Good morning. This is Katie Deighton filling in for Nat Ives. Today, corporate America reckons with the fact its AI obsession and incessant cost-cutting has made things kind of...boring.

White collar work has been stripped of all fun.

The curtailing of perks, from offsites to travel, is happening against the backdrop of an artificial intelligence push that employees say seems aimed at squeezing more work out of fewer people. Companies are tightening scrutiny of employee expenses, meaning certain small niceties are disappearing, too.

If the prospect of losing jobs to AI wasn’t enough of a bummer for Dell Technologies staffers, the company also took away their daily free espresso shots last year, Mark Maurer and Chip Cutter report. At software company Q2 Holdings in Austin, there’s now a $100 cap on a single wine-bottle purchase when entertaining clients.

I’m sure this will ring true if you work at an ad agency.

Despite the existence of Cannes as a concept, many of my conversations with industry staff lately conclude with some form of “It’s just not fun anymore.” Creatives overloaded with pitches and always-on campaigns are tethered to the office, AI is poised to kill the exotic on-location shoot, and the promise of being paid to drink and think at lunch died a long time ago.

Advertising used to come with a bargain: You might not get paid as much as you would working for a bank or a law firm, but you’re almost certainly destined to have a more creatively fulfilling life. I’m not sure that still holds.

Chief financial officers at large U.S. companies mentioned “efficiency” at least once on 307 conference calls in the latest quarter as of March 26, up from 219 a year earlier and the highest level since at least 2020, according to AlphaSense. During Omnicom’s most recent investor day presentation, the term and its variations came up seven times.

OpenAI’s Sora was hyped as AI’s next consumer-friendly frontier—a simple app that allowed users to put themselves and their friends in whatever video settings they choose. It now looks like an expensive strategic miscalculation.

OpenAI abruptly decided to shut Sora down last week. The news came as a surprise to executives at Disney, which had agreed to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and allow the studio’s Marvel, Pixar and other characters to appear in Sora videos, Berber Jin and Jessica Toonkel write.

What they didn’t know was that Sora had quietly turned into a liability for OpenAI in the months after its release.

OpenAI was weeks away from finishing work on a new AI model and needed to free up more computing resources to power the coding and enterprise products that would run on it. Sora wasn’t profitable, and every user who spliced themselves into a World War II newsreel or Hollywood chase scene drew down a finite resource.

OpenAI had been in direct talks with some major brands about potential commercial applications, my colleague Patrick Coffee reported last November. The parent company of WWE saw it as a potential new way for fans to connect with its brands and intellectual property, for example.

But the app never took off in the ways its creators imagined. Usage flatlined by the end of the year. Sora was losing roughly a million dollars a day, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Creating a viral design is a dream for most fashion designers. For Conner Ives, it also posed a problem, Sophia Herring reports.

Ives’ original “Protect the Dolls” charity t-shirt, worn by celebrities like Madonna and Pedro Pascal, has been duped to the high heavens. About 30% of consumers, and almost 50% of Gen-Z customers, have bought an unauthorized copy, according to Morning Consult, and more than 100 iterations of the design are available across TikTok Shop, Amazon, Shein, Temu and Etsy.

The case highlights an interesting corner of creative copyright law.

Phrases are not generally trademarked. Ives said that his lawyers advised him to include the phrase as an insignia on the label of the shirt, and try to claim copyright protection on that. But trademark application approvals can often take over a year—much slower than the time it now takes for a design to blow up on social media, get copied by another brand, and wind up on TikTok Shop.

“We need to be more realistic in acknowledging that when something goes viral, it does create a form of ownership that we should recognize in the trademark system,” said Susan Scafidi, the founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute in New York.

Why concerts keep getting more expensive. [WSJ]

Kit-Kat had to issue a statement to confirm, seriously, that 12 tons of its chocolate really were stolen, an incident that looked suspiciously to some like a brand marketing stunt. [Daily Beast]

Apple hired Google executive Lilian Rincon to lead AI product marketing. [Axios]

Politico named insider Jonathan Greenberger as its new editor in chief. [WSJ]

Bob Schmetterer, former chairman and chief executive officer of Havas precursor Euro RSCG, died at 82. [Adweek]

Inside “Fruit Love Island," a TikTok show starring messy, cheating, sexy AI fruit characters. [WSJ]

Does spring need a PR agency? [New York Times]