The Banana Button That Builds Your Deck

Copying text out of one AI tool and pasting it back into your real work is already starting to feel like the “old way.” I’m Steve Brown, and I walk through why Google Gemini 3 feels like a turning point: it’s not just another chatbot, it’s AI embedded inside Google Workspace and Chrome so it can help right where you’re building, writing, presenting, and deciding. 

We dig into the practical shift from ChatGPT’s first-mover advantage to Gemini’s built-in, next-to-your-cursor experience. I show how I can take raw information and generate a more polished visual inside Google Slides, including infographic-style layouts and quick refinements. If you lead a team, you know the real problem isn’t having data, it’s communicating the meaning. Clear visuals and story-driven structure can unify a room fast, and integrated generative AI makes that easier to produce on demand. 

Then we get hands-on with AI productivity in Google Sheets, using Gemini to create tables, draft structured data, and iterate without getting bogged down in spreadsheet setup. I also talk about multimodal AI: uploading a photo of handwritten notes and having Gemini organize them into a clean outline. Finally, I demonstrate Gemini in Chrome reading the current tab to coach you through tools you don’t use every day, like ClickUp, and even helping you make sense of confusing option menus in complex setups. 

If you want faster workflows, clearer leadership communication, and fewer interruptions to your team, this is a strong place to start. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s still stuck in copy-and-paste mode, and leave a review with the biggest task you want AI embedded into next.

Transcript

ChatGPT First Mover Advantage

Old Workflow Versus Built-In Gemini

Infographics In Google Slides

Spreadsheets Without The Frustration

Multimodal Notes And Tool Integration

Gemini In Chrome For Any Tab

SPEAKER_00 0:03

All right. You've been hanging out, watching these episodes, and the reason we're here is um you understand that AI is going to be a big part of your future. You understand that you need to figure it out because it's a competitive advantage, it's your future. And if you don't, then this uh new future that we're uh sailing into is going to be rough. Just you're gonna go through a similar experience you had with COVID. If you're new here, my name is Steve Brown. This is uh uh AI Made Simple. Um and so my goal is just to teach you how to quickly think about all these uh resources that we now have at our fingertips. Our government's embracing it, every business that you deal with is embracing it. Um every part of your life, your phone, the phone calls that um every phone call you get now is AI generated, basically. And so here's the thing: you need to be comfortable in order for you to have the eyes to see um and discern where where your future is best for you. And so today we're gonna walk through, I'm gonna show you a couple of things. Um, the title of this episode is uh I've uh been using chat gpt for uh several years, four years now, and and I've been showing showing you all the ways um about how to use chat GPT andor similar tools to get a leg up, to solve a bunch of uh problems, to think about them very differently. And um this week for me was uh uh significant in that I uh I woke up and um one day Google just rolled out this new Gemini 3 update, and I've I've used Gemini a little bit, it's been in my Google Docs, it's been in my uh Gmail. We use Google Workspace, and so you know, all of our documents, our calendars, our email, our um sheets, Google Sheets, everything is inside of Google. But there's been this little AI thing over here, and I've used it a couple of times, and it's just been disappointing. And it's like I don't I'm comfortable over here in Chat GPT, I don't have time to figure out Gemini 2, especially and figure out auto all the idiosyncrecies that exist in these tools. But Gemini 3 rolled out it was like this whole shift in in uh the capabilities. Chat GPT got this uh first mover advantage, it was like the iPhone, is when the iPhone came out. There were other uh cell phones, but iPhone just made it dead simple. You know, it was intuitive and it just felt right, and you um adopted it. And Chat GPT got that first iPhone movement going, and it's uh introduced most of uh us into what a generative pre-trained um transformer model that's what GPT stands for. What that is it's a tool that helps us uh uh discern patterns and data, helps us write content, and most of us have been using it for writing better content or thinking through and seeing patterns and getting organized and uh getting a plan. It's been kind of nice, and it's really um leaped forward in all of its capabilities. If you think about what your expectations were before when you first started using it, and what your expectations are now, we design these uh custom GPTs for our clients, and it's it is a transformative moment when you hand them a tool that speaks in their language, that has their brand style guide that unifies their messaging across their project manager, their their uh team, and even the leader of the organization can grab it and quickly generate a proposal or uh generate a presentation for the team. It's it's just amazing what it does. And so uh in the background, Jim and I've been hanging out, and it's it's been it's been okay. It's integrated in every tool that I work in, but it hasn't been worth me really uh leaning into until recently, until the last couple of weeks, and that's where we are. And it's like I've been using ChatGPT, but then here's the thing the in the old way of chat GPT, is it's like I had to walk across to another building where Chat GPT is, do the work, get what I want, copy and paste it, and come back and drop it into my work tools, whatever I'm working through. And it's been nice. It's like, hey, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna go talk to uh this consultant, I'm gonna get my ideas clear, I'm gonna get my messaging clear, and then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna put it into my email, I'm gonna put it into my document, I'm gonna put it in my spreadsheet, I'm gonna put it in my presentation. And it's been way better than what I had before. What I had before was I had to go, um, I had to go interrupt a team member, brainstorm with them, spend an hour or two, leave and wait for them to come back and go, is this what you were thinking? And then we would go back and forth, back and forth until we got it down. And that's just the way that it works. But then when the ChatGPT showed up, I needed less of that. But now that Gemini showed up, it's way different. Gemini is right beside you and can help you immediately right where you are. And so let's go in here. I want I wanted to show this. This is the old way. So I went and got some data. I just went over here to trueflation.com. I got some data. I want to create an infographic. Okay. So I came back and I put that in, designed me an infographic for the following uh information. So it's gone through a nice explanation of the plan. All right, turn this blueprint into a fully rendered infographic. And it came back with this. It's what color is it going to do? Typography, trend cards, and it's now I need to do something else. Well, give me give me the variations. It says I can generate three variations. Well, give it to me. Well, it's gone on and on and on. All right. Well, this is way better than before. I have a lot more clarity of what I'm doing and the and the in-depth aspect and the significance, but I gotta argue a little bit. I have to do some direction. And so now, now when I'm uh in this is a Google slide. Um, you it's like um PowerPoint, but it's a Google version of this. And so I would take that data, I would take this information, it's given given me the details, and I would have handed it to my trusty creative assistant and give them that explicit instructions, and they would come in and design it, and then we would go back on iterations. But what's cool now is you can start, you can come in here, and you see, here's Gemini's baked in here. Okay, this is one area, but look at this over here. This is nano banana. This is when you go into your Google Google uh tools, you'll see create images. You see that banana? That means that it's gonna bring up the uh image creation tuning. So when we're in this infographic, obviously slides is very visual. Well, they've got it baked in right here. And so, for example, I brought in and I put in some information, um, and I just asked it, look, help me help me think through how to design an infographic. So I said, here's how you do it, and so I put that information. You see this down here in infographic. I just put put that information and click design it, and here's the slide that it created. Now, here's here was the rough draft of the way it was before, until I click beautify this slide. See the banana. This was the output that it generated. Now that's significant. I didn't I did it right here in it, and it's already tuned in. So I went, I went and got some information on uh fusion. Just the heart, one of the hardest problems that a leader has, and I said this many times, is to take what's in your head and clearly communicate a complex idea to your team. It's just difficult to go. You think, why can't you just read my mind? Well, they can't. So it's uh it's on you to tell them clearly. Well, now these tools, and this presentation that I'm showing you right here, I designed this. This presentation is from an outline that I brainstormed. I just popped it in here and I said, I said, uh, help me design. I said, um, like you do every week, help me create an interactive web page that I will present to my audience for the AI Made Simple Live. Well, here it is. Here's the back and forth. It took my ideas in my head that I got straightened out and organized, and then it's bringing a visual communication tool to power for me, and now I can not focus on having to go back and forth and interrupt a team member. I can quickly get it done and bring something that brings clarity, right? So back to here. We have all this information. This is an explanation of fusion energy. And it has a classified. I just went to a website, usfusionenergy.com. I got it and I brought it over here, and I popped it in here and asked this tool to make me to make me a presentation of that information. Well, this was it just took less than a minute. But imagine being able to go get your all your notes or your ideas, throw it in, get it organized, and then tell it to present you an infographic, and you walk into a meeting with something that really clearly it can this can unify a team. This is can get them all to focus and see exactly what you're uh wanting them to see because our brains are trying to it desires information in the form of a story that honors the rules of a story, just so we can stop thinking and pay attention. And visual, visual communication is a shortcut. Your eyes went to these graphics before they went to confirm what it was discerning from this. Okay, this is powerful, and you now have this lever baked into these tools that can quickly help you communicate these things. That that um true inflation data that I showed you right here. You see, this is text. We used to show up in a meeting and read this data, and people's minds would just go, and you wonder why it didn't sink. But to quickly show a little dashboard the change, this is way more powerful, it's way more professional. It's it's an indicator of clear leadership. But to be a great leader, you'd have to go and create a team, get them trained, spend years like I have, and get them to coordinate with each other because one person's gonna be great at writing, and the other person's gonna be great at creating, and the other person's gonna be great at um um you know, informational planning. I don't know, but this tool right here, you just go pop the content in and you're off to the races. It's amazing. Here's another example. You know, we're we're looking at, we're going from the old way of copying and pasting, and now it's just sitting right beside you. And so here we are, we're in this tool. Gemini sitting right beside you, okay, in your own tool. So I clicked on it, and I'm just saying here create a table with 10 rows of dummy customer data, columns, full name, email, phone number, city. So let's just get that done. I hate designing spreadsheets. I get all hung up on the formulas, how to get them, the total, all of that. But look how fast this happened. Look how fast and organized. This would have taken me being clumsy, being frustrated, being interrupted because I got text or phone calls or other things I'm uh that's happening, and I would have tried to squeeze this in, and I would have fumbled my way through, and it wouldn't have been fun. But let me tell you, this is way more, makes I feel way more better about it now. Now I have an example. It went through and it quickly put this in here, and then I can iterate just by asking. I don't have to figure out how to okay, organize this data in in some format. I know you can. I took the class in you know, in college way back when, but I don't want to have to go figure it out again. I can just ask Jim and I what I did before is I would delegate it to one of my team who loved spreadsheets and they would get it done. But I'd have to wait, I'd have to interrupt, I'd have to delegate. Here I can just say it and it will quickly do. And then I say, No, that's not what I wanted. Do it the other way. I can go back and forth, and I don't have to worry about um the feelings of this tool either. It's like I can just be very direct. Amazing stuff. So this week I created a couple of spreadsheets. I never create spreadsheets. So why is that a big deal? Because that spreadsheet helped me get clarity and helped me go and communicate something to um some folks that needed clarity on where we were in some organized way. Problem solved. One meeting this week with a client. I showed them an example of how they could communicate their information in this way, and it created excitement and it created the expectations they didn't know they could have. Every company has confusing data that needs to be visually explained simply. Imagine a sales team going out and having this. They usually have to figure it out themselves, and they may be good and they may not. But how how awesome to unify a message and a strategy and then hand it out to the team and send them off set up for success. That's the beauty of the school Gemini tool. It's not just a multimodal. Multimodal means now it not only can help me write great text, it can help me make great visuals, great videos, great spreadsheets, screenshots. I took a bunch of handwritten notes, took a photo with my phone and uploaded it into Gemini. And I asked it to take those notes and get them organized. And it did. It created a nice outline of all my messy notes that I took just in my handwriting. This is powerful, so it's not just multimodal. I mean, it can do all those things now, but it's also in your tools, multi-tooled, so I don't have to go externally out to ChatGPT, for example, and then get what I want and come back. You can see where I was going to have to argue with this just to get a visual representation. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Well, I'll figure it out back and forth. But in seconds, I was able to get exactly what I want. Now I can just say, hey, change, change the background to red, and it'll do it. It's just amazing. And it's already in your tools, it's already in your spreadsheets, it's already in your documents, and it's already in your browser. There's another thing I wanted to show you. So here we are. I'm in uh this we have a project management tool called ClickUp. It's browser-based, so that means that I'm in Chrome when I'm going into ClickUp. So I don't get into ClickUp very often. ClickUp's a very powerful tool, it's got all these features, they're always adding new things, and I'm always behind. And again, I have what it takes to figure it out, but do I have the time that it takes to figure it out? And generally that answer is no. So I'll def delegate or expect someone to stop what they're doing and come hold my hand and show me for the third time this year how to do something. So here we are. I just uh I'm just gonna say, all right, I want to I want to create a new space. All right, so it says right down here, create a space. I don't know. I don't do this all the time, but what if you see this up here? I've I have uh I have this uh Gemini tool. And so before the episode today, I said uh, hey, you have to so you have to click this and make sure that it sees the current tab you're working on. And then I can I said in here, how do I set up a new space correctly? And here's the instructions exactly how to go about it. So it goes, give me it gave me the examples, it gives me a step-by-step. This is amazing. I I was able to figure out some very complicated uh things and setting up inside of the uh Google Cloud where I have no business being by myself, but I was able to take some suggested instructions, go to that area, pull this up, and then I was able to proceed forward with confidence. There were like 10 options that weren't even um discussed in the instructions that were sent to me where you said click on and add this role. So I go and I click to add that role. Well, there's like 15 roles, versions of that role that I have to choose from. I didn't know which one. So I could have gone back and forth with that person, but what did I do? I came in here, I clicked on Google Gemini, and I asked it, hey, what's going on? And here I was able to get it done and move forward with confidence.

unknown 21:59

That

Voice Mode And Closing Calls

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Where we are, that's where we are now. We're able to start moving forward with confidence. As we we've already been the old way, we figured out how to have proper expectations of a tool like ChatGPT. But now you uh Google's come around and they've been working very hard, and they've been totally re um refurbishing all of their tools, and now it's this tool is baked in, and you can start using it immediately and shortcut your things. You can come in and ask it to help you design a proposal and a spreadsheet or a document. So today, just just go in, go into um your Chrome. Chrome's the most um, I think the most prolifically used browser. Okay, and just come in. You've got AI mode here, but you've also got Google Gemini, and you can come in and ask it to look at the current tab and tell you what's up. So let's just uh here's an example. I'm I'm coming in here, I'm gonna click on Gemini. I'm gonna say the current tab, and then just uh help me understand um what this page is about. So it'll go and quickly bring you back um some interesting information. The other point I'm not doing at the moment, I'm doing the typing, but it has a verbal, it is a verbal version of this. So this is thinking pro, that's what what we're doing. But if I um if I click in, I believe we can go to mobile tabs. How do we get back there? There's a voice activated aspect where you can just have a conversation with it. Here we go. And so now I'm able to sit here and discuss. So fusion, what's the difference between fusion and nuclear energy? So you may not be able to hear me at the moment because I don't have it shared correctly. But here's this episode winding down anyway. But here's the thing you've got shortcuts, you've got a path forward here. It's getting baked into everything you do. This is Google's moment. Maybe it's grok at the next, maybe it's perplexity, who knows? Microsoft, you know, it's Microsoft's never, never discussed in the AI conversation. Maybe that's on the horizon. We'll see. So if if this is something that uh you're enjoying, like and share. Also, one last thing before we go. I would love for you to like and subscribe. I'm not sharing the right screen. Hey, go to ROIonline.com. There's uh you can set a time and get with me, and let's talk about what uh what your future, how your business could adopt AI better. And that's what I do. I work with uh leaders like you to set you up for success. It's um I let me shortcut your path here. If you're in, you know you got to learn it, you just need a little help, reach out. I'm Steve R O Y Brown. This is AI Made Simple. We'll see you on another episode of AI Made Simple.