this point isn’t well enough understood, and it’s one of the reasons why I changed this newsletter’s focus to really be about the people side and change management side of AI transformation.
If you break down your processes clearly, you can get them done to a required level of quality and cost with a model like 3.5 Flash. We have almost been gifted the luxury of not having to worry about clearly articulating exactly what we want out of some of our AI workflows because of the capability of models like Claude Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.5!
The most important thing for you to do with new things coming out every week is making sure you are getting at least one use case into a production environment. Leverage AI every week - your delivery matters more than the never-ending hype cycle.
Regards,
Brennan
PS: If you liked this shorter format, drop a comment below or send me a DM.
Google def hit back with this one. People seem to really like it though I haven't had a go. They offered much better rate limits now too after complaints!
Great framing, Brennan! The model-by-model comparison game can become a distraction if teams haven’t yet built the muscle of turning clear business problems into usable workflows. AI workflows aren't just analog workflows with AI.