Google Builds Creative Tools Beyond One-Off Image Generation
Google is shifting its media-generation products from single-use tools toward software that creative professionals use throughout entire projects. The company announced this week that users have generated more than 50 billion images with Nano Banana, its photo-editing tool that launched in summer 2025, but most of that usage remains transactional-people prompt the tool and move on.
The company wants to change that pattern. Google Labs VP Elias Roman said the company is "really building a new Google product line that's entirely dedicated to creativity," moving beyond tools that work like "a coin-operated machine."
Flow Becomes a Creative Copilot
Google's answer is Flow, a video-generation tool that the company first showed at its 2025 developer conference. At this week's Google I/O, the company revealed a significant update: Flow now functions as an AI agent that guides users through the entire creative process rather than just generating individual clips.
Users can now chat with Flow to brainstorm projects, create storyboards, develop scenes and character art, and generate videos. The tool uses Google's new Gemini Omni model, which brings the editing capabilities of Nano Banana to video.
Flow maintains visual consistency across projects automatically. The tool can preserve the same camera lens look across every shot without users having to specify it in each prompt. It also keeps characters consistent and applies stylistic guidelines throughout.
Roman described the shift this way: "Flow is evolving from this prompt-in, content-out tool to an agent that's a copilot at every step of the creative process."
For more on how AI is being built for creative work, see our coverage of Generative Video and AI for Creatives.
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