Google unveils new Veo AI model for faster, better visual understanding
Chad here. Google just announced their new Veo AI model, and unlike most of their recent AI announcements, this one might actually matter for businesses without an IT department and a supercomputer.
Veo is Google’s latest computer vision model – basically, it’s designed to understand images and video better and faster than previous systems. What makes this one interesting is they’ve managed to shrink it down while making it more capable, which means it can run on normal hardware without needing a data center’s worth of processing power.
Here’s why you might actually care: Veo can analyze images or video in milliseconds (that’s really, really fast) to identify objects, read text, recognize faces, and understand what’s happening in a scene. The practical applications are what make this interesting.
For retail businesses, Veo could power better inventory management by automatically identifying products on shelves or in stockrooms. For restaurants, it could analyze food presentation or help with contactless ordering. And for any business with security cameras, it could provide better alerts about unusual activity without constant false alarms.
Google claims Veo is 30% more accurate and 40% faster than their previous visual AI systems while using less computing power. That’s the trifecta we actually need – better, faster, and less resource-intensive.
What I appreciate most is that they’re focusing on practical applications rather than just showing off technical capabilities. They demonstrated Veo being used to quickly digitize paper documents (including handwritten ones), automatically generate product descriptions from images, and create accessibility features for visually impaired users.
The real test will be how accessible this becomes for small businesses. Google says they’re planning to make Veo available through their Cloud Vision API with “flexible pricing options,” which usually means “affordable for big companies and still too expensive for small ones.” But they’re also releasing smaller versions that can run locally on devices, which could be integrated into apps without ongoing API costs.
Is Veo revolutionary? Not really. But it’s an incremental improvement in an area of AI that has practical, everyday applications for businesses. And unlike generative AI that creates questionable content, computer vision solves concrete problems like inventory tracking, document processing, and quality control.
For small businesses looking at practical AI implementations, keep an eye on how Veo gets packaged into actual products and services in the coming months. The technology itself matters less than how easily and affordably you can implement it.
