No. 2 · 13 October 2026 · From Atlas Studios. Dispatches from where frontier AI meets the creative industries.
What only you can do.
I built an agency business as a founder, and it ate my entire life for years. A business should have its senior people spending as near as possible to 100 percent of their time doing things that only they can do.
Judgement, taste, and the texture of human interactions are the connective tissue of all creative companies. Operating systems, powered by AI, can create value for the team and the founders by letting them focus deeply on this part of their work. Judgement stays at the absolute epicentre because it is, by its definition, the differentiating factor that defines what the organisation is about.
Napper
P.S. If you’re at ADE next week, I’m speaking on Friday morning at Felix Meritis. Say hello.
Humans being more human...
Five things from across the web
Each one read in full by one of us. The initials say who picked it.
1 · Frontier · VGC, 7 Oct · NT
Google turns a typed idea into a playable game
Google’s Playground builds a playable game from a few typed lines, and a Unity version built from store assets is due later this year. Google’s own line: “Game creation has historically been limited to a very select group with technical experience.”
Our take
Systems thinkers win. This new way of working and solving problems is really profoundly rewarding systems thinkers, and non technical systems thinkers often.
From dream to weekend. I spent the last 10, 12 years of my life dreaming about software products. Give or take, I am building things that took a senior engineer six to eight months in a single weekend on my own now.
Taste still picks. I go deeper and deeper into the version I like. It’s like A/B testing against my taste.
People solving things with no-code, low-code systems have been rewarded by the arrival of AI vastly more than traditional engineers.
2 · Music & live · MBW, 8 Oct · NT
Suno hires Ticketmaster’s Michael Chua to lead live, Songkick included
Suno now has a live team, Songkick included, and is moving into concerts. I think in person just becomes exponentially more valuable.
3 · Film & TV · Deadline, 8 Oct · NT
BBC staff push back on praise for an AI Doctor Who
Staff pushed back after director-general Matt Brittin called an AI Doctor Who “pretty good”, and he has since stressed human-led creativity. You can’t write a creative person’s instinct down, and I wouldn’t want a model making those calls for them.
4 · Advertising · MBW, 7 Oct · NT
TikTok brings its ad network to the US, with agents that run campaigns
TikTok’s new tools let AI agents plan, launch and manage ad campaigns. By default an agent proposes and one of your team approves. Nothing goes to a client or an agency without a person saying yes.
5 · Law · MBW, 5 Oct · NT
Sony Music has asked platforms to remove more than 260,000 AI deepfakes
Its takedown requests have nearly doubled since March. You need a centralised set of approved assets that have gold-plated artist approval, because that’s a prerequisite to do anything.
Your turn
When an AI agent can plan, buy and ship the work, which calls should only a person at your company ever make?
Reply to this email. A few lines is plenty.
First published on atlasstudios.ai. Field Notes is written by Napper Tandy, Kieran Mallon and Abdo El-Mobayad at Atlas Studios, applied AI for the creative industries. Forwarded this? Sign up at atlasstudios.ai/field-notes.
Napper invests at the frontier of AI through Principia (Anthropic, xAI, Replit). We say so whenever we cover them, and never write about valuations, rounds or share prices.