Disney names Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer
Disney has hired Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer.
He will join on 2 October in the newly created role of senior executive vice-president and chief technology officer. He will report directly to Disney chief executive Josh D'Amaro, according to Variety.
As CTO, the executive in charge of technology strategy across the company, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. Enterprise technology covers the internal systems staff use every day, from email and payroll to production tools. Infrastructure covers the core computing, networks and storage those systems run on. Data and AI platforms cover the tools for organising information and building artificial intelligence features. Product and engineering covers the teams that design, build and maintain software for staff and customers.
That is a first for Disney. The company has not previously had a single technology chief at this level. The new post brings those different areas together under one leader, with a direct line to the chief executive who makes the final decisions on strategy and spending.
Anand was most recently chief executive of Character.AI, a company that builds generative AI chatbots, meaning computer programmes that create conversation in response to prompts. A number of Character.AI's technical team members are expected to join Disney with him. The report did not name those staff or give an exact headcount.
His career before that spanned three major technology employers over more than two decades. He served as president and chief product officer of Brex, a role that combines running part of the company with leading what its products do. At Meta's Facebook, he held leadership roles, most recently as vice-president of ads and business products, the part of the business that builds tools for advertisers and other commercial customers. Earlier, he spent 15 years at Microsoft in senior product and engineering leadership roles and was part of the team that built Azure, its cloud-computing platform for delivering storage and computing power over the internet rather than on individual machines.
What makes this stand out is the scope of the brief. One person will now carry responsibility for systems, software, data and AI work across the whole organisation. For audiences, there is no immediate change to what appears on screen. The work sits backstage, in how services are built, kept running and updated, and in how the large crews behind them share tools and information.
