Disney’s New CTO—and the Danger of Becoming a Museum of Our Own Imagination

There are corporate announcements that matter because of the person being announced, and then there are announcements that matter because of what the company says while making them.

On September 18, The Walt Disney Company named Karandeep Anand its first companywide Chief Technology Officer. It's a significant appointment. Anand arrives from Character.AI with a résumé that spans artificial intelligence, consumer technology, advertising, infrastructure, product development, and engineering. At Disney, his portfolio will stretch across enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. He'll report directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro.

There is plenty in Anand's appointment worth examining, particularly given how much of his career has been spent at the intersection of infrastructure, consumer technology and artificial intelligence. But the most interesting question isn't whether Disney intends to use AI, whether Disney+ will become more technologically sophisticated, or even whether the company can finally make its sprawling collection of technological systems behave more like parts of the same enterprise. We can reasonably assume all of that is coming.

The more consequential question is what Disney intends all of that technology to do.

D'Amaro offered an answer in announcing Anand's appointment: “great storytelling as our North Star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as One Disney.”

That's exactly the right order. It's also an order worth paying very close attention to, because reversing those first two things would be remarkably easy.

The Technology Is Not the Point

Disney has never been a company that merely tolerated technology. Technology is part of its creative inheritance.

Animation itself was repeatedly transformed by technological experimentation. Sound and color changed what animated films could be. Multiplane photography gave artists another dimension in which to tell stories. Audio-Animatronics made characters physical. Computer animation opened possibilities that ink and paint couldn't. Ride systems, projection, digital effects, streaming—the history of Disney is littered with examples of somebody encountering a new tool and wondering whether it could make an impossible idea possible.

That last part matters. The technology was not the destination. The story was.

D'Amaro has been fairly consistent on this point during his first months as CEO. At Disney's shareholder meeting in March, he described technology as an “amplifier” for stories, experiences and emotional connection. He talked about empowering storytellers with new tools while preserving the importance of characters, creative partners and audience trust. In August, discussing artificial intelligence with investors, he described a creative process that should remain human-centered, artist-driven and creator-led.

Those are encouraging words. More importantly, they're measurable ones. If technology is really meant to serve creativity, we should eventually be able to see the results. Not merely in faster production pipelines or more sophisticated recommendations on Disney+, but in the creative output itself. Are artists able to attempt things they couldn't attempt before? Are storytellers getting better tools? Is technology lowering barriers between a great idea and its execution?

Disney has spent much of its history answering those questions with some version of yes. That doesn't mean every technological experiment worked, or that every innovation produced something worth remembering. It does mean the company developed an unusually productive relationship between people who imagined things and people who figured out how to build them. That relationship is more important than any particular technology.

Artificial intelligence will change. Today's platforms will be replaced. Disney+ will evolve into something we probably can't describe particularly well yet. Twenty years from now, the technology Anand is being hired to oversee may look as quaint as some of Disney's earlier technical innovations look today. That's fine. The point was never the machine.

The Museum Problem

The greatest danger facing Disney isn't bankruptcy. The parks won't suddenly close, Mickey Mouse won't disappear, and Disney+ isn't going to blink off one morning.

The more plausible failure is far quieter: Disney remains an enormous, profitable corporation that becomes increasingly skilled at monetizing the imagination of dead people.

That is the museum problem.

And to be clear, museums are wonderful things. They preserve work worth preserving. People cross oceans to visit them. They can be culturally important and extremely successful institutions. But their fundamental purpose is preservation.

Disney's historic genius was different. It learned how to preserve yesterday while continuously manufacturing tomorrow.

That's an important distinction because it helps explain why Disney's intellectual property became so economically powerful in the first place. The company didn't begin with a collection of franchises and then figure out how to monetize them. Somebody had to create the things that eventually became franchises.

A great story creates characters people care about. If that attachment survives, the story can grow into something larger: another film, a television series, a game, a toy, a book, perhaps eventually an attraction or an entire themed environment. Each part can strengthen the others, but somewhere near the beginning of that process is a creative gamble. Somebody makes something before the market has had an opportunity to prove that people want it.

When that gamble works across generations, the economics become almost absurdly attractive. A generational Disney story creates an annuity.

Disney itself provided a nearly perfect example earlier this year when D'Amaro discussed Toy Story. Characters introduced more than thirty years ago now exist across streaming, consumer products, hotels, theme parks and cruise ships. A creative investment made in the 1990s continues generating both affection and revenue in the 2020s.

There's nothing wrong with continuing to capitalize on that affection. Quite the opposite. If people still love Woody and Buzz, Disney would be foolish not to find thoughtful ways for audiences to spend more time with them.

The problem appears when the success of that model begins changing which end of the machine gets the most attention.

Disney owns one of the most extraordinary libraries of intellectual property ever assembled. Modern technology makes that library easier to distribute, personalize, translate, merchandise and extend than at any point in the company's history. The financial temptation is obvious. Why assume the enormous risk of creating the next thing when technology makes extracting additional value from the old thing easier every year?

We don't think anyone at Disney needs to sit in a conference room and consciously decide to stop taking creative risks for this to happen. Institutional incentives can do the work all by themselves. Proven characters come with audience awareness. Existing franchises come with data. Sequels come with a customer base. An established property can be modeled, researched and forecast in ways an original idea simply cannot.

The next Toy Story cannot arrive with thirty years of audience data. The next Frozen cannot arrive with proven multigenerational affection. And the next Mickey Mouse, whatever form that creation takes, will initially possess the most terrifying attribute imaginable to a modern corporation: no established franchise value whatsoever.

Somebody has to create it anyway.

Something New Worth Protecting

This is where Anand's appointment gets considerably more interesting than the usual executive personnel announcement.

Disney is clearly trying to become a more technologically unified company. Anand's responsibilities span businesses that have historically had very different technological needs, and D'Amaro has repeatedly used the phrase “One Disney” when talking about the company's future. Disney+ itself is increasingly being positioned as something larger than a streaming library: a digital point of entry into a company whose relationship with its audience also includes movies, television, games, merchandise, cruises and physical destinations.

There is enormous potential in that. If technology makes it easier for an animator to iterate, wonderful. If infrastructure removes barriers between creative organizations, even better. If Disney can understand where genuine audience affection is forming and give creators the resources to develop it, that's useful information. If digital products can connect stories, games and physical experiences without making every interaction feel like another attempt to reach into someone's wallet, there are fascinating things Disney could build.

Artificial intelligence makes the possibilities considerably larger—and considerably messier.

There's an almost poetic wrinkle in Anand's appointment. In 2025, Disney sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist letter over unauthorized Disney characters appearing on its platform. Character.AI removed the material. Now the CEO of that company is becoming Disney's CTO.

We don't find that contradictory. If anything, it captures Disney's relationship with AI rather neatly.

Disney has an obligation to protect the creative inheritance it already owns. It also has an obligation to understand a technology that could reshape enormous portions of the entertainment business. The company's agreement with OpenAI demonstrates that Disney is willing to experiment with those possibilities when it believes the terms provide appropriate protections for its characters, creators and intellectual property.

Protect what already exists and experiment with what comes next. Both make sense. But neither is enough.

Disney also has to create something new worth protecting.

That's where efficiency and imagination can become dangerously easy to confuse. Technology that lowers production costs, makes creative workflows faster, improves digital products or helps Disney operate its physical businesses more effectively can create very real value. Resources wasted on avoidable friction are resources unavailable for creative ambition. Fans and shareholders alike should want Disney to be extraordinarily good at those things.

Efficiency, though, is a multiplier. Multiplication still depends on what number you put in front of it.

Technology can make an existing franchise more profitable. It can help a familiar character appear in more places, in more languages, for more people. AI may eventually allow artists to accomplish in days work that once consumed months. That's exciting, and Disney should explore it aggressively and responsibly.

But none of it eliminates the need for the uncomfortable moment that has always preceded Disney's greatest successes: somebody sitting in front of something that does not yet exist and deciding it is worth making.

That's why Anand matters. Not because Disney finally has a companywide CTO. Not because his résumé includes AI. And certainly not because any executive appointment should be treated as evidence that a company's problems have been solved.

We don't know yet whether this will prove to be an extraordinary appointment or an ordinary one. A résumé can't answer that question. Execution will.

If “One Disney” means the company's remarkable collection of creative, technological and experiential capabilities finally operate as parts of a coherent storytelling ecosystem, there is enormous value waiting to be created. If AI gives artists the ability to attempt things that previously consumed prohibitive amounts of time or money, that's worth celebrating. If Disney+ evolves into a genuine digital doorway to the larger Disney universe rather than simply another streaming warehouse, we'll be interested to see what walks through it.

But those are means.

Disney's enduring advantage has never been that it owns better computers than everyone else. Technology companies will generally build technology faster. Nor is its advantage simply the possession of intellectual property. Libraries can be bought.

Disney's remarkable advantage, when operating at its best, is its ability to turn imagination into cultural memory. Technology should make that capability more powerful.

The View From Main Street

Main Street, U.S.A. contains a contradiction we've always found rather wonderful.

It looks backward, toward an idealized version of an America that was already disappearing when Disneyland opened in 1955. Or maybe never even existed in the first place. Yet if you keep walking, Main Street doesn't lead you farther into the past. It leads toward Adventureland, Fantasyland…and Tomorrowland.

There's something poetic in that.

Disney has always understood the power of memory. These stories and places get tangled up with childhood, family, first trips, favorite movies, people we love and, eventually, people we miss. Very few companies are entrusted with that kind of emotional inheritance, and there is enormous value in preserving it.

But preservation alone isn't stewardship.

We don't need Disney to become Walt's company from 1955, 1966, 1989, 1994 or any other year that happens to correspond with someone's favorite version of it. Walt didn't leave behind a finished thing. The Disney we inherited exists because generations of people kept adding to it, often by taking enormous chances on things that had no guarantee of working.

Today's Disney inherits the results of those chances: characters it didn't create, stories it didn't write, places it didn't build, and affection it doesn't have to earn from scratch. The obligation isn't to be embarrassed by that inheritance or reluctant to profit from it. The obligation is to leave something behind too.

That's why D'Amaro's description of great storytelling as Disney's North Star matters more than any particular technology Anand will oversee. Technology will change, as it always has. What matters is whether Disney uses it to make the next impossible idea a little more possible.

Somewhere inside this enormous company, someone will eventually sit down in front of a blank page with an idea nobody has heard of and characters nobody loves yet. There will be no nostalgia to rely upon, no proven franchise value and no thirty years of consumer data demonstrating that the idea deserves to exist.

Someone will have to believe in it anyway.

That's the part worth protecting.

Because someday it will be our turn to hand Disney to another generation. The measure of our stewardship won't simply be whether everything we inherited is still there.

It will be whether we added anything they can't imagine Disney without.

For the first issue of WWWD?, then, we'll begin with the question we suspect we'll return to many times:

What are we creating today that people will still love when none of us are here to see it?

— Walter B. Good