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In A(i) Nutshell

Andrew Davis

A 10-minute daily podcast about the world of Generative AI for marketers and the everyday person.

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Today · 8 min
Get AI to Attack Its Own Naming Suggestions Before You Pick a Favourite
Andrew Miles Davis argues that when using AI to generate names for products, services, or campaigns, most people make the same mistake by asking for more options rather than building a better way to judge the options they already have. He outlines a four-part naming brief covering the product, the audience, the desired outcome, and the point of difference, arguing this alone produces better results than a vague request generating fifty forgettable names. Drawing on a real workshop example where a name loved by the room turned out to mean something offensive in another language, unnoticed by everyone except one person who spoke it, he demonstrates why the next step should be asking AI to attack its own suggestions, surfacing unintended meanings, generic overlap, and confusion risk before any name gets chosen. He connects this to his Story Lens method's exposure stage, arguing that a weak name often reveals an unclear understanding of positioning rather than a naming problem itself, and closes with the central lesson: never ask AI what is best without first establishing best according to what, since criteria must exist before judgement can happen. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute AI insight and to the YouTube channel for the full video breakdown with live examples.
Friday · 8 min
Three Hikers Nearly Died on a Mountain Because Gemini Gave Them the Wrong Directions (AI News)
Andrew Miles Davis leads this week with a genuinely alarming story from Mount Shasta, where three hikers ignored official safety guidance to turn back by midday after receiving conflicting information from Gemini, resulting in an injury, dead navigation devices, and a night stranded on the mountain waiting for rescue, with the hikers themselves admitting they relied too heavily on AI over their own critical thinking. He also covers OpenAI officially confirming advertising is coming to ChatGPT, a development he has been anticipating and dreading for nearly three years as a signal that the current ad-free era of large language models is ending, drawing a direct parallel to how Facebook's feed evolved once advertising took hold. Other stories include a former TikTok executive's AI photo-coaching app built after her husband's inability to take a decent picture, the official trailer for Artificial starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman landing around Christmas, Reddit's research showing AI is making holiday shopping more conversational while community trust still outweighs polished product pages, Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne raising concerns about screenwriters passing off AI-generated scripts as their own without addressing who trained the underlying models, and a Lancashire company using AI-powered sorting machines to rescue 25 million Lego bricks from landfill for cleaning and resale. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for the AI news that matters to marketers, every Friday in ten minutes.
Thursday · 10 min
Codex Made My Problem Worse Then Told Me I Was Out of Credits (Pet Peeves)
Andrew Miles Davis returns to pet peeves for the first time since July with three genuinely fresh frustrations. He starts with training projects and chats in both ChatGPT and Claude, describing hours spent uploading detailed source material only for both models to confirm they can see the information and then ignore it entirely when generating output. He then tests ChatGPT's sycophancy directly, deliberately contradicting himself about a simple fact and watching the model agree with every version regardless of accuracy, contrasted against Claude going too far the other way by rigidly refusing to budge from an outdated goal Andrew had since changed elsewhere. The most costly frustration involves Codex repeatedly failing to fix a teleprompter mirroring issue between his laptop and iPad, making the problem worse with each attempt before running out of credits entirely, a experience Andrew compares to hiring a plumber who breaks something further and then walks off once the paid hours are up. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes that tell you honestly what using AI is actually like, frustrations included.
Wednesday · 11 min
Three Years of Daily AI Podcasting and Here Is What I Have Learnt (In AI Nutshell 3rd Birthday)
Andrew Miles Davis marks the third anniversary of In AI Nutshell by reflecting on what daily podcasting has actually taught him rather than covering the latest news or tools. He traces the idea back to abandoned attempts at daily video content in 2010 and an early influence from 50 Cent's relentless mixtape output, and shares the surprising discovery that finding something to say every day was never the real challenge, deciding what to focus on was. He weighs the trade-off between audio's consistency and relationship-building strength against video's greater reach, acknowledging he could have grown faster on video but doubts he would have sustained three years of daily output the same way. Looking ahead, Andrew announces a shift in emphasis for the podcast's fourth year, moving beyond tools and prompting mechanics toward judgement, decision-making, and how people navigate ongoing change, tying this directly to his Story Lens method, a framework built around the "stranger comes to town" story structure that he has developed and delivered for over a decade and will be focusing on much more heavily going forward. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute AI insight, now heading into its fourth year.
Tuesday · 9 min
Never Know What to Type Into Suno Again. This Free Tool Builds the Perfect Music Prompt For You (Cool Tools 79)
Andrew Miles Davis marks 79 weeks of Cool Tools Tuesday with three specialist tools, starting with ClerkAI, a bookkeeping assistant that prepares accounts for accountants by matching bank transactions to receipts, flagging missing documentation, and drafting communications, all with double opt-in confirmation before touching any login-protected accounts. He covers Music Prompts by Scholarsail, a free tool that builds structured music generation prompts for platforms like Suno and Udio by walking through genre, mood, and energy selections, which Andrew tests with a UK garage prompt and rates as a genuinely solid result for something built entirely from dropdown menus. The episode closes with Magic Tellers, a colouring page and activity generator for kids that turns uploaded photos or text prompts into printable black and white colouring sheets, alongside maze generators, crossword makers, and other activity tools useful for teachers, parents, or anyone working with children. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for three new tools every Tuesday, some built for daily use and some genuinely niche, but all worth knowing about.
Monday · 8 min
Not Everything on Your To-Do List Needs to Get Done. Here Is the Framework That Decides What Does. (Do Delay Delegate Delete)
Andrew Miles Davis breaks down a productivity system he has used and taught for years but never fully explained in detail, built around four decisions for anything that lands on a to-do list: do, delay, delegate, or delete. He draws on Stephen Covey's urgent and important matrix to explain how items within the do category still require prioritisation, using his own test of what would not let him sleep at night. He argues delay is often mistaken for procrastination but works as a genuine productivity tool when paired with a system that guarantees the task actually resurfaces later. Delegation gets a modern update, covering both handing work to people and increasingly to AI, with Andrew encouraging listeners to practise identifying which steps of a workflow genuinely need human involvement now, ahead of a future where AI agents handle far more autonomously. He closes on delete as the hardest and most disciplined choice, sharing his own decision years ago to deliberately drop Google AdWords from his skillset entirely rather than trying to do everything. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes covering how to actually think about productivity in an AI-driven world.
September 11 · 10 min
Apple Finally Fought Back in AI and ElevenLabs Just Signed Its First Major Label Deal (AI News)
Andrew Miles Davis covers a genuinely massive week in AI news, opening with OpenAI's double release of ChatGPT 6 Astra, already being called the most intelligent and aligned model yet for coding, scientific research, and complex agent tasks, alongside ChatGPT Images 2.5, which promises 50% faster generation, sharper detail, and significantly improved multi-turn editing that no longer distorts faces across repeated prompts. He covers Apple's AI comeback attempt with a major overhaul of Siri into a dedicated chatbot-style assistant capable of generating images, tempered by the now-familiar pattern of a limited free tier designed to push users toward a paid subscription. Other stories include 11 Labs signing its first major label deal with Universal Music Group to build a licensed AI remix platform, the Seattle Times and Newsday suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged unauthorised training on paywalled journalism, an expanded class action lawsuit against Anthropic alleging its $100 and $200 subscription tiers were marketed with usage multipliers that mean far less in practice due to five-hour windows and weekly caps, a widely reported claim from an Anthropic figure about long-term existential AI risk, and Amazon Prime Video launching AI-powered lip-sync dubbing technology starting with a German romance series. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for the AI news that matters to marketers, every Friday in ten minutes.
September 10 · 11 min
What Is Something I Would Never Trust AI to Decide For Me (Random Questions)
Andrew Miles Davis answers eleven randomly generated questions in his favourite monthly format, covering the most memorable being asked what he would never trust AI to choose for him. His answer centres on major strategic life decisions, explaining that when a human decision goes wrong there is at least someone to hold accountable, even if that someone is yourself, whereas an AI carries no such responsibility and leaves you with nowhere to direct the frustration when things go badly. He also touches on how he uses AI as an honesty check for his own goals, asking it to be bluntly honest about gaps between his stated ambitions and his actual behaviour. Beyond AI, the episode covers lighter ground including the most ridiculous thing he has ever queued for, involving a five hour London traffic ordeal caused by closed bridges, memorable adverts he still remembers years later, and the first website he ever regularly visited, an early UK garage and drum and bass forum tied to the London record shop Uptown Records. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for one of these unscripted, unfiltered episodes every month alongside daily ten-minute AI insight.
September 9 · 8 min
Three Prompt Endings That Take Any Answer From White Belt to Black Belt (AI Prompt Hacks)
Andrew Miles Davis returns to prompt hacks with a shift in focus, arguing that as prompting fundamentals become second nature for most people, the real differentiator is what gets added to the end of a prompt rather than the prompt itself. He shares three foundational endings aimed at clarifying message and tone: asking AI to explain something as if you are a complete beginner with no prior knowledge, which forces the model to build from a genuine foundation rather than assuming existing understanding; instructing AI to adopt a specific tone such as professional, empathetic, and reassuring, which shifts focus toward business outcomes and away from purely technical detail, illustrated with a real example of drafting a complaint email calmly despite personal frustration; and asking AI to avoid industry jargon and acronyms in favour of plain, accessible language, preventing specialist terminology from undermining clarity. He also points listeners to his continuously updated prompt endings guide on his website for further examples. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for prompt hacks and daily ten-minute AI insight built for marketers who want sharper, more usable answers.
September 8 · 7 min
This AI Meeting Assistant Records Without Ever Joining the Call as a Bot (Cool Tools 78)
Andrew Miles Davis marks 78 weeks of Cool Tools Tuesday with three tools recommended directly by listeners rather than sourced by him, with no affiliate or sponsorship ties to any of them. Sidelong.app promises to combine research, writing, and publishing into a single workflow, and Andrew flags a personal use case, uploading nearly three years of podcast transcripts to potentially generate that same length of social media content. Olva.ai offers bot-free real-time meeting transcription that records audio directly from a device without needing to formally join a call, positioned as an alternative for people uncomfortable inviting a visible AI assistant like Fathom or Otter into meetings while still wanting the transcript benefits. Jobseeker.com rounds out the three, an AI-powered platform for building CVs, cover letters, and tracking applications that a listener credited with directly helping them land a job, though Andrew notes it currently appears geared toward US and EU users with the UK notably absent from its country selector. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for three new tools every Tuesday, sourced from what's actually working for real listeners.
September 7 · 7 min
Why Prompting Well Will Stop Being Impressive and Judgement Will Become the Real Skill
Andrew Miles Davis argues that one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make is assuming AI simply lets them do the same job faster, when in fact it is fundamentally shifting where marketing value sits. Drawing on his ten years in the music industry, he compares the emerging marketer role to a music producer, someone whose value lies not in playing every instrument but in knowing what good sounds like and directing the process toward it. He explores what happens to value when production becomes cheap, using music's shift from paid cassettes to free streaming as a parallel, and argues that judgement, taste, and the ability to spot technically competent but boring or off-brand work will matter more than the ability to prompt well. He warns against mistaking polished-looking AI output for genuinely good thinking, and closes with a practical challenge: pick one task you produce repeatedly, like a weekly report or email copy, and start building a process where AI handles more of the production while you focus entirely on the decisions. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes exploring where AI is genuinely changing the shape of marketing work.
September 4 · 10 min
ChatGPT's Ad Business Hit a Billion Dollar Run Rate in Under 200 Days (AI News This Week)
Andrew Miles Davis covers a week defined by AI facing pressure on multiple fronts, starting with OpenAI's advertising business reaching a billion dollar annualised run rate in under 200 days as self-service ad buying expands across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, a development Andrew is openly hoping fails given his long-held concerns about ads eroding trust in AI-generated answers. He covers Australia's music industry body barring fully AI-generated tracks from official charts following controversy over an AI-assisted Madonna cover, Sony and Warner suing Anthropic for allegedly torrenting and scraping songs to train Claude and seeking up to $150,000 per song, and the US government weighing in on the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI in favour of fair use, framed around not falling behind the rest of the world on AI development. Other stories include Instagram replacing its optional AI creator label with a blunter AI-generated tag that throttles reach for undisclosed AI content, a survey suggesting older content creators are becoming more valuable to brands seeking credibility in an AI-saturated market, Time magazine's fourth annual Time 100 AI list sparking debate over the inclusion of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Ben Affleck alongside traditional tech figures, and a study showing AI can measure heart fat in under two seconds compared to fifteen minutes manually, with significant implications for cardiovascular risk assessment. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for the AI news that matters to marketers, every Friday in ten minutes.
September 3 · 11 min
The Biggest Mistake People Make With AI Is Accepting Its First Answer
Andrew Miles Davis breaks down a practical framework for moving beyond surface-level AI summaries into genuine analysis, using a fictional set of 300 customer comments as a working example. Rather than simply asking AI to summarise, he demonstrates asking it to identify themes with supporting evidence, then challenging its own conclusions to surface minority patterns that frequency alone would bury, uncovering a small but significant cancellation and refund issue hiding beneath larger but less urgent themes. He connects this three-question approach, what is this, so what, and what now, to his broader AI Essentials framework, and uses three stages of his Story Lens method, arrival, exposure, and decision, to explain where genuine human value now sits in a workflow AI can execute in minutes rather than hours. The core argument is that human judgement does not disappear as AI takes over the mechanical work, it simply moves to questioning and deciding what the analysis actually means. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute AI insight and to the YouTube channel for the full demonstration with live prompts and spreadsheets.
September 2 · 9 min
What I Am looking Forward to in September
Andrew Miles Davis opens September with an honest review of August, where the YouTube channel finally launched with two videos live, and ChatGPT voice conversations during daily dog walks became a genuine part of his working process for developing ideas before reaching his desk. For September he is bringing his backlog of thousands of training questions accumulated over fifteen years of face-to-face sessions to LinkedIn video, alongside a return to a full training and keynote schedule after a deliberately quieter August. The centrepiece of the month is the public launch of his Story Lens Method, a framework built around the idea that everything shared online tells a story whether intentionally or not, drawing on one of seven core story structures to help people navigate change, judgement, and decision-making in an AI-driven world. Having delivered variations of this system with organisations for years, Andrew describes finally building it out fully over the summer as genuinely exciting, a rare reaction for him. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute AI insight and to follow the Story Lens Method rollout across podcast, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
September 1 · 8 min
Turn Messy Spreadsheets Into Insights in Seconds With This Copilot Excel Feature (Cool Tools 77)
Andrew Miles Davis covers three tools on this week's Cool Tools Tuesday, leading with a genuine change of opinion on Copilot's integration with Excel, which he had previously dismissed after a poor experience with a similar feature in Gemini a year earlier. He walks through five practical use cases including turning messy spreadsheets into instant insights, generating charts and pivot tables from plain language requests, writing formulas without needing to know the syntax, automatically cleaning data and standardising UK date formats, and summarising what has changed across workbook versions, concluding that the native Copilot integration outperforms both ChatGPT and Claude's Excel connectors. He also covers Umind.com's prompt library, a free daily-updated resource of trending prompts across images, video, and text, and IdeaVideo.ai, a free video generation aggregator giving access to Seedance, Veo, Kling, and other major models, positioned as a low-stakes starting point for marketers wanting to build video skills without committing to a paid platform. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for three new tools every Tuesday with honest verdicts from someone testing them in real work.
August 31 · 10 min
The Top 3 Tools I Have Used Most In August
Andrew Miles Davis wraps up a deliberately quieter August, using the extra time away from training to properly test three tools that shaped his month outside of his permanently retired ChatGPT and Whisper Flow. Claude Design handled the full front end of his new website, thestorylensmethod.com, built from a rough description in under an hour, and impressed him further with animation capabilities he plans to bring to LinkedIn content given the cost and complexity of sourcing motion graphics manually. Codex handled the back end, hosting the site directly and removing the traditionally fiddly process of domain purchasing, hosting, and name server configuration. Copilot rounds out the three, with Andrew revisiting a tool he had previously written off after a poor experience with Gemini and Sheets, now praising its native integration across Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, particularly for small formatting tasks he can now handle entirely by voice given his RSI. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for a daily ten-minute update on what is actually worth using, from someone building real things with these tools every month.
August 28 · 9 min
Dr Dre Says AI Speeds Up Production But His Taste Still Decides What Makes the Final Cut (AI News August 2026)
Andrew Miles Davis covers a relatively quiet news week that still carried some significant stories, starting with new research suggesting AI written language now leaves fingerprints across roughly a third of the web, prompting a wider question about what happens to the value of original thinking as competent, AI-polished copy becomes the norm. He covers Hollywood creatives being paid to train AI systems on the exact skills that once made them employable, drawing a direct line to Ford's earlier decision to rehire staff it had replaced with AI in order to train the technology properly, and Dr Dre's public comments on using AI in music production, arguing that taste and judgement remain the irreplaceable skill even as AI speeds up experimentation. Other stories include New York enforcing disclosure rules for AI-generated influencers appearing in advertising, Twitch streamers suing Amazon over claims their content trained AI without consent, YouTube testing a prompt-based custom homepage feed, and AI identifying hidden patterns in breast cancer data that could help doctors tailor treatment more effectively. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for the AI news that matters to marketers, every Friday in ten minutes.
August 27 · 11 min
Why Smart People Completely Disagree About AI and What to Do About It (Story Lens Method)
Andrew Miles Davis continues his Story Lens video series by tackling why intelligent, well-informed people can look at the exact same evidence around AI and reach entirely opposite conclusions. Using the Moneyball story of traditional baseball scouts versus data-driven analysis as his central example, he argues that disagreement is rarely about who has the facts and far more often about which facts each side considers important. This lands in what he calls the Divide stage of his Story Lens framework, one of seven stages built around the "stranger comes to town" story structure, where disruption forces people into genuinely different readings of the same change rather than clean categories of understanding versus not understanding. Drawing on his own decision to leave the BBC for MySpace in 2006, a move that looked reckless to almost everyone at the time, Andrew offers a five-question method for evaluating competing arguments without immediately picking a side, including using AI itself to stress-test your own position rather than outsource the decision entirely. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute AI insight and to the YouTube channel for the full Story Lens series.
August 26 · 11 min
Claude Overtook ChatGPT as the Most Important Tool for Marketers and Here Is Why That Matters (Marketing Report Breakdown)
Andrew Miles Davis breaks down a recent Social Media Examiner marketing report, walking through the key statistics with his own honest reaction to each. Daily AI usage among marketers has jumped from 37% to 73% in two years, while a genuinely striking finding shows Claude has overtaken ChatGPT as marketers' most important single tool despite ChatGPT still leading on raw usage, a shift Andrew traces back to Anthropic's public stance against government surveillance and weapons work last year. He highlights that 85% of marketers now pay for AI tools, with the majority spending their own money, reinforcing his ongoing argument that the era of doing everything for free is ending and people need to shift their mental model toward paying for AI the way they pay for a phone bill. He also covers the gap between interest and adoption in AI video, where the desire to learn far outpaces actual usage, and the significant gap between AI agent hype and real-world adoption, with only 11% of respondents using them regularly despite widespread interest. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes breaking down what's actually happening in AI marketing data.
August 25 · 8 min
ChatGPT Images Can Now Do Transparent Backgrounds and It Looks Just as Good as Canva (Cool Tools 76)
Andrew Miles Davis marks 76 weeks of Cool Tools Tuesday with three picks, leading with Happy Shrimp, an AI music generator that has become one of the most talked-about tools of the summer despite its unusual name, competing directly with Suno, Udio, and Producer AI. Running his standard test prompt, Andrew found it produced strong results on the first attempt, making it a genuinely good starting point for anyone new to AI music generation. He also covers a quietly significant update to ChatGPT Images, which now supports proper transparent background generation, removing the need to route images through Canva for background removal and matching that quality directly inside the platform. The episode closes with FindOutMy.com, a lighter tool that analyses uploaded photos and gives feedback on posture, presentation, style, and physical presence, which Andrew tests on himself with mixed seriousness while flagging it purely as entertainment rather than anything to take too literally. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for three new tools every Tuesday with honest verdicts from someone testing them in real work.

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