Utopai Studios Taps Ex-Disney AI Exec Hans Ku as Chief Product Officer After $60M Raise

Utopai Studios, the AI-focused entertainment company, has hired former Disney AI executive Hans Ku as its chief product officer, adding a studio veteran just weeks after raising $60 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to reports from Variety and Deadline.

Ku will oversee product, engineering, research and business development, and report to CEO and co-founder Cecilia Shen. His central assignment is scaling Utopai’s technology, including its AI production platform, PAI, across the company’s film and television projects, and shaping how the studio builds its proprietary tools.

What the chief product officer role covers

The job is as much about infrastructure as creativity. Ku is expected to take technology that has been developed on individual productions and turn it into repeatable products. In his own words, the aim is to “take what we learn from real productions, turn those lessons directly into better products and workflows,” then offer them to filmmakers and studios around the world. He stressed that PAI is being built alongside filmmakers and that creative decisions should remain in their hands, a notable emphasis in an industry still wary of AI and job losses.

Shen framed the hire as a bet on someone who knows how to move emerging technology “from experimentation into an organization operating at global scale.”

A résumé spanning animation, tech and Sora

Ku most recently served as Disney’s vice president of AI and engineering in its Office of Technology Enablement, where he worked on expanding AI tools across the company and exploring AI-native production pipelines. He also helped link Disney and OpenAI teams around Sora, OpenAI’s generative video product.

That collaboration has since unraveled. Deadline reports that Disney struck a deal at the end of 2025 to license characters for Sora in exchange for a $1 billion equity investment, and that the arrangement was later undone after Sora was shuttered. Variety describes the pact as short-lived.

Earlier in his career, Ku worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation, building a system for traditional animators, and at DreamWorks Animation, where he created the DreamColor display with HP and won a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Deadline adds that he has also been an entrepreneur and a product executive at Tubi, Yahoo and Flipagram, a TikTok predecessor.

Growing a slate while the industry watches

Founded in 2022, Utopai has been assembling a mix of AI-generated and AI-enabled projects. They include the Antonio Banderas-led live-action film “Cortés,” an AI-assisted animated adaptation of the children’s book “The Most Serious Fart,” and a fully AI-generated adaptation of “Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years” with Chinese production company Huace. Variety says “Cortés,” “The Most Serious Fart” and the live-action feature “Half Moon” are all slated for release next year.

The hire fits a broader pattern Deadline describes: Hollywood’s gradually growing, though conditional, willingness to work with AI. For Utopai, recruiting a chief product officer with deep studio and big-tech experience signals that it wants to be seen as a durable production company rather than a showcase for experimental tools. Whether PAI can win over filmmakers at scale will be tested when its first films reach audiences.