Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash can slash enterprise AI costs by more than $1 billion a year

Google unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash at its annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, a new artificial intelligence model that the company says shatters what had become a seemingly iron law of the AI industry: that the smartest models must also be the slowest and most expensive to run. The model sits at the center of a sweeping set of announcements — from a video-generating "world model" called Gemini Omni to a 24/7 personal AI agent called Gemini Spark — but 3.5 Flash carries perhaps the most immediate consequence for the enterprises pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, told reporters during a press briefing Monday that companies running roughly one trillion tokens per day on Google Cloud could save more than $1 billion annually by shifting 80 percent of their workloads to a mix of Flash and other frontier models. "You've probably heard anecdotes from other CIOs that companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets,