Disney is encouraging its streaming staff to embrace AI while warning against wasted token usage.
The Mouse House streaming leader recently encouraged employees to use AI to improve speed and productivity, two senior technology employees told Business Insider.
“The most important thing is to increase the velocity, the pace of production,” said a high-level AI-focused employee.
But Andre Rohe, Disney’s vice president of product engineering, said at Wednesday’s meeting that Disney doesn’t want its employees to “token max,” according to two technical staff members who attended. “Tokenmaxxing” refers to maximizing the usage of AI tokens, regardless of the impact on productivity.
A software engineer shared three key takeaways from what Disney’s streaming leader said on the conference call.
- AI token tracking aims to identify inefficient usage
- Disney wants to speed up feature releases and code delivery
- Disney is focused not only on speed but also on code quality and product resiliency, and wants to minimize the number of AI-coded products that fail after release.
Disney has ramped up its interest in AI over the last year, providing employees with coding tools like Claude and Cursor, as well as creating an AI adoption dashboard for staff to track token usage. Some managers are sending check-in messages to software engineers that aren’t using AI.
Disney has also made it clear that employees should be intentional about their use of AI. For example, a person familiar with the company’s strategy said the AI dashboard is not intended to encourage advanced usage, but rather to help staff use AI tools efficiently and effectively.
Other major US companies, including Microsoft, are also seeking to restrict the use of unchecked AI tokens. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently called tokenmaxxing “addictive.” Companies are aware that burning off AI tokens may be wasteful and may not encourage the right projects.
Paramount Skydance, one of Disney’s Hollywood rivals, informed its technical staff on Wednesday that it would introduce a “per-user monthly spending limit” for AI tokens. However, Paramount executives said there would be a “high ceiling” on the cap.
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Disney surprised the media industry in December by signing a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to license the company’s iconic characters to the now-defunct Sora AI video app, as well as opening the door to publishing AI-generated videos on Disney+.
The Mouse House itself was shocked in March when OpenAI canceled its contract with Disney and shut down Sora less than a week after Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro took over.
D’Amaro hasn’t signed any major AI deals since the deal with OpenAI fell apart, but Disney has talked to “more than a dozen partners” about how to implement AI, the Wall Street Journal reported in March.
Disney is not sitting back and waiting for an AI partner. The company’s top software engineers are using an army of AI agents to crush their coding projects and accomplish much more than they could accomplish alone.
Jason Cox, Disney’s executive director of AI research, development and engineering, said in a blog post that he has developed an AI assistant he calls his “son” and that it represents his “love.” It’s unclear whether Cox uses AI chatbots in his work at Disney.