How the CTO Role Changed and Where It's Headed in 2027

Disney has never had a chief technology officer.

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Until now.

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On September 18, 2026, the company named Karandeep Anand, most recently CEO of Character.AI, as senior executive vice president and CTO. It's a newly created role, and he'll report straight to CEO Josh D'Amaro once he starts on October 2.

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I think that one hire says more about where the job is going than any industry survey. Over roughly a decade, the CTO went from the person who kept the servers running to one of a handful of executives deciding what a company sells and how much risk it takes on. And 2027 will change the role again.

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The old job: keeper of the machines

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Through most of the 1990s and 2000s, the CTO ran operations. Pick the vendors, keep the data centres running, hold the budget down.

Technology sat on the books as a cost centre, so the CTO usually reported to the CFO or COO and got measured on uptime and spend. Strategy meetings? Only now and then... if at all. At plenty of non-tech companies the title didn't exist; the CIO covered it.

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What the role typically covered

• Infrastructure, networks and hardware procurement
• Internal IT systems and vendor contracts
• Security as a perimeter problem: firewalls and access control
• Engineering teams sized to support the business's back office
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What changed: four shifts that rewrote the job

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Technology became the product. Once that happened, the CTO moved out of the back office and onto the product line.

1. The cloud took the servers away

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud turned infrastructure into a utility, and owning hardware stopped giving anyone an edge. CTOs swapped data-centre management for architecture decisions, cloud-cost control and vendor strategy.

2. Every company became a digital product company

Streaming, apps, e-commerce, connected devices. All of it put software in front of paying customers, which made the CTO answerable for the experiences customers see and pay for, on top of the systems employees use every day.

3. Data became an asset

Personalisation, advertising and forecasting turned data platforms into revenue engines. Own the data stack and you end up in pricing meetings. Marketing and product ones too.

4. AI moved from lab to boardroom

Generative AI has been a board-level topic since 2023. Today's CTO answers for model strategy and AI spending, plus safety, copyright exposure and how fast staff actually adopt the new tools.

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The CTO who used to report to the CFO or COO now usually reports to the CEO. Uptime and cost were the old scorecard; growth, product speed and risk make up the new one. Focus has moved from infrastructure to products, data and AI platforms, while security grew from perimeter defence into enterprise-wide risk and trust. And the occasional guest at strategy meetings? Now a permanent member of the core leadership team.

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Case study: Disney's first CTO

Disney's hire is the modern mandate in one person: a single executive owning technology across the company and reporting to the CEO.

According to CNBC, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, and product and engineering. Disney wants him to "further modernize how Disney builds and delivers technology company-wide."

Why it matters

• Direct line to the CEO. Anand sits in the C-suite and reports to D'Amaro, who's made technology one of his three priorities next to storytelling and operating as "One Disney."
• A consumer-AI background. He ran Character.AI, a chatbot platform with a highly engaged audience, after stints at Brex and Meta's Facebook. Disney is hiring members of Character.AI's technical team as well.
• Tied to revenue. The hire comes as Disney builds toward an "integrated ecosystem" on Disney+ combining streaming, shopping, parks, cruises and gaming. It's also weighing a free, ad-supported tier.
• Trust and IP as core skills. Disney once sent Character.AI a cease-and-desist over use of its characters. Now it's hiring the startup's CEO, which tells you how central AI, copyright and user safety have become to the CTO's job.

Other companies should read this plainly. Disney hired a CTO to build the platform its business will grow on.

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How the CTO role will change in 2027

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By 2027 the CTO's real job is running a company where AI does a meaningful share of the work. Adoption is the easy part. Five trends stand out.

1. Managing people and AI agents together

AI agents are leaving the pilot stage and landing in daily workflows, where they write code, handle support tickets and run internal processes. That's a team-design problem. CTOs will decide where engineers supervise agents and which work stays human.

2. AI governance becomes a formal duty

Regulation is tightening. The EU AI Act's obligations phase in through 2026 and 2027, and someone has to own the model inventories, risk reviews and audit trails; that someone is the CTO, who'll also be answering to regulators and the board.

3. The cost of AI comes under the microscope

CFOs have funded years of experiments. Now they want returns. Expect CTOs to be judged on AI unit economics (compute spend per product, per customer, per task), the same way cloud bills got picked apart a decade ago.

4. Security and trust move to the centre

Deepfakes, AI-assisted attacks and data leaking through AI tools all widen the threat surface. The lines between CTO, CISO and chief trust officer will blur. Some companies will merge the roles outright.

5. Fewer engineers, different skills

AI coding tools let small teams ship a lot. So CTOs will spend less energy scaling headcount and more on reskilling staff and redefining junior roles. Hiring shifts too: judgment over raw output.

What else to watch

• More non-tech companies creating a first-ever CTO seat, as Disney just did
• Reporting to the CEO becoming the default for CTOs
• CTOs moving into CEO roles as technology strategy and business strategy merge

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What CTOs earn now

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Bigger role, bigger pay. The structure changed as well, with more of the package riding on growth-linked bonus and equity and less on a fixed salary for keeping systems up.

Pay varies widely by company stage, sector and city. A CTO at a seed-stage startup may take a modest salary and a large equity stake, while a public-company CTO earns a higher base plus RSUs.

Check your market rate

For a realistic benchmark, run your numbers through the CTO Club compensation calculator. It splits pay into three parts:

• Base salary
• Bonus, as a percentage or cash
• Equity, as RSUs, phantom equity or percentage ownership

Filters cover 25+ roles (engineering leads up to CTO), eight venture stages plus private and public companies, 40+ sectors and 30+ cities. What I like: the site says each pay band lists its cohort, source type, observation period and sample size. Missing data shows up as missing, so the gaps stay visible.

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How to prepare for the 2027 CTO role

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The CTOs who win in 2027 will speak code and commerce equally well.

1. Learn the business model. Know how your company makes money, then tie every technology bet to it.
2. Build an AI governance plan now. Map where AI runs, who owns each system and how you review risk.
3. Track AI costs like cloud costs. Put unit economics on every AI workload before the CFO asks.
4. Redesign teams around agents. Decide what AI handles and what humans review. Then work out how juniors still learn.
5. Make trust a feature. Security, privacy and IP protection belong in the product from day one.

The CTO used to run the machines. Now the CTO steers the company. When a business built on storytelling creates the role for the first time, as Disney just did, it's hard to argue technology sits anywhere but the centre of growth. The 2027 question for CTOs is how to run a company built on AI, safely and at a profit.