Utopai Studios Names Former Disney AI Executive Hans Ku as Chief Product Officer

Utopai Studios has named Hans Ku its Chief Product Officer, putting him in charge of product, engineering, research and business development at the AI-focused film and television studio, Deadline reported on 2 November 2026.

Ku comes to Utopai from Disney, where he was most recently Vice President of AI & Engineering in the company's Office of Technology Enablement. Deadline reports that he played a key role in Disney's collaboration with OpenAI on Sora, the company's generative video tool. That partnership had a large financial side. At the end of 2025, Disney agreed to license its characters for use on Sora in exchange for a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. The licensing arrangement was later undone after Sora was shuttered.

His background stretches back well before that. Deadline says Ku previously worked at Walt Disney Animation, where he built a system to help traditional animators work online. At DreamWorks Animation he created the DreamColor display with HP, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him a Scientific and Engineering Award for that work. He has also held product and executive roles at Tubi, Yahoo and Flipagram. A LinkedIn profile lists him as a co-founder of Ptch, the company Yahoo later acquired.

Utopai was founded in 2022 and is based in Mountain View, California. Its chief executive and co-founder is Cecilia Shen, and Kevin Chong is its Chief Operating Officer. The studio describes itself as AI-fluent and story-first, making original films and series. It runs its own production system, PAI, which stands for Production Assistive Intelligence.

Deadline reports that Utopai recently raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation. The studio has also set out its plans. In August 2026, Variety reported that Utopai will premiere three movies and two series in 2027. In April 2026, the studio announced a three-minute 4K video generation capability and an upgraded Story Agent for PAI, according to a press release distributed through Business Wire.

The appointment puts a former animation engineer and streaming product leader at the centre of a studio that is trying to make AI part of the everyday filmmaking process. Ku's remit covers the tools, the research behind them and the business side of selling them. For a company with films and series due in 2027, the product role is where those three areas meet.