Disney has hired Karandeep Anand, most recently chief executive of the AI chatbot company Character.AI, as its first chief technology officer. He starts October 2 and reports directly to CEO Josh D’Amaro.
Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering, working across Disney’s segments to modernize how the company builds and delivers technology. Before Character.AI he was president and chief product officer at the fintech company Brex, and before that spent time at Meta as vice president of ads and business products. He began his career at Microsoft, where he worked for 15 years and was part of the team that built the Azure cloud platform.
The appointment is the first time Disney has had a CTO at all, which is itself notable for a company of its size and one that has spent the past several years reorganizing around streaming and parks technology.
Anand’s most recent employer arrives with context. Character.AI is among the companies named in litigation over chatbot harms to minors, including the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in 2024 after an extended relationship with a chatbot on the platform. Reporting published the same day as Anand’s appointment detailed how state chatbot safety laws are being drafted with industry input and exemptions.
Disney didn’t link the two in announcing the hire, and there’s no indication the company sees a tension. But Disney’s audience is children, its next several years of technology strategy will involve AI, and it has just put someone who ran a conversational AI company in charge of that strategy. Those facts sit together whether or not anyone draws a line between them.
