Walt Disney names Karandeep Anand as first chief technology officer

By Asia Samachar  | United States |

Veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand will join the Walt Disney Company as its Chief Technology Officer, a newly created position, effective October 2.

Anand, who most recently has served as CEO of Character.AI, will report directly to Disney Chief Executive Officer Josh D’Amaro.

“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,” said D’Amaro 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.”

Karandeep will hold the rank of a Senior Executive Vice President.

As CTO, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product, and engineering, working across the company’s segment technology teams to further modernize how Disney builds and delivers technology company-wide.

Anand led Character.AI through a period of explosive growth, building one of the most engaged consumer-AI audiences in the world, while also making user trust and safety a priority as the platform scaled, according to Disney’s statement.

About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the tech startup a cease-and-desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform. Character.AI complied with the request.

Before Character.AI, he was President and Chief Product Officer of the financial technology company Brex. He also served in several leadership roles at Meta’s Facebook, most recently as Vice President of Ads & Business Products. Earlier in his career, Anand held senior product and engineering leadership roles at Microsoft, where he worked for 15 years and was part of the team that built the Azure platform. He holds a Computer Science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

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