What does it take to get to the top of Disney’s “AI Adoption Dashboard”?
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The answer from one of Disney’s most active AI users: building a team of AI “agents,” or bots handling certain tasks, to significantly boost their productivity.
“I’m pushing the bleeding edge of agentic workflows,” the Disney engineer told Business Insider. “I’m not out here just having a joyride.” They said they have eight to nine AI agents that complete tasks on their behalf.
This staffer said their heavy AI usage had turned heads inside Disney — in a good way.
The super-user said a “solid handful” of software engineers had seen their name near the top of the AI dashboard and reached out, asking what they were working on and how to replicate their methods. Feedback has been positive from both their peers and bosses, they said.
“I was sort of expecting, ‘Hey man, you better chill out,'” the power-user said. “But it’s more ‘OK, we really like what you’re doing. Let’s try to produce tangible results as soon as possible.'”
AI isn’t just a token gesture at Josh D’Amaro’s Disney.
The Mouse House is encouraging employees to use AI more often, seven tech staffers told Business Insider, and the AI dashboard shows that some tech employees are invoking coding tools like Claude and Cursor tens of thousands of times a month.
Other large companies have been pushing the use of AI, including Wall Street giant JPMorgan, Meta, and Visa.
Disney’s token usage is “in the sweet spot” for a non-tech company, said Val Bercovici, the chief AI officer at AI memory storage company WEKA, after reviewing internal documents on the company’s AI usage obtained by Business Insider. Tokens are basic units of data processed by AI models, and companies are billed based on how many they use.
Assembling an agent army
The AI power-user said AI agents can pull in data from across Disney, finishing tasks that could take days or weeks in as little as hours.
“It takes AI power in order to harvest the information from that. If you don’t have that kind of number-crunching going on, it just takes a lot longer,” they said.
These agents can check each other’s work to ensure they’re not making errors, the super-user said, though it takes skill to direct the agents and manage their work.
This employee said that since they started using AI more, they’re working longer hours — from about 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., instead of their typical 9-to-5. They said they don’t mind, as long as they’re getting fairly compensated for their productivity.
That experience aligns with a Harvard Business Review study that found AI didn’t save time or reduce the amount of work employees were doing, but rather intensified their workload.
Disney goes all in on AI
A second Disney tech employee, who described themselves as a middle-of-the-pack AI user, said they’ve been using AI more often — in part because their boss has pushed them to do so.
When they told their boss that they were having trouble with a project, they said their manager responded: “Did you use AI for it yet?”
Disney leadership has evolved from AI skeptical to AI curious to AI advocates in the last year, three staffers said. The company inked a partnership with OpenAI that would have led to AI-generated video on Disney+, before Sam Altman’s company spiked the deal in March.
D’Amaro, Disney’s CEO, told employees in a memo that “technology innovation” is a top priority and said to shareholders that AI could drive stronger stock returns over time.
“It’ll include making the production process more efficient and increasing the volume of content that we actually put out,” D’Amaro said on an earnings call on Wednesday.
The second staffer said they felt some employees were using AI when it wasn’t necessary, though. An example they gave was someone “vibe coding” software tools when similar non-AI versions already existed.
“A lot of people are reinventing the same wheels,” this tech staffer said.
AI allows one employee to knock out ‘human, adulting things’
The second software engineer said leaning on AI agents lets them do “all the other human, adulting things I need to do,” like wiping down counters and vacuuming to picking up a prescription at Walgreens, “while the agent does the actual work.”
When asked whether their manager approves of their AI-enabled multitasking, this employee said they’re still getting work done and going to meetings.
“I don’t think anybody is watching my keystrokes or anything like that,” they said. “It’s been affording me a lot of peace of mind.”
