Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s bonus Cloud Wars Minute, I’m at the Gemini Workspace event in New York, speaking with Tyler Predale, IT Director at Flashpoint, about how the company is leveraging Gemini AI to boost productivity, streamline workflows, and empower employees across different departments. Predale shares details on users, use cases, obstacles, and more:
Highlights
00:50 — Flashpoint is using Gemini throughout the organization. It’s given licenses to people from all different departments. It didn’t necessarily go the typical marketing-sales route, but went broader. And it found a lot of success with that.
01:46 — Flashpoint is able to give its users a tool that it’s confident in, in terms of data security. Also, with this tooling, users are able to write faster and augment their skills. It has junior people able to do more coding; it has marketers feeling more confident. Overall, everyone is able to do more with less, and that’s been great to see.
02:40 — You’re able to free up some of your cognitive load when using generative AI like Gemini because you don’t have to think about the small intricacies of your email. You can get a little head start on that email, or overcome the blank page when starting a Google Doc to write product requirements or documentation.
04:01 — As a smaller company, it’s always trying to do more with less. Sometimes it doesn’t have the biggest teams or all the headcount it might want in a department. Gemini helps overcome that by allowing a team of three to operate like a team of five. Those little wins really add up and help Flashpoint overcome the obstacle of running lean but still producing higher-level output.
05:00 — You can get started with Gemini right away. You don’t necessarily need training — just start prompting and get a use case out of it. It’s found champions within the organization — power users who love AI — and enabled them to discover more tricks and ways to optimize their work. They then spread that knowledge throughout the company.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents for mid-market and enterprise companies. It takes place March 17-19 in San Diego, CA. Register now to attend.
05:44 — The difference with Gemini compared to other tools—people want to use it. It’s not like, “Oh, another tool.” They want to use it because it saves them time and gives them more time to focus on creative pursuits and work they care about.
06:49 — Nowadays, people are in front of screens all day, and context switching from tab to tab can create a lot of cognitive load. With Gemini, you can write a prompt, get a response, open it right into Google Docs, turn it into an email — everything is within one ecosystem. That makes life so much easier, and from a training perspective, it’s simpler because it meets users where they are.
07:30 — Every week there’s a new Gemini feature—something new. I check the blogs in the morning, and it’s like, “Oh, there’s this new security advisor feature” or something else. I’ve never seen enterprise tooling evolve so fast, and it’s exciting because you never know what’s coming next.
