From Hollywood battles to Adobe in ChatGPT, here’s how this week’s AI news translates into practical workflows that boost your creativity and productivity.
Most companies still treat AI like a side project. Meanwhile, Netflix is trying to buy half of Hollywood, Disney is handing its characters to a video model, and Adobe just put Photoshop inside ChatGPT.
This matters because those big, flashy media deals quietly signal the same thing that’s hitting your day‑to‑day work: AI is moving from “tool you open” to “layer that sits inside everything.” From content creation to research to admin work, we’re shifting from apps to assistants.
In this AI & Technology series, I want to focus on one question: how do you use these shifts to actually get more done, not just read more headlines? This week’s news cycle is a perfect case study.
Below, I’ll break down five big moves from Hollywood, Big Tech, and AI startups—and what they mean for your creativity, your workflow, and your productivity in 2026.
1. Hollywood’s AI Wars: Why Netflix vs. Paramount Matters for Your Work
The key point: the Netflix–Warner and Paramount–Warner bids are really about who controls the content pipelines that AI will learn from and produce for.
Netflix kicked the week off with a $72 billion bid (about $82.7 billion including debt) for Warner Bros.’ scripted assets: HBO, DC, Warner Bros. Studios. That’s Batman, Westeros, Succession, and more under one streaming roof. Then Paramount came in with an even bigger hostile offer—$78 billion, or around $108 billion including debt—for the entire company.
On the surface, this is classic streaming-war drama. Underneath, it’s about AI.
What’s really being bought: data, IP, and audience attention
Whoever wins doesn’t just get hit shows. They get:
- Massive, high‑quality content libraries that can be used to train in‑house AI tools (securely and legally)
- Brand trust and audience habits, which will matter when AI starts auto‑cutting trailers, personalizing intros, or even co‑writing scripts
- Production workflows that can be quietly infused with AI for editing, localization, VFX, and analytics
Here’s the thing: once a studio controls both the content and the AI layer, creative teams don’t just write and edit. They orchestrate systems—prompting models, reviewing outputs, and iterating faster than traditional pipelines allow.
What you can steal from Hollywood right now
You don’t need a studio budget to use the same playbook. You need:
- A central content library – Keep your brand assets, templates, and documents organized so AI tools can work with them. Your own “mini Warner Bros.”.
- Reusable prompts and workflows – Treat prompts like scripts: refine them, reuse them, and store the winners.
- AI in the boring parts of production – Use AI for:
- Transcribing and summarizing meetings
- Drafting outlines, scripts, or talking points
- Generating alternate title, thumbnail, or copy variants
Hollywood is fighting for IP. You should be fighting for repeatable, AI‑friendly workflows.
2. Disney + Sora: From Fan Fiction to Fast Video Prototyping
Disney’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI and its decision to license 200+ Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters to Sora isn’t just a fun toy. It’s a preview of how video creation is about to feel like writing prompts instead of storyboards.
Starting in early 2026, anyone will be able to create 30‑second Sora clips featuring licensed Disney characters—within guardrails like no adult themes and no impersonating actors’ voices. Some of the best fan creations may even end up on Disney+.
People are arguing about whether this is “corporate fan fiction.” I see something more practical for your day‑to‑day work: prototype‑speed storytelling.
How this changes creative work
The old model:
- Brief → script → storyboard → design → animatic → final
The new model:
- Prompt → video draft → iterate
AI video doesn’t replace professionals, but it shifts where their time goes:
- Less time on first drafts, more time on story, pacing, and polish
- Fewer budget and timeline excuses for not testing creative ideas
- More room to A/B test different narratives before committing to production
Practical ways to use this mindset today (even before Sora)
You don’t need Disney characters to work this way. You can:
- Use AI to generate low‑fidelity video mockups for:
- Explainer videos
- Social ads
- Training snippets
- Generate storyboards and shot lists from a text description of your product or message
- Turn blog posts into video scripts with scene suggestions and B‑roll ideas
When video becomes as fast to draft as a paragraph, the teams who win are the ones who test more ideas, more often, not the ones with the fanciest cameras.
3. Meta’s News Deals: Real‑Time Research Without the Tab Overload
Meta’s new multiyear licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, USA Today, People, and Le Monde do one important thing for productivity: they turn AI chat into a real‑time research assistant instead of a stale encyclopedia.
By piping live headlines and coverage into Meta AI, Meta is solving a core problem: models that only know the world up to a certain year. They’re also sidestepping growing legal battles around unlicensed scraping by simply paying for data.
What this means for your daily workflow
Most knowledge workers spend a painful chunk of the day juggling:
- News sites
- Slack or Teams threads
- Email newsletters
- Internal dashboards
AI with licensed, up‑to‑date news lets you:
- Ask “What’s changed on this topic since last quarter?” and get a concise brief
- Get multi‑source summaries instead of manually scanning 10 articles
- Pull quotable stats and opposing viewpoints for presentations or content
Here’s a simple, repeatable workflow I use:
- Ask an AI assistant for a 3‑paragraph brief on a topic, specifically “as of today.”
- Ask for 3–5 key stats with dates and sources.
- Ask for a 90‑second spoken explanation you can turn into a Loom, podcast intro, or meeting opener.
The goal isn’t to outsource your thinking. It’s to compress the “catch up on everything” part of your day to a few focused prompts.
4. Adobe Inside ChatGPT: Your New Creative Side Panel
The most “work smarter, not harder” move of the week belongs to Adobe. By embedding slimmed‑down versions of Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat directly inside ChatGPT, Adobe effectively turned a chat window into a creative control room.
Type something like “Adobe Photoshop: blur the background and brighten the subject,” and instead of getting text instructions, you get actual controls and edits—with the option to jump into the full web apps when you need more power.
Why this is a big deal for productivity
This is the shift I mentioned at the start: AI is becoming a layer across tools, not just another app in your dock.
In practical terms, that means:
- Fewer context switches between apps
- Less time learning complex software menus
- More “tell the system what you want, then refine” workflows
For individual creators and small teams, this is huge:
- You can clean up images for a pitch deck without being a Photoshop pro.
- You can redact PDFs or tweak layouts without hunting through menus.
- You can keep your thinking, drafting, and editing in one place.
Concrete workflows you can start using
Here are three simple, high‑impact patterns:
-
One‑shot content pack
- Draft a post or article in ChatGPT.
- Use Adobe Express to generate matching visuals.
- Export as a PDF with Acrobat for internal review.
-
Sales or client deck shortcut
- Paste your outline into chat.
- Ask for a slide‑by‑slide structure and copy.
- Use Photoshop/Express to adapt or clean up imagery.
-
Policy or legal doc clean‑up
- Summarize a contract.
- Ask for a plain‑language version.
- Use Acrobat tools to annotate, highlight, and export a clean version.
This is the core theme of AI & Technology for work: keep your work where your thinking happens. Let the tools come to you inside that flow.
5. The “Shadow Web”: How Agentic AI Will Touch Your Job Next
The most sci‑fi story of the week comes from startups quietly cloning major consumer websites—Amazon, Gmail, United Airlines—into fake look‑alikes like “Omnizon,” “Go Mail,” and “Fly Unified.”
These replicas sit on a “Shadow Web” where AI agents can click, scroll, search, book, and buy without:
- Taking down real websites with bot traffic
- Triggering fraud systems and bot blockers
- Risking real customer data or payments
Why? To train agentic AI systems—bots that don’t just answer questions, but take actions in apps and on the web.
From chatbots to co‑workers
Gartner estimates this market could hit $47.1 billion in the next few years, even if 40% of projects fail by 2027. That’s normal for an emerging space. The survivors will be the ones that quietly automate tasks like:
- Booking simple travel
- Filling forms and updating CRMs
- Pulling reports from multiple SaaS tools
- Handling level‑one customer support tickets
The Shadow Web is the training ground so that, eventually, your real tools can be driven by safe, competent agents.
How to prepare your team for agentic AI
You don’t control the Shadow Web, but you do control how ready your work is for automation. I’d focus on three steps:
-
Standardize your processes
Document recurring workflows: onboarding, reporting, approvals. AI can’t automate chaos. -
Separate judgment from grunt work
Identify which steps need human judgment vs. which are pure execution. Target the execution steps first. -
Start with “co‑pilot mode”
Use AI to suggest actions (draft replies, fill forms, propose schedules) that humans approve, before you let anything run fully automated.
The companies that gain the most productivity won’t be the first to deploy agents. They’ll be the ones that have clean, well‑described workflows for those agents to run.
How to Actually Work Smarter With All This
There’s a common thread running through Netflix’s bids, Disney’s Sora deal, Meta’s news partnerships, Adobe’s integrations, and the Shadow Web experiments:
Work is shifting from “I click all the buttons” to “I describe the outcome, then shape what AI gives me.”
If you want to stay ahead in 2026, here’s a simple playbook:
-
Choose one area of your work to “AI‑ify” this month.
- Content creation
- Research and analysis
- Document and design cleanup
- Repetitive online tasks
-
Build one small, repeatable workflow.
For example: “Turn meeting notes into a summary, action list, and follow‑up email draft in 10 minutes.” -
Measure the time saved.
If a task takes 60 minutes today and you can get it to 20 with AI and light editing, that’s a 66% productivity gain on something you do every week. -
Tighten your prompts like you’d tighten a process.
Save the good ones. Share them with your team. Treat them as assets.
The headlines will keep getting louder—bigger deals, bigger models, bigger controversies. The reality is much simpler: small, repeatable AI workflows stacked together will change your work life more than any single big announcement.
If you’re serious about working smarter, not harder, don’t just follow the AI news cycle. Turn at least one of these trends—creative automation, real‑time research, embedded tools, or agentic execution—into a concrete habit in your weekly workflow.