Karandeep Anand will become The Walt Disney Company’s first chief technology officer and senior executive vice president on October 2, 2026. He will report to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro and oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and artificial-intelligence platforms.
The role is newly created, so Anand is not replacing another CTO. His brief is to work across Disney’s businesses and modernize how the company builds and delivers technology, with product, engineering, data unification and user trust among the stated priorities.
A technology role with an enterprise brief
CIO Dive reported that Anand arrives from Character.ai, where he was chief executive. Before that, he held leadership roles at Facebook and Microsoft. Disney expects some members of the Character.ai technical team to join him, adding continuity as the new office takes shape.
ThePrint described the appointment as part of D’Amaro’s effort to bring Disney’s technology teams closer together. Anand’s background spans product, infrastructure and business platforms: he spent nearly seven years at Meta, about 15 years at Microsoft and also served as president and chief product officer at Brex.
Fortune listed the appointment among the week’s Fortune 500 leadership moves and noted the October 2 start date. For Disney, the immediate test is organizational: whether a single technology leader can connect data and infrastructure across studios, streaming, parks and other businesses without losing sight of the creative work those systems support.
