Disney hires Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer

Disney has spent a century building worlds. Now it needs someone to wire them together. The company announced on September 18, 2026, that Karandeep Anand will become its first-ever chief technology officer, starting October 2. The company runs theme parks, cruise lines, streaming platforms, film studios, and broadcast networks, each with its own technical infrastructure. Anand’s job, in short, is to make all of it talk to each other. Who is Karandeep Anand? Anand brings a resume that reads like a tour of the last two decades of enterprise tech. He spent 15 years at Microsoft working on the Azure cloud platform, then moved to Meta as a vice president, then joined Brex as president and chief product officer. Most recently, he served as CEO of Character.AI, the generative AI chatbot platform that became one of the more closely watched consumer AI products during the current wave of the technology. Several technical staff from Character.AI are expected to follow him to Disney, which suggests this is less a hire and more a small talent acquisition bundled inside an executive appointment. Anand will report directly to CEO Josh D’Amaro. His remit covers enterprise technology, infrastructu...