Disney Hires Its First CTO Amid Industry Push to Embrace A.I.
Disney is finally getting serious about operating like a technology company.On Friday, it named Karandeep Anand, an expert in building artificial intelligence and consumer technology products, as its first companywide chief technology officer.Reflecting the importance that Disney has placed on the role, Mr.
Anand will report to Disney’s chief executive, Josh D’Amaro.Competitors like NBCUniversal and Warner Bros.Discovery have technology chiefs for streaming, but no companywide counterpart or publicly identified A.I.
guru who reports directly to the boss.Mr.Anand, who starts Oct.
2, has spent the past 15 months leading Character.AI, a start-up whose lifelike chatbots have attracted intense scrutiny over child safety.He arrived after a wrongful-death lawsuit accused Character.AI of contributing to the death by suicide of a 14-year-old boy.
Under Mr.Anand’s leadership, the Character.AI adopted its most sweeping safeguard, barring minors from open-ended conversations with its chatbots.The lawsuit was settled in January.
Terms were not disclosed.Disney has long since shed its reputation as a digital bumbler, with the success of Disney+ displacing the disastrous Go.com as the defining chapter in the company’s internet story.Nonetheless, Disney is still struggling to make its sprawling businesses work together technologically.The 103-year-old Disney has been slower to develop and introduce new streaming features than tech-driven rivals like Netflix.
Disney must also figure out how to embrace A.I.without alienating actors, writers and other creative workers who fear it will take their jobs, or undermining the trust it has built with families.Since taking Disney’s top job in March, Mr.
D’Amaro has made addressing those challenges an urgent mandate.Other moves have included a content-sharing deal with TikTok, announced last month, that will bring to Disney+ curated short-form videos that use clips from the company’s library.On Thursday, Disney named Adam...