The Walt Disney Company has roped in Karandeep Anand to play senior executive vice president and chief technology officer (SEVP & CTO). Anand will be the first one to play this new role at Disney, starting 2 October 2026.
For the past two years, Karandeep Anand has been associated with Character.AI, first as Board advisor and then as CEO since May of 2025.
Anand has spent the first 15 years of his career with Microsoft, from 2000 to 2015. He joined as an intern at Microsoft IDC while he was pursuing his undergrad at IIIT Hyderabad.
September of 2002 saw him joining Microsoft Azure as partner/ director of product management. For the next 12 years, he worked out of Greater Seattle Area, building, growing and running the product-development team that was responsible for Azure application platform, management platform, developer platform, user experience, commerce/ payments and ecosystem/marketplace, across the company’s public, private and hybrid cloud.
June of 2015 was witness to Anand moving to Facebook Infrastructure, at California to head technical product/programme management. Nine months later, he moved to Facebook Payments, Gaming Analytics and Developer Platform. A year and a half into this role, he was promoted to VP product, marketplace/commerce and payments. By December 2018, he had been made vice president, head of workplace, based out of London, UK. He had reached the position of vice president, ads and business products when he moved on from Facebook in November of 2021.
He was associated with Brex as president/chief product officer from January of 2022 to March 2025 after which he became advisor.
Character.AI roped him in as board advisor in October of 2024 and appointed him CEO in May of 2025.
Now, in his latest assignment with the Walt Disney Company, he will work with the infrastructure, data and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, enterprise technology, product, and engineering teams to help build and deliver advanced technology across the company.
HRKatha wishes him all the best in this endeavour!
