About Lucid Directions
The North East is becoming the UK's centre of gravity for AI. We put that capability to work for the businesses that keep the region running: the workshops, kitchens, warehouses and firms that could never hire an engineering team. Until now.
Why Now
Every ten to fifteen years the technology industry goes through a true platform shift: mainframes to personal computers, the desktop to the internet, the internet to the cloud, the cloud to mobile. We are in the middle of the next one. AI is not another application layer; it is becoming the platform itself, and for the first time in the history of the industry, software has begun to improve itself. That changes what software is, how it is built, and who gets to build it.
The UK has made AI a strategic priority, and it is turning into physical infrastructure. The North East is emerging as a designated AI Growth Zone: new compute capacity, regional incentives, and deepening collaboration with the universities on our doorstep. Being based here is no longer a quirk. It is a structural advantage.
The shift changes the rules of execution too. Work that once needed large teams, long timelines and heavy capital can now be shipped by a small, senior team. The constraint is no longer access to technology; it is execution speed and product judgement. That is the environment Lucid Directions was designed for: an AI product and execution studio, building our own products and high-value systems for the businesses around us.
The Idea
A chatbot forgets every conversation, lives in a browser tab, and suggests what you should do. An AI Employee remembers everything, runs around the clock on hardware you own, and does the work inside boundaries you set. It has a name, a role, and continuity.
The difference between a recommendation and a completed task is the whole product. That is what we engineer in Newcastle, and what we deploy into the businesses that keep the region working.
The Architecture
The engineering decisions underneath every deployment are deliberate. They are what make an AI Employee a colleague you can trust rather than a subscription you rent.
Hardware you own
Every AI Employee runs on a dedicated machine in your building, always on. Your memory, records and conversations live there rather than on a shared platform. If you ever stop working with us, everything on that machine is yours to keep.
Memory that never resets
Every conversation, decision and contact becomes part of a persistent knowledge base about your business. It never starts from scratch, and what you agreed last quarter still counts today.
One orchestrator, many specialists
You talk to one colleague with a name. Behind it, specialist agents screen the inbox, take meeting notes, answer the phone and run deep research, each reporting back through the single voice you know.
Approval gates on every boundary
It reads, researches and prepares freely. Before anything crosses a boundary, an email sent, a post published, a client contacted, it asks first. Every action is logged, so there are no hidden moves.
Private by architecture
No third party reads your conversations, and sensitive categories are blocked from the cloud by a hard-coded filter. Voice runs locally in under 300 milliseconds. You are not the product; the improvement loop stays with you.
Lucid Directions is co-founded by Ryan Davidson and Arnaud Décube.
We are two engineers who believe software is changing fast, and that the next generation of digital tools should feel more intelligent, more useful and more human.
Our work is built around a simple idea: technology should help people move forward. Whether we are building apps, AI tools or bespoke software systems, our focus is always on creating practical solutions that make a real difference.
We are optimistic about the future of software, and proud to be building that future from the North East.
Ryan Davidson
Co-Founder
Ryan is an engineer with a creative streak. He focuses on product design and the interaction details that turn working software into something people actually enjoy using.
Arnaud Décube
Co-Founder
Arnaud is an engineer focused on AI: the models themselves, the machine learning craft behind them, and running them privately on hardware you own.
Jimmy is our own AI Employee. Press play to watch a full day of his work, from the overnight shift to the morning briefing that is ready before we arrive. Ninety five seconds, no sound needed.
Silent 95-second explainer. Most small businesses do not need more software, they need a worker, so we build the tools and the worker who runs them. The video shows live tasks an AI employee can handle, the twenty-four kinds of work it can take on, the four principles behind how we build them, and a snapshot of the four AI employees we run inside Lucid Directions every day. It closes with: we build the tools, we build the workers, we deliver the work. Talk to us.
We use what we sell.
Our own AI Employees handle real work in our business every day: the inbox, the phone line, the research, the briefings. We are not theorising about AI, we are running it. If we recommend it to you, it is already running in ours.
The right tool for the problem.
Not every system needs to be an agent. A predictable workflow is often cheaper, faster, and more reliable than a model making its own decisions. We choose the simplest architecture that solves the problem and only reach for more autonomy where real ambiguity earns it.
Full stack, one team.
The screens you see, the systems behind them, the AI inside them, and the infrastructure they run on. One team, no handoffs, no gaps in knowledge.
Based in Newcastle.
The North East combines industrial depth, strong academic talent, a growing technology cluster, and rising investment in AI infrastructure. The right people, the right research, and new compute are converging in the same place at the same time. It is a good moment to be building here.
No black boxes.
Everything an AI Employee does is logged: every action, every draft, every decision. And we explain our technical choices in plain language. You will always understand what we are building, what it is doing, and why.
Tell us what your business does and where your time goes, and we will tell you exactly what an AI Employee would look like for you. Free, forty five minutes, no commitment.