Visual Intelligence Just Went Mainstream

So this week has been big for the AI space, and I want to make sense of that for the strategic leader that is you.

We're not going to talk about benchmarks or why this is cool. We're going to look at you as a strategic leader in your business. What does it mean for you? That's really my interest here.

We had three big launches in seven days.

November 18: Google released Gemini 3 Pro - their most advanced reasoning model. It's beaten ChatGPT, Grok, and even Claude in many reasoning benchmarks. That's significant.

November 20: Google followed with Nano Banana Pro. Now, that's an interesting name - it was the insider codename that stuck. But here's what matters: Nano Banana Pro is not just an image generation model. It's a visual reasoning model. That's a very important distinction.

November 24: Just as I was going to press on this newsletter, Claude dropped Opus 4.5 - their new high-level reasoning model for complex professional work.

When you bring all three together, you start to see that this week has been a step change in visual reasoning.

Let me walk you through what that means in a practical way.

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Gemini 3 Pro: Making Sense of the Mess

Look, as strategic leaders, we have a whole bunch of documents, a whole bunch of things that we have to create and input.

How many times have we gone and did a whiteboard session and took a photograph of the whiteboard session and then what? Like, what do we do with it? We go back and sometimes look at it or make notes. How many times have you done post-it notes on wallpaper? And then you come back and say, how do I make sense of all of this? How do I bring it together?

Well, Gemini is your friend here now.

Let me give you an example. This is a piece of work I did many years back when I was CEO of a clinical trials business called Plexus. I was exploring how to reimagine clinical trials from the ground up - strategy, AI/ML, bringing technology and business models together. This was the whiteboard.

What I did was give this whiteboard to Gemini and said: "Analyse this whiteboard for strategic logic, strategic tension, and the overall approach to growth for a clinical trial business."

Now look at what it did. It didn't just convert the whiteboard to text - that's what GPT-4 could do. It actually went through a specific understanding of the clinical trial business and the business model.

It caught the idea that I was working on a platformisation of clinical trials. It talked about the data layer as differentiation. It identified the predictive value proposition. And there's a much better articulation here than what was on the whiteboard itself.

But here's what I found fascinating. At the end, it said: "Would you like me to explore this idea generation flowchart you had at the bottom?"

It recognised that the bottom-left section was a different kind of thinking from the rest of the board. And when I said yes, it identified that we were applying a design thinking scientific method to clinical trials - which is itself a scientific method. It saw the meta approach.

That's not OCR. That's not summarisation. That's strategic pattern recognition.

So next time you've got a whiteboard, next time you've got post-its - it's not just converting to text anymore. It's taking that and really adding reasoning, thinking on it, and making a lot more sense.

Nano Banana Pro: Visual Reasoning, Not Just Image Generation

I really love this model.

A lot of image generation models over the years really struggled with text. You ask it to write something, and it gets the spelling wrong, or one word out of three is way bigger than the others. It didn't make sense. These models were trying to think as images, not about images.

Nano Banana Pro is different. It's a visual reasoning model. The same Gemini reasoning you saw before - you can now see it in visuals.

What that means is it's thinking deeply about your context, your prompt, your outcome, what you want to achieve. And it brings all of that together in one place.

Let me give you a sense of that.

I asked it to create an infographic on the three stages of enterprise AI adoption. Look at this. It's beautiful. It's got clear text. It's got a nice flow. It looks like a designer has done it. It's picked the right images. Every single piece of text is clear and correct. No mistakes.

That's just never been done before at this level.

But it also understands the core logic of what it's communicating. So I thought, okay, let me translate it into Japanese.

Now I can't read Japanese, so somebody looking at this can tell me better. But it's taken that and done a full translation while preserving the design logic. Is it perfect? I don't know. But think of the power of what you can achieve with this.

We say the picture is worth a thousand words, but making the picture is hard.

Now you can do it.

Think about your marketing team. Think about what you can do with board presentations. You want to share something visual with your team? The constraint just moved from production to curation.

Claude Opus 4.5: From Thinking to Action

Now, Claude is interesting. It's one of my favourite tools for strategy and professional work because it gives you a very different angle.

What Claude's been doing is asking: what does a professional strategic leader and knowledge worker actually need? We reason things, we look at data analysis, we make Word documents, we make PowerPoint presentations. Claude's been building toward that.

Not just thinking about a context. Not just writing about it. How do you take it to the next level and act on it?

Imagine the number of times you've chatted with an AI, then you need to copy, paste, see if it makes sense. Does it really work? Oh, I need to edit it. You go back, type again, work with it again, create it back again. It's not the same.

What we're exploring here is how to go beyond that.

Let me show you a hypothetical. You're presenting to your board next week. Your company wants to build AI capability internally. Should you build it yourself? Partner with someone? What do you do?

I gave Claude this scenario and said: "Format it as a professional document and use a framework you think is credible."

Opus thinks through it. Then it says: "I'll create a professional executive summary for your board." It works through what a good board document should look like. And then it creates it.

When you look at it - it's actually done an amazing job. This is a Word document you can download, open up, edit directly. You can tell Claude to change things, or you can open the document and start writing yourself.

We've gone from not just creating content and ideas. We're going into action.

When we hear "agentic," this is what agentic is. It's moving from thinking, reasoning, output - into action.

And this action is going to be critical. It's creating a new opportunity for all of us and a new way of doing things.

What This Means for You

So we've had an amazing week. Three launches that together represent a step change in visual intelligence.

As a strategic leader, here's how to think about this:

Gemini 3 Pro means your whiteboards, your post-its, your messy strategy sessions - they can now be analysed, not just transcribed. The synthesis work that required your most experienced people? It just got a powerful new tool.

Nano Banana Pro means visual communication is no longer a production bottleneck. The picture is worth a thousand words, and now making the picture takes seconds.

Claude Opus 4.5 means the gap between thinking and doing just collapsed. Documents, spreadsheets, analysis - not just drafted, but delivered.

The next layer up? You have to rethink your workflows. You have to rethink how your teams work. How do you bring all of this together?

And that's how you start to create new value.

So that's the week in visual intelligence. Three launches. One signal. The way we work with information is changing.

I've written a full article on this with all the prompts I used - so you can try these yourself. Link in the description. And if you want this kind of breakdown every week - not the hype, just what it means for your business - subscribe to Helix Loop.

And look, if you're thinking about how to bring this into your organisation - the workflows, the team structures, the strategy - that's the work I do. Reach out at suhitanantula.com.

See you next week.