Tech News Digest: Tuesday, 28 April 2026

Tuesday brings major news from Amazon's developer conference, a significant milestone for the UK gaming industry, and a wave of AI-powered productivity tools launching specifically for small business owners. Here's your daily briefing from sheddad.tech.

Amazon AWS Summit London: Nova AI Models Now Available in UK Regions

AWS Summit London drew thousands of cloud professionals to the Excel centre, where Amazon's biggest announcement was the full availability of its Nova family of foundation models across AWS UK (London) regions. Nova Pro, Nova Lite, and Nova Micro span a range of capability-cost trade-offs and are tightly integrated with AWS services like S3, Lambda, and Bedrock. The models support multimodal inputs — text, images, and video — and are particularly optimised for enterprise tasks like document understanding and customer service automation. Several major UK retailers and financial institutions demoed Nova-powered applications at the event. Amazon also announced expanded compliance tooling for UK data residency requirements, addressing a major concern for regulated industries. AWS remains the dominant cloud provider for UK enterprises, and these launches reinforce its AI offering against Microsoft and Google.

UK Gaming Industry Hits Record £10bn Revenue in 2025

The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment published its annual State of Play report, revealing that the UK gaming industry generated a record £10 billion in revenue in 2025 — a 22% increase on the prior year. Mobile gaming accounts for the largest share (47%), followed by console (34%) and PC (19%). The report highlighted that AI-assisted game development tools have significantly reduced production costs for indie studios, with average indie game development time dropping by 30% as AI handles asset generation, NPC dialogue writing, and quality assurance testing. The UK is home to over 2,500 games companies, employing 70,000 people directly, with a particularly strong cluster around Guildford, Leamington Spa, and Dundee. The sector is also increasingly attractive for side hustlers, with mobile game revenue from solo developers reaching £180 million collectively in 2025.

Canva Launches "Magic Studio Pro" with Advanced AI Video Generation

Canva expanded its AI capabilities with the launch of Magic Studio Pro, which adds advanced AI video generation, AI-powered presentation narration, and a new "Brand Intelligence" feature that learns your brand's visual style and automatically applies it to new designs. The video generation tool can produce short marketing videos (up to 60 seconds) from a text prompt, incorporating brand colours, logos, and stock footage. For UK small business owners who've struggled with the cost of video content production, this represents a significant democratisation of a previously expensive creative format. Canva Pro costs £99/year and now represents one of the most comprehensive AI-powered creative suites at any price point. UK marketing teams at SMEs have been among the most enthusiastic early adopters globally, according to Canva's regional usage data.

Rishi Sunak Joins AI Safety Board of San Francisco Startup

Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has joined the advisory board of a San Francisco-based AI safety research organisation, Aligned AI, in his first major post-political role. Sunak, who championed the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit during his tenure, said the role reflects his ongoing commitment to ensuring AI development remains beneficial and controllable. The appointment is likely to raise eyebrows in Westminster, given the traditional expectation that former prime ministers take some time before accepting commercial advisory roles. Aligned AI is a non-profit research lab focused on the theoretical foundations of goal-aligned AI systems. Sunak will not receive a salary but holds a small advisory equity stake. The appointment reinforces the revolving door dynamic between senior politicians and the tech sector that has become increasingly common on both sides of the Atlantic.

Zapier Launches AI Agent Builder — No-Code Automation Just Got Smarter

Zapier, the no-code automation platform beloved by UK side hustlers and small business owners, launched its AI Agent Builder — allowing users to create autonomous agents that monitor triggers, make decisions, and take multi-step actions across connected apps without manual intervention. Unlike standard Zaps (which follow fixed if-this-then-that logic), AI Agents can handle ambiguity, prioritise tasks, and escalate unusual situations for human review. Practical use cases include an agent that monitors your inbox, drafts replies to routine enquiries, and adds complex queries to a task list for human handling. Or one that monitors competitor pricing and automatically adjusts your own product listings. The Agent Builder is available on Zapier's Professional plan (from £19/month). For the UK's growing community of solopreneurs, it's a genuinely powerful addition to the automation toolkit.

That's your tech news for Tuesday, 28 April 2026. Bookmark sheddad.tech for your daily digest.