Beauty and the Bots 👸💸

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover OpenAI’s capturing of the intellectual property everyone wanted - Disney. It’s get exclusive rights to everything from Iron Man to Cinderella for $1 billion, but we wonder who gets the best part of the deal? We also have news on Microsoft’s struggles with Copilot sales, an AI Santa doing the rounds, Gemini’s exciting Disco tool, the release of GPT-5.2, as well as all the latest from 3Advance!

🎬 Our Top Take

💰🪄 AI – Disney Releases Its Intellectual Property to OpenAI

If you can’t beat ‘em, make ‘em pay you. For a long time, Disney was one of the significant holdouts on AI. It was perhaps the most litigious of media groups, seemingly hitting everyone with cease-and-desist letters or full-blown lawsuits the moment an AI-generated Mickey Mouse or any of its other precious IP appeared on screen. Last week, Disney CEO Bob Iger visibly changed his tune, heralding the Magic Kingdom’s $1B deal with OpenAI as a big step into the future. The deal, which will give Sora and ChatGPT exclusive access to Disney’s IP, will be exclusive for one year, which suggests that Mr. Iger knows he can milk a few other AI companies for IP access later down the line. There has been some pushback on the deal from creative arts unions, although Disney says this is assuaged by the deal ruling out appearances, voices, and likenesses of human performers. Yet, we are somewhat interested in what OpenAI gets from this. A billion might seem like small change in this era, but that represents about 5% of OpenAI’s predicted annual revenue for this year. Disney might help with wider adoption, but we would question what value it offers beyond people mucking about by generating videos of themselves as Jedis and Avengers. As we explain in our Stat of the Week, there is swirling concern over businesses paying for AI. Mass AI adoption, yes. AI monetization, that’s tricky unless your selling chips. #U-Turn Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: ElfYourself

Alright, alright. We usually reserve this column for apps we’d use ourselves, or at least something that piqued our interest, but this time we are going to give in to the mainstream by highlighting the annual success story of ElfYourself. As you can probably guess by the name (and time of year), ElfYourself is an app that turns you (or, more likely, your kids) into Santa’s Elves through an array of image and video generators. This isn’t a new app – it’s been one of the top hits of December for 14 years running – but if you have kids and they haven’t tried it, give it a whirl. It’s technically free, but we’ve noticed they are getting pushier with ads and in-app purchase prompts. On iOS here and Android here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 50%

📈📉 Microsoft – Company Admits Its Scaling Back AI Goals

The Information broke a hugely significant story that surprised us by the lack of attention it’s getting. Microsoft – one of the clear early winners in the AI race – has cut its sales targets for AI agentic software by up to 50%. Microsoft verified The Information’s story, which stated that fewer businesses than expected are buying AI software packages like Copilot. The heart of the problem, reporter Aaron Holmes claims, is that businesses simply don’t trust AI agents yet. #NoPilot Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

Earlier this year, we worked with author and podcaster Emily P. Freeman to reimagine her Quiet Collection app – a space for short, thoughtful audio reflections that help slow things down. The Advent Collection continues to be such an important part of the app, offering a calm, steady companion during a season that can feel busy and overwhelming. What’s been really exciting to watch is how Quiet Collection has continued to grow this year. Advent still shows up in the way people know and love, and now there are new collections – like Lent and Birthday – that give folks more reasons to come back at different times of the year. It’s led to Quiet Collection having its strongest year yet, which makes us incredibly proud. Not just because of the growth, but because it came from expanding the app in a way that still feels so true to Emily and the work she’s putting into the world. This is exactly the kind of partnership we love.