When “Toy Story” premiered in 1995, the enemy was plastic. In its latest chapter, it’s pixels.
More than 30 years after Woody worried about being replaced by Buzz Lightyear, the franchise is ready to take on a bigger threat: the screen.
The official trailer for “Toy Story 5” was released on Thursday and shows the toys vying for Bonnie’s attention against a frog-themed tablet named Lilypad. Bonnie is the young girl to whom Andy gave his toys when he left for college at the end of “Toy Story 3.”
In the clip, Bonnie receives the device in a package and is almost instantly absorbed, scrolling and tapping with a glazed look as her analog toys watch from the sidelines.
It all builds to a face-off between Jessiethe cowgirl doll and Lilypad. Jessie says, “You’re not even listening to me,” only for the tablet to coolly reply, “I’m always listening.”
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Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack, has been in charge since Woody left at the end of “Toy Story 4.” Now, as Bonnie’s attention drifts elsewhere, the gang brings their old — and now balding — leader back.
“I don’t know, Jessie,” Woody says in the trailer. “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.”
The film is set to be released on June 19, with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen returning to voice Woody and Buzz, respectively.
The storyline taps into a broader debate playing out in real life, as parents and experts wrestle with how screens are reshaping childhood.
Too much screentime has been linked to delays in social skills development, as well as problems with attention and behavior. Those concerns have prompted some governments to move toward banning social media use for children under 16.
The last installment in the Pixar franchise, “Toy Story 4,” was released in 2019. It surpassed $1 billion at the global box office and won an Oscar for best animated feature.
As companies rethink how they train early-career workers in a job market shaped by AI, Salesforce executive Andy White said resilience is top of mind for him — both at work and at home.
White oversees Salesforce’s implementation of Slackbot, an AI personal agent that generates responses based on conversations, files, and workflows inside Slack.
As White raises his son and daughter during a period of rapid technological change, he said he preaches to his kids the importance of powering through moments that don’t go as planned. He said resilience is pivotal and that it’s important for people to focus on doing the hard things and being OK when things don’t go as expected.
The senior vice president of business technology said he recently spoke with his daughter about the importance of dealing with situations rather than merely labeling them as “good” or “bad.”
“Hard is hard,” White told Business Insider. “Hard isn’t necessarily bad.”
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Expectations, he said, are the “destroyer of hope and joy,” and that when things don’t go as planned, it often turns out to be a good thing down the line, even if it doesn’t seem that way in the moment.
“It’s when we look back, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, I’m glad that didn’t go the way I expected,'” White said. “But when you’re in it, it’s really hard.”
The importance of persistence
The resilience lesson is one White also thinks is relevant for entry-level workers. While junior hires often arrive ready to use new tools and deliver a “pretty high output,” he said, persistence is an area where some still need to grow.
He described today’s entry-level talent pool as “incredibly capable, very bright, and very driven,” with a stronger grasp of how to use AI tools to solve problems.
“They’re much more fluent at being able to leverage AI tooling in the flow of their work,” White said.
However, he said the group sometimes struggles when it comes to working through challenges.
“There’s more willingness to give up sooner,” he said, adding that this traitdoesn’t apply across the board.
Finding confidence
White said he’s seen AI tools, such as the company’s recently upgraded Slackbot, help boost entry-level workers’ confidence. He said they could help reduce feelings of imposter syndrome by helping early-career workers navigate challenging situations that arise at work.
With that said, White added that workers need to stay balanced and not let tools make them “overly confident.” He said workers need to bring skepticism to “any kind of information” they get, and be diligent about reviewing sources and citations when using AI.
“If you don’t believe something, read the citation, and if it doesn’t have a citation, you have to assume it’s a hallucination,” White said, adding that he tells his kids the same thing.
Over eight years of writing for travel publications, Kim Magaraci developed a passion for domestic travel. She learned that travel tips online couldn’t compete with those destinations you could only discover by word-of-mouth.
So, when she founded her travel business, KGM Travel Design, in 2024, she hoped to emphasize personal relationships with vendors and customers and avoid using AI, despite her experience with it.
“I don’t think you can get good advice asking ChatGPT for an itinerary,” she says. “It’s antithetical to everything I stand for.”
And yet, Magaraci realized that using AI for administrative tasks like analytics, compiling reports, and generating condensed client briefs allowed her to spend more time on the personalized relationships that set her business apart.
She’s one of many solopreneurs who told Business Insider that outsourcing administrative tasks to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Nano Banana — Gemini’s photo-editing AI — has allowed them to scale their business by spending more time on strategic and creative work, including growth decisions and building personal connections with customers.
“It’s getting harder and harder to deny the time-saving aspects,” Magaraci says, adding that she has embraced AI “in order to run a successful business and grow this business into what I want it to be.”
AI supports growth by creating more free time, solopreneurs say
Seneca Connor, founder of The Bag Icon, an accessories brand, uses Nano Bana and other AI products to edit photos and videos. That not only saves her money — up to $2,000 per monthly photo shoot, she says — but also time.
Seneca Connor is the founder of The Bag Icon.
Ian Tuttle for BI
With the hours saved, Connor has been able to design more original bags and launch a greater number of bags curated from other designers, all while reducing her marketing costs.
As a result, The Bag Icon saw more than a 20% year-over-year increase in profits last year, despite the impact of tariffs.
Accountant and solopreneur Gloria Hebert uses ChatGPT for her business, Aybear Services, to instantly create educational client worksheets that previously took an hour or two to set up.
This frees up time that she then uses to prioritize analyzing financial data from her bookkeeping clients — data she doesn’t feed into AI because of privacy concerns. Managing finances is the core of her business, so having more time to spend on that has allowed her to streamline her workdays.
Gloria Hebert is an accountant and the founder of Aybear Services.
Stephe Ross Goldstein for BI
The time saved also allows her to organize networking events and community education classes for local business owners, which has led to an uptick in business. “Several of those entrepreneurs hired me to do their books,” Hebert says.
AI allows more time for personalized communications, which build brand following
Lisa York is the owner of Sell More Stuff, an email marketing business. Although she has a small audience, she saw a 33% conversion rate for sales last year, she says. She credits that growth to her personalized, voicey emails, which always open with a personal anecdote and are never written with AI.
“I use a lot of story-led emails,” York says. “People enjoy them, and they open the email because they can see my name.”
That’s something AI just can’t replicate, she says. But York is able to spend time drafting engaging copy because she outsources other tasks — including tech support for her website, research, and brainstorming marketing strategy — to ChatGPT.
Lisa York is the founder of Sell More Stuff.
David Oates for BI
Like York, Connor uses the time that AI saves to build robust communication and rapport with her customers, which she says builds loyalty to her business. Less time spent on photos and video gives her more time to respond to emails and direct messages from clients seeking advice about their purchases.
“It’s building community that’s missing in the big brands,” Connor says.
AI frees up time so solopreneurs can focus on their business’s core
While AI has allowed these solopreneurs to grow their businesses without hiring a team, the technology shouldn’t take over the core aspects of a business, Hebert says. Rather, it can be a tool that allows owners to focus on those critical areas.
“Use it as a resource,” she says.
York — whose target clientele are other solopreneurs — says she’s seeing more people recognize that. “People aren’t scared of it anymore,” she says.
Seneca Connor emphasizes that while she uses AI, all thoughts, ideas, and suggestions she shares with her clients are her own.
Ian Tuttle for BI
Connor plans to expand her use of AI this year. She’s experimenting with a digital clone — a video avatar that can deliver a script explaining new products. That approach will save her time on filming videos, but she says she’ll always be the one dishing out the original advice that her clients have come to trust.
Even if a video is created using AI, Connor says, “all thoughts, ideas, and suggestions — those are my own.”
China’s deepening property crisis has crushed household wealth and dented the fortunes of some of its biggest tycoons — but a new class of AI-era billionaires is rising fast.
This year, the standout winners are coming from China’s red-hot AI chip sector.
On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai — a GPU startup founded by former AMD executives — skyrocketed as much as 755% on their first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s tech-focused STAR Market, before closing up about 700%.
The surge catapulted its chairman and cofounder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China’s fastest-rising tech moguls. Chen’s stake in MetaX is worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Other early insiders also saw eye-popping paper gains.
MetaX’s other two cofounders and co-chief technology officers, Peng Li and Yang Jian, hold stakes worth hundreds of millions of dollars after the blockbuster debut, according to Bloomberg’s calculations.
China’s AI rush
Chen’s rise follows that of another GPU entrepreneur, Zhang Jianzhong, the founder and CEO of Moore Threads Technology.
Earlier this month, Zhang’s net worth jumped to $4.3 billion after his company’s successful IPO, continuing a wave of investor enthusiasm for homegrown semiconductor players.
The richest figure in China’s AI chip scene is Chen Tianshi, a cofounder and CEO of Cambricon Technologies — a company retail traders have dubbed “China’s Nvidia.”
Cambricon’s Chen is now worth $22.5 billion, making him the country’s 16th-richest individual on Bloomberg’s list. He is the 115th richest person in the world.
These new fortunes reflect a sharp shift in investor sentiment.
Chinese AI and semiconductor stocks have been on a tear since the breakout of the China-made DeepSeek-R1 AI model released in January. The model helped spark a rally in local tech names and pushed the Hang Seng Tech Index up more than 20% so far this year.
Washington’s tightening export controls on advanced Nvidia chips also contributed to the boom.
Such restrictions on high-end AI processors have choked China’s access to cutting-edge US hardware and pushed Beijing to lean harder on domestic suppliers.
Still, China’s new AI billionaires remain far from the top of the country’s wealth rankings. The upper tier is still dominated by long-established tycoons.
In the top spot is Zhong Shanshan, the low-key bottled-water magnate behind Nongfu Spring, with a fortune of $68.1 billion, per Bloomberg.
Pony Ma, a cofounder and CEO of Tencent, ranks second with $66.5 billion — a fortune up 38% this year, on the heels of Tencent’s AI-induced rally — while ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming comes in third with $65.2 billion.
If AI feels overhyped now, Eric Schmidt suggests that businesses should brace themselves — the real disruption hasn’t even begun yet.
In an interview with Professor Graham Allison at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University on Monday, the former Google CEO pushed back on the idea that AI’s rapid growth is a speculative bubble, saying that the technology is actually under-hyped.
“If anything, it’s under-hyped because you are fundamentally automating businesses,” he said.
The real transformation, he said, is happening deep inside companies, where AI systems are beginning to take over the “boring” tasks that quietly consume billions in corporate spending.
The biggest gains, he suggested, will come from automating the backbone of corporate work: the repeatable, time-consuming processes buried deep inside every organization.
The former Google chief listed billing, accounting, product design, delivery, and inventory management as examples of this.
“There’s an awful lot there — it’s extraordinary,” he said, pointing to areas like medicine, climate solutions, and engineering as sectors where automation could accelerate breakthroughs.
Schmidt, who helped steer Google’s early investments in AI and later co-authored a book on AI with Henry Kissinger, implied the technology’s economic impact will be far larger than markets or executives appreciate.
Still, not everyone agrees with that perspective. Some economists are sounding alarm bells that the AI boom is overheated.
In an interview this week, renowned economist Ruchir Sharma said the AI surge displays all four traits of a classic bubble and could unravel if interest rates rise, while tech leaders such as Sam Altman and Bill Gates have cautioned that parts of the market resemble the dot-com era.
Far beyond coding
To illustrate how quickly AI capabilities are advancing, Schmidt described watching an AI system generate an entire software program.
“Holy crap. The end of me,” he said.
“I’ve been doing programming for 55 years. To see something start and end in front of your own life is really profound,” he added.
However, he said that AI’s long-term upside extends far beyond coding.
From back-office workflows to logistics and scientific discovery, Schmidt believes the automation curve is still in its early stages of scaling and that Wall Street is underestimating the magnitude of the shift.
“The reason people are spending this amount of money,” he said, “is to automate the boring parts of their business.”
