Gemini's new agent-based video analysis cuts token use up to 88%

Google is rolling out agent-based video analysis to Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash-Lite. Instead of scanning video frame-by-frame at a fixed rate, the model decides which segments to examine and at what resolution, which Google says cuts token usage by up to 88% while improving accuracy on multi-hour footage.

Why it matters: Video has been the most token-expensive input for multimodal models, so letting the model control its own sampling density is a meaningful efficiency trick that could make long-form video analysis, like surveillance or lecture archives, economically viable at scale. It also reflects a broader industry shift toward giving models agentic control over their own inference process rather than just their outputs.