The CFO AI Digest: December 11, 2025

Big AI players lay the groundwork for agents in 2026, a consulting giant doubles down on AI partnerships, and Google sharpens its edge in AI-powered news search.

Plus, Adobe brings its creativity apps to ChatGPT, and a voice AI startup makes the case for maintaining a narrow focus.

Here’s the rundown:

OpenAI

1. Disney strikes landmark deal with OpenAI to bring its characters to Sora

Disney and OpenAI announced a three‑year licensing agreement that will allow Sora to generate short, user‑prompted videos featuring more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Select fan‑created Sora videos will also stream on Disney+. As part of the deal, Disney will become a major OpenAI customer, using its APIs to build new experiences, adopting ChatGPT internally, and investing $1 billion in OpenAI with warrants for additional equity. Both companies framed the agreement as setting responsible AI standards for entertainment, including safeguards around creator rights, safety, and age appropriateness. Sora‑generated Disney content is expected to roll out in early 2026.

CFO takeaway: Disney is betting that user-generated content can extend its storytelling reach, while maintaining control through safeguards on creator rights and age-appropriateness. Disney gets new revenue streams, deeper fan engagement, and distribution on Disney+ of fan-created videos. OpenAI gets validation from the entertainment industry's gold standard and a blueprint for partnering with IP holders. If successful, this model could reshape how studios monetize their libraries in the AI era.

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2. OpenAI co-founds Agentic AI Foundation to advance open standards for AI agents

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, have joined as early members, and are able to contribute to AAIF’s directed fund through membership dues. The foundation will steward open standards for agentic AI systems so agents can work across different tools and platforms. OpenAI donated AGENTS.md, a file format that gives coding agents project-specific instructions like coding conventions and testing requirements, which has been adopted by over 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI. Anthropic has handed over its Model Context Protocol (MCP), which OpenAI uses as the foundation for connectors and apps in ChatGPT, and Block is contributing goose, an open-source local AI agent for automating engineering tasks.

CFO takeaway: Leading AI companies are building the plumbing for an agentic AI ecosystem. If agents become the next computing paradigm, controlling the interoperability layer gives these frontier model creators influence regardless of which models win. OpenAI's donation of AGENTS.md and Anthropic's donation of MCP indicate that both companies see more value in setting industry standards than building walled gardens. For enterprises, this consortium approach reduces lock-in risk and accelerates agent adoption, potentially making 2026 the year agents move from experimentation to production.

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Anthropic

3. Anthropic and Accenture partner to scale Claude across global enterprises

Accenture and Anthropic announced a multi-year partnership expansion to help enterprises move from AI pilots to production at scale. The Accenture Anthropic Business Group will give 30,000 Accenture professionals Claude training, and Accenture will deploy Claude Code to tens of thousands of its developers. The companies are launching a joint offering for CIOs to measure value and scale AI adoption across engineering organizations, with initial industry solutions focused on regulated industries such as financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and public sector.

CFO takeaway: Accenture is hedging its AI bets. A week after partnering with OpenAI, the consulting giant is making a similar commitment to Anthropic. For Anthropic, Accenture brings enterprise credibility and reach, especially in regulated industries where Claude’s safety-first positioning resonates. But the real winner may be Accenture, which is now building expertise across multiple platforms while creating a lucrative services business around AI implementation.

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Google

4. Google announces paid publisher partnerships and new search features

Under a new commercial partnership program, Google will test AI-generated article overviews and audio briefings on participating publishers' Google News pages. Partners include The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and El País. Google is also partnering with The Associated Press and South Korea’s Yonhap to provide real-time information in Gemini results. "Preferred Sources" will allow users to customize search results to see more stories from select news sources. Other features include a dedicated carousel highlighting links from users' news subscriptions, more inline links in AI Mode responses with contextual explanations, and an expanded Web Guide that uses AI to organize links into topic groups for complex searches.

CFO takeaway: Google is positioning itself as the news engine of the AI era. As AI becomes a core part of how people discover and consume news, Google is offering users control through features like Preferred Sources, and building credibility through partnerships with trusted publishers. This approach contrasts with Perplexity’s more open aggregation model, signaling Google’s bet on curated and customizable AI-powered news delivery.

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Adobe

5. Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat come to ChatGPT

Adobe launched Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat for ChatGPT, making these apps available directly within the ChatGPT interface. Users can access these apps through conversational prompts in ChatGPT such as "Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image." The apps are free to all ChatGPT users globally and available on ChatGPT desktop, web, and iOS. Adobe Express is also available on Android, with support for Photoshop and Acrobat coming soon.

CFO takeaway: Last week, we reported on ChatGPT's platform play with consumer use cases. The app this week continues on that trajectory, positioning itself as a full-stack workspace for creative tasks. Rather than building competing tools in-house, OpenAI is choosing to integrate best-in-class software into its platform. For Adobe, this is a strategic distribution play; for OpenAI, it’s another step toward making ChatGPT the default all-in-one workspace.

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ElevenLabs

6. ElevenLabs Raises announces $100M Employee Tender at $6.6B Valuation

Voice AI startup ElevenLabs launched a $100 million employee tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation, double its Series C valuation nine months ago. The offer is led by existing investors Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from others like a16z. The company recently surpassed $200M in ARR, expects to hit $300M by year-end, and is approaching a 50/50 revenue split between enterprise and self-serve, it said.

CFO takeaway: ElevenLabs has become one of Europe’s most valuable startups, proving that specialized AI can be a competitive edge even as tech giants continue to expand capabilities. A Forbes profile of the company attributed ElevenLabs’ model breakthroughs to its lean team of machine learning researchers, obsessive focus on one narrow problem, and cost discipline. The platform’s accuracy has become its moat — the profile noted that “its models are so good that it’s able to get away with charging up to three times as much” as competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

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In other news

1. Meta to shift from open source to closed models with ‘Avocado’ launch in sight (Bloomberg)
2. Athropic launches interview tool in Claude to analyze how professionals view AI (Anthropic)
3. OpenAI taps former Slack CEO as new Chief Revenue Officer (OpenAI)

2 new AI tools to try

1. Vibe CLI (Mistral)
2. Rnj-1 (Essential AI)

Recommended reading

1. The state of enterprise AI (OpenAI)
2. The 2026 State of AI Agents Report (Anthropic)