Walt Disney has created its first company-wide chief technology officer role and filled it with Karandeep Anand, the outgoing chief executive of Character.AI, as the entertainment giant pushes technology deeper into streaming, parks and fan experiences.
Anand will join on 2 October 2026 as senior executive vice president and CTO, reporting directly to chief executive Josh D’Amaro. Disney said he will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering, working across segment technology teams rather than sitting inside a single division. Several Character.AI technical staff are expected to move with him.
Why Disney wants a corporate CTO now
Disney has long had technology leaders inside parks, studios and streaming. What it has not had, until this appointment, is a single corporate CTO charged with modernising how the company builds and delivers technology across those businesses.
D’Amaro, who took over from Bob Iger in March 2026, has made that shift a public priority. In Disney’s announcement he described three priorities: storytelling as the north star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as “One Disney.” Anand, he said, brings experience across infrastructure, consumer technology and AI, plus “sharp instincts for what fans actually want.”
The timing also sits beside Thursday’s streaming shake-up, when Disney named Adam Smith chairman of streaming and created a new television franchise role for Joe Earley, sharpening focus on Disney+ and Hulu as direct-to-consumer hubs.
The Character.AI twist
Anand’s résumé is unusually pointed for a studio hire. Before Character.AI he was president and chief product officer at fintech firm Brex, a Meta vice president for ads and business products, and spent 15 years at Microsoft, including work on Azure. He holds a computer science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.
Character.AI, which lets users chat with generative AI personas, has also been a legal flashpoint. TechCrunch and Reuters note Disney sent the startup a cease-and-desist in September 2025 over alleged unauthorised use of Disney characters. Character.AI has faced separate litigation over chatbot safety, including a May 2026 suit over doctor impersonation and an earlier wrongful-death settlement tied to a teen’s suicide.
Disney’s official statement does not address that history. Anand said he has “admired Disney my entire life” for blending storytelling with technology and looks forward to connecting fans with stories and characters “in new and innovative ways.”
What it means for fans and competitors
For Disney, the hire signals that AI and platform engineering are no longer side projects under parks or streaming chiefs alone. D’Amaro’s earlier Epic Games investment and his push to turn Disney+ into a hub for games and other experiences suggest Anand’s brief will stretch beyond back-office IT into product surfaces fans actually touch.
For the wider media industry, the appointment is another data point in a consolidation-and-AI race: entertainment companies are recruiting consumer-AI operators even as they litigate or threaten startups over intellectual property. Hiring the CEO of a chatbot firm Disney once accused of copying its characters makes that tension unusually visible.
Anand starts on 2 October. The open question is how quickly a new corporate technology stack can reshape Disney+ and the parks without diluting the brand’s control of its most valuable characters — the same assets Character.AI was told to leave alone.