Disney has named Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer, a newly created role that takes effect Oct. 2. He will join the company as senior executive vice president and report directly to Josh D’Amaro.
The hire lands as Disney sharpens its focus on technology and puts enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering under one leader. Anand is the person Disney chose to help modernize how those pieces work together across its business.
That choice also answers a question Disney had left open until now: who would sit at the top of its technology stack. The company had not had a CTO per se, and its highest-ranking tech executive had been Adam Smith, who was promoted on Thursday to chairman of direct-to-consumer for Disney Entertainment after being hired in 2024 as chief product and technology officer for Disney Entertainment and.
Anand arrives with a background that fits the job on paper. Before Disney, he was CEO of Character.AI. Before that, he was president and chief product officer of Brex, held multiple leadership roles at Meta’s Facebook and spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he worked on the Azure cloud-computing platform.
The move is easier to read as a statement of direction than a routine executive shuffle. D’Amaro said Anand brings experience across infrastructure, consumer technology and AI, and said he will be a vital addition to Disney’s senior leadership team as the company pursues great storytelling as its North Star, technology in service of creativity and operating as One Disney. He also said technology creates the most value when it helps people do their best work.
There is, though, a hard edge to the hire. About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the company a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Disney characters be removed from the platform. Character.AI complied. Now Disney is bringing in the executive who led that company, and a number of Character.AI’s technical team are expected to follow him.
That makes the next step more important than the announcement itself. Anand is set to start on Oct. 2, and his first test will be whether he can turn a newly created title into a coherent technology structure that actually speeds up how Disney builds and delivers products company-wide.
