Dive Brief:
- The Walt Disney Company has selected Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer and senior executive vice president, effective Oct. 2, the entertainment company shared in a Friday announcement. Anand will report to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro.
- In the newly created role, Anand will manage enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, the company said. He will work across teams to modernize Disney’s approach to building and delivering technology companywide.
- Anand most recently served as CEO of Character.ai, a generative AI chatbot platform. Some members of Character.ai’s technical team are also expected to join Disney as part of the move.
Dive Insight:
The creation of a CTO role at Disney comes as the company’s CEO emphasizes the importance of embracing AI, leaning on technology as a growth driver.
D’Amaro took over as CEO six months ago, replacing longtime CEO Bob Iger, who stepped down in March 2026. D’Amaro said the company was founded on “the convergence of creativity and breakthrough technology,” a tradition he plans to continue in advancing AI across the company.
“We’re using AI strategically across not only our studios, but across the whole enterprise,” D’Amaro told investors during Disney’s Q3 2026 earnings call in August. “We’re doing that to gain efficiency, to be faster, to accelerate velocity, and unleash creativity inside of Disney.”
Disney is using AI across core technical processes in its production pipeline to help get films to market faster, accelerate rendering and noise reduction processes and expand the number of films that can be offered in 3D, D’Amaro said. The company is also using AI within its Disney+ streaming business to improve personalization and enhance its recommendation engine, he added.
D’Amaro has sharpened the company’s focus on adopting AI in the wake of a complicated relationship between Disney and third-party AI services over use of copyrighted images. Less than a year ago, Disney sent Character.ai a cease and desist letter warning the company to stop using copyrighted Disney characters without prior authorization.
Disney reportedly also sent a cease and desist letter to Google in December 2025, claiming its AI models infringed on Disney’s copyrighted images. Disney and Universal filed an IP lawsuit against Midjourney, an AI image generation company.
In the Friday announcement, Disney said part of Anand’s focus will be on AI platforms, product and engineering. While building Character.ai, Anand made user trust and safety a priority while the platform scaled, the company said. Prior to Character.ai, Anand held leadership roles at Facebook and Microsoft.
Anand will also have an eye toward data in his role, an enterprise priority D’Amaro highlighted during the August earnings call. Data is proving to be a critical foundation for AI, particularly agentic capabilities.
“One area that’s an enterprisewide priority for me and our whole team is data unification,” D’Amaro said. “Large companies with multiple businesses, especially ones that have been built over time through a series of acquisitions, they often end up with disparate datasets that sometimes don’t talk to each other, and we’re putting real resources behind fixing that.”
