Key Takeaways
- These are not typical media executives. A year ago, Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter. Now Karandeep Anand and members of his technical team will shape how the company uses AI. Adam Smith, meanwhile, has spent more of his career at Google and YouTube than inside traditional media companies.
- The shakeup advances CEO Josh D’Amaro’s bid to make Disney a tech-forward company, with Disney+ as the digital hub. The longer-term aim is a super app that lets fans manage their entire relationship with Disney — park tickets, merchandise, streaming, and more. AI is likely to be a core engine of that strategy.
Disney has created its first companywide chief technology officer role and filled it with Karandeep Anand, the outgoing CEO of Character.AI. Anand starts Oct. 2 as senior executive vice president and CTO, reporting directly to CEO Josh D’Amaro. A day earlier, Disney Entertainment elevated Adam Smith — a two-year Disney veteran after more than two decades at Google and YouTube — to chairman of Direct-to-Consumer.
The Anand hire is striking because of the recent legal history. In September 2025 Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter accusing the service of filling its platform with unauthorized chatbots that impersonated Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars characters and, Disney said, risked harming children and damaging the brand.
Smith now oversees Disney+ and Hulu product, engineering, advertising technology, programming strategy, viewer experience, partnerships, and data and analytics. His former co-president, Joe Earley, moves to a new post as president of Disney Entertainment Television franchise and content strategy. Taken together, the two appointments are the clearest sign yet of how D’Amaro, who became CEO in March, wants Disney run: as a technology company that also makes entertainment, not a studio that also has apps.
Anand will own enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product, and engineering across the company and will work with segment tech teams to modernize how Disney builds and ships software. A number of Character.AI engineers are expected to follow him. Smith’s promotion puts a product-and-platform operator, not a traditional programming executive, at the top of the streaming business D’Amaro has called Disney+ the digital centerpiece of a more connected fan relationship.
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| Josh D’Amaro |
D’Amaro now describes Anand as “an expert builder and strategist, technical and product-minded, with sharp instincts for what fans actually want,” and lists three priorities the new CTO is meant to serve: storytelling as the north star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as “One Disney.”
Smith joined Disney in 2024 as chief product and technology officer for Disney Entertainment and ESPN after leading product for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium; he became co-president of DTC in March 2026. Dana Walden, Disney’s president and chief creative officer, credited him with building a product and technology bench and improving the global Disney+ experience. What used to be a classic entertainment job — greenlighting shows and movies and deciding when they air — now sits next to large language models, recommendation systems, ad tech, infrastructure and analytics.