State of Tools, Back to Office and Gemini 2.5

A weekly round-up—3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

External happenings

What’s in your stack: The state of tech tools in 2025

Lenny Rachitsky, who runs a popular newsletter aimed at tech products and growth, surveyed his user base on the software they and their companies use. The findings will surprise you. And it tells a lot about the things to come very fast.

Google’s Sergey Brin Urges Workers to the Office ‘at Least’ Every Weekday

If you read about the state of tech tools post, you’ll understand why Sergey Brin is scared about not being the first to embrace the full potential of AI. The implications of missing the AI race are enormous.

“A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by,” he wrote. “This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.”

The sentiment behind this quote is about the need to be the first to achieve AGI, which Sergey thinks is within grasp—if only people would come together face-to-face and try to achieve it!

Putting Gemini 2.5 Pro through its paces

Google missed the start of the LLM revolution (even after writing the definitive paper on it) but is slowly catching up. Their latest LLM, Gemini 2.5, was tested by the venerable Simon Willison, and his findings: “My experiments so far with these capabilities indicate that Gemini 2.5 Pro really is a very strong new model.”

We have been playing with the Gemini models, and I concur that they feel more capable and natural than the rest of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models.

Internal reflections

Vasu and I are in China this week, participating in the Enterprise Leadership Transformation (ELT) Programme we both signed up for with Enterprise Singapore, the National University of Singapore, and the Linhart Group. The programme is designed to sharpen business leaders' business acumen to take on the challenge of growing their companies. An overseas business trip was part of the programme and the participants voted for China. We spent 3 days in Guangzhou and are heading to Shenzhen today. The growth and speed in China are fantastic. E-commerce is booming and is very, very advanced. Manufacturing is significant and automatic. The Singapore-China partnership is strong and a platform that budding entrepreneurs can pursue. We hope to leverage some of these benefits as part of PebbleRoad’s transformation plan.

Quote worth remembering

“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca