AI trends, news and tools with Andrew Davis. August 2026

Welcome to the latest edition of my AI newsletter.

I’m Andrew Davis. For more than 25 years, I’ve worked in digital, social media and emerging technology, from working at BBC Radio 1Xtra and helping launch Myspace in the UK to training more than 16,000 people.

Today, I work with organisations to help their people understand what’s changing, make better decisions about what matters, and use AI and digital technology with greater confidence.

This newsletter is where I cut through some of the noise. Each edition brings you the AI developments I think are worth paying attention to, the biggest stories you may have missed, and a few useful tools worth trying.

What’s trending!!

Vibe coding

Vibe coding is quickly becoming one of the most interesting trends in AI, particularly because it is opening up software creation to people who have never written a line of code in their lives.

In simple terms, vibe coding means describing something you want to create in everyday language and getting AI to help build it. You might ask for a simple website, an interactive experience, a tool for organising a project or even a small app. You then try what it creates, tell the AI what you like or don’t like, and continue developing it through conversation rather than traditional coding.

For people working in the arts and creative industries, this opens up some fascinating possibilities. A theatre could prototype an interactive experience for an audience. A museum could experiment with a new way for visitors to explore a collection. An artist could turn an idea into a digital experience. A small creative organisation could build a simple tool to solve a problem without having the budget to commission a complete piece of software.

And that is what makes vibe coding worth paying attention to. It isn’t really about becoming a programmer. It’s about having another creative medium available to you…and if you are a programmer, it becomes an incredible assistant.

There are limitations. Something you create with AI might work perfectly as an experiment but still have security, privacy or reliability problems that require someone with technical expertise to solve. Creating a prototype and building professional software are still very different things.

But the barrier between having an idea and actually making something has become significantly smaller.

So the next time you have an idea for a digital experience, tool or project, instead of immediately thinking, “I wouldn’t know how to build that,” it might be worth seeing just how far you can get.

For someone in the arts who wants to try vibe coding without being a developer, I’d start with these four:

• ⁠OpenAI Codex: Tell it what you want to build in plain English and work with it to create and change the code.
• ⁠Claude Code: Anthropic’s coding tool. Particularly useful for building projects conversationally and iterating on existing work.
• ⁠Google AI Studio: A good place to experiment with Gemini and quickly prototype AI-powered ideas and applications.
• ⁠Lovable: Probably the most approachable of the four for complete beginners. Describe the website or app you want and watch it build it visually.

5 most important news stories last month

1. “I was accused of using AI in my dissertation but I wrote it all myself”
2. 🔏 Claude will hide a watermark in your AI-written text, and it’ll follow you around 
3. More than 10% of Jobs in Hollywood are looking for AI expertise now 
4. Netflix reveal 300 of their films used AI including 17 minutes of Tom Hanks' new documentary
5. Different AI platforms look at different factors in placing you in their answers 

3 cool tools to look out for

Granola

Granola is an AI-powered meeting notepad that helps you concentrate on the conversation rather than frantically trying to capture everything being said. It listens to your meeting without adding another bot to the call, then combines the conversation with any notes you make to produce organised notes afterwards.

For people working in the arts, this could be useful for production meetings, creative planning sessions, funding discussions or conversations with collaborators. You can stay engaged in the room while Granola helps capture the details, decisions and actions you might otherwise miss.

Seedance. 2.5 ⁠

Seedance 2.5 is an AI video-generation tool from ByteDance that lets you create video from prompts and visual ideas. It is another example of how quickly generative video is moving from short experimental clips towards something creatives can actually use as part of the development process.

For artists, filmmakers, theatres and other creative organisations, tools like Seedance can be useful for visualising ideas before committing time and budget to producing them. Think concept development, storyboarding, experimenting with scenes or simply seeing whether an idea in your head works visually.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is increasingly being built directly into the Office tools many organisations already use, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. It can help create and edit documents, analyse information, build presentations, work with email and pull out important information from meetings.

For arts organisations, the interesting bit is that you don’t necessarily need another AI tool or a completely new way of working. You can use AI inside software you already know, whether you’re drafting a funding proposal in Word, working through budgets in Excel, preparing a presentation in PowerPoint or dealing with an overflowing inbox in Outlook.

Andrew Davis 

If you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can find me here