Google's Gemini, Veo, and Nano Banana: A Practical Guide to the 2026 Model Lineup

Google's AI catalog now includes Gemini across three tiers, Veo for video, Nano Banana for image, and a growing shelf of purpose-built models. Confusion about which to use for which job is starting to slow adoption. Here is a practical guide, oriented at US teams making real purchasing decisions this quarter.

The Gemini tiers

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Gemini 3.5 Pro (targeted July 17) is the reasoning flagship: hard analysis, agentic workflows, long-context research. Gemini 3.5 Flash is the balanced default for high-volume chat and structured extraction. Flash-Lite is the cost-controlled workhorse for classification, embeddings prep, and simple summarization at scale.

Veo and Nano Banana

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Veo is Google's video-generation model, now capable enough for real marketing and prototyping work. Nano Banana (Gemini 3.1 flash-image) handles image generation and editing at meaningfully lower cost than DALL·E and Midjourney, with strong text rendering. Pair them for storyboard-to-video workflows.

Choosing on Vertex

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On Vertex AI, the practical selection rule is: start with Flash, escalate to Pro only where evaluation shows a real quality gap, and use dedicated models (Veo, Nano Banana, embeddings, code) for their categories rather than asking a general model to do everything. Cost differences compound quickly at production volume.

The bottom line

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Google's model catalog is deeper than most teams have absorbed. A quick audit of which Google models your workloads should map to is probably the highest-leverage cost move in Vertex AI this quarter.