This is a whole lot of not news to many of you, but if you love toys, buy toys, collect toys, or more crucially, you design toys, then AI is going to become a part of your life very soon. If it hasn't already. Spotted in toybook:

Rise of the Playbots: Mattel, OpenAI Ink Deal to Power Toy Innovation

tl;dr - key takeaways:

Mattel "inked a deal with OpenAI."

"Mattel plans to integrate OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT Enterprise, into its consumer-facing offerings and internal operations."

"it moves to introduce thoughtful AI-powered experiences and products into its iconic brands"

"new [internal] tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale"

So, expect more of your mass market toys to have AI powered tech in them. Duh.

But out of work toy designers & toy project managers should be diving deep into AI tools to ride the wave of this trend. More and more job postings in the toy biz will require knowledge and usage of AI productivity and concepting tools, so you might as well learn all that stuff now. 

Remember, AI doesn't replace your creativity. It augments your creativity. You will still have to use your human brain 🧠 to figure out which toy design and concept looks, feels and works the best for the toy project you are working on. 

AI can give you suggestions in that department but it can never out-human you, you sad, happy angry frustrated sack of 🥩 meat! Get meaty and dive into AI tools while you search for jobs. 

Even better, use ChatGPT to tell you what AI productivity tools are used most frequently at top toy companies, and learn to use those (we are talking data, project management and creative tools amongst others).