I worked with a commercial real estate company last year that had a very specific problem.
Their executive team was preparing for every meeting by reading two-page text documents. Building statuses, project notes, next steps — all dense prose. Someone had to sit down and wade through it before every single call.
It sounds manageable. But multiply that by a full week of meetings, across a team of executives, and you have a real productivity drain. Not because the information was bad, but because the format was wrong.
We solved it with AI-generated visual briefings. One-page dashboards showing the status of every building at a glance. Colors, icons, clear hierarchy. The kind of thing you can absorb in 20 seconds instead of 4 minutes.
The difference in how the team showed up to meetings was immediate.
The Tool Most People Haven't Found Yet
The AI feature that made this possible is Gemini Imagen.
Google named it “Nano Banana” at one point (that's the label that appeared in the UI when I first used it — it's stuck in my head ever since). The concept is simple: you give it a description of a complex idea, framework, or process, and it generates a clean visual asset. Diagrams, explainers, concept maps. The kind of thing that used to require a designer, a few days of back-and-forth, and a budget.
Now you can generate a first draft in under a minute.
I tested it on my own content. I described the TEA framework — Time, Energy, Attention, the three pillars I use when teaching productivity — and asked Gemini Imagen to create a visual explainer. Something I could show a client in a second instead of talking about it for five minutes.
The output was clean enough to use in a presentation that same afternoon.
Why Visuals Close What Words Can't
There's a principle I come back to often: if an output is being ignored, or if it's taking too long to understand, convert it into a visual.
Dense meeting docs get skimmed. A well-made visual gets absorbed.
This isn't new knowledge. We've known for decades that visuals communicate faster than text. What's new is that AI makes it cheap and fast to produce them. You don't need a Canva subscription and three hours of design work anymore. You describe what you need and the model generates something usable.
The business applications are everywhere:
- Sales decks that explain a complex service model in one image
- Internal briefings for executives who don't have time to read
- Workshop materials that make abstract frameworks tangible
- Social media content that stops someone mid-scroll
Any time you're explaining something complex in text and it's not landing… there's probably a visual version that would work better.
How to Try This Today
Open Gemini and find the Imagen feature (look for image generation options in the model selector).
Think of a concept you explain repeatedly. A framework, a process, a system. Write a plain-text description of it — three or four sentences about the main components and how they relate to each other.
Ask Gemini to create a visual explainer based on that description.
Then ask it to iterate. Adjust the layout. Try a different style. Add specific elements. Within a few prompts, you'll have something usable.
This is one of those features that changes your workflow once you start using it regularly. The first time you hand a client a visual you generated in five minutes instead of commissioning a designer, you'll understand why I keep talking about it.
The Bigger Picture
Everyone right now is using AI to write more text. More emails, more blog posts, more documentation.
The people who figure out how to use it for visuals are going to have a real edge in the next couple of years. Not because visuals are inherently better, but because the gap between “can explain it in text” and “can show it visually” is where attention and trust get built.
Words describe. Visuals demonstrate.
And with tools like Gemini Imagen now available to anyone with a free account, the only thing stopping most people from doing this is knowing the feature exists.
Now you do.
Thanh Pham is the founder of Asian Efficiency and runs AI workshops in Austin. To learn how to build your own AI workflows, check out the 4-Day AI Sprint.
