Utopai Names Former Disney AI Leader Hans Ku as Chief Product Officer

Utopai Studios, the AI-focused entertainment studio, has hired former Disney AI leader Hans Ku as its chief product officer, tapping a Hollywood studio veteran as the company tries to grow its content slate.

Ku will focus on the studio’s product, engineering, research and business development teams, scale the startup’s AI tech and its AI production platform PAI across its film and TV slate and determine how the company builds its proprietary technology. He will report to CEO Cecilia Shen.

Ku was previously 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 researching AI-native production pipelines. He also helped connect Disney and OpenAI team members during the short-lived $1 billion deal to license Disney characters for OpenAI’s Sora video generator.

“Hans knows what it takes to move emerging technology from experimentation into an organization operating at global scale,” Shen said in a statement. “From developing tools for animators early in his career to helping lead Disney’s collaboration with OpenAI on Sora, Hans has consistently worked at the intersection of creative ambition and emerging technology. He brings that experience to a studio where filmmakers and technology teams develop tools together on active productions. That combination is critical to where Utopai Studios is going next. We are building a global studio for a new era of entertainment, and Hans will be central to scaling the technology and infrastructure that make that possible.”

Ku, who also worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation and DreamWorks Animation, said Utopai “has the opportunity to build something fundamentally different” due to the close collaboration between its studio and product sides.

“We can take what we learn from real productions, turn those lessons directly into better products and workflows, and then bring those capabilities to filmmakers and studios around the world,” Ku said in a statement. “My focus is on building PAI alongside filmmakers, giving them better tools to explore ideas, refine their work, and bring their creative vision to the screen while keeping creative decisions in their hands.”

Utopai has tried to cement itself as a premier production studio in the AI age, raising $60 million last month at a $1 billion valuation. It has also amassed an extensive slate of projects, both AI-generated and AI-enabled, including an Antonio Banderas-led live-action film “Cortés” and an AI-assisted animated feature-length adaptation of “The Most Serious Fart,” a 2023 children’s book written by “Not Another Teen Movie” screenwriter Mike Bender.

It also partnered with the Chinese production company Huace to produce a fully AI-generated adaptation of “Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years,” an origin story of the 1592 Chinese mythological book. “Cortés,” “The Most Serious Fart” and the live-action feature “Half Moon’ are set for release sometime next year.