Disney is bringing veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand into its senior leadership team as the company creates its first Chief Technology Officer role. Anand, who most recently served as CEO of generative AI chatbot company Character.AI, will join Disney as senior executive vice president and CTO from October 2.
The newly created role comes as Disney looks to strengthen its technology capabilities and position technology more closely with creativity and entertainment.
Interestingly, Disney and Character.AI had a dispute in 2025. They accused the AI company of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding the removal of Disney characters from the platform. Character.AI later complied with the request.
They said Anand will report directly to D’Amaro, who became CEO in March. Several members of Character.AI’s technical team are also expected to join Disney alongside Anand.
Who is Karandeep Anand?
Anand previously served as president and chief product officer at financial technology company Brex. Before that, he held multiple leadership positions at Meta’s Facebook, including VP of ads and business products.
Earlier in his career, Anand spent 15 years at Microsoft in senior product and engineering roles. He was also part of the team that built the Azure cloud-computing platform.
“Karandeep brings a rare mix of experience across infrastructure, consumer technology and AI, and will be a vital addition to Disney’s senior leadership team as we further our three priorities: great storytelling as our North Star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as One Disney,” D’Amaro said in a statement. “He is an expert builder and strategist, technical and product-minded, with sharp instincts for what fans actually want.”
“He also has real enthusiasm and respect for Disney, a clear sense of where technology and creativity meet, and shares our belief that technology creates the most value when it helps people do their best work,” he added.
As CTO, Anand will oversee Disney’s enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. He will also work across Disney’s technology teams to “further modernise” how the company develops and delivers technology across the company.
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