Disney employees are fascinated by AI, with a handful of super users tapping the chatbot tens of thousands of times a month.
In recent months, some of Disney’s technical staff have been given access to an “AI implementation dashboard” that shows AI usage across the Cursor and Claude coding tools in tokens used and requests made, two Disney technical staff told Business Insider. Similar dashboards are popping up at major companies like Meta and JPMorgan.
A dashboard screenshot seen by Business Insider shows AI usage by about 4,800 Disney Entertainment and ESPN product and technology employees over a nine-day period in mid-April. As of September 27, Disney employed approximately 231,000 people worldwide.
The dashboard is the clearest look yet at Disney’s use of AI since CEO Josh D’Amaro takes over from longtime Mouse House leader Bob Iger.
A person familiar with the company’s strategy said it does not intend to encourage or reward so-called “token maxing,” in which software engineers use up their tokens to demonstrate productivity.
Still, it’s human nature for some employees to view AI-enabled dashboards as “leaderboards,” as one staff member put it. Screenshots seen by Business Insider show that there are “milestones” to unlock, such as streaks based on the number of consecutive days an AI user uses the tool.
The dashboard shows that the largest power user, Claude, spent 234.2 million tokens after calling the Anthropic chatbot approximately 460,600 times in nine days. This equates to more than 51,000 calls per working day.
Disney’s AI usage in numbers
Product and technical staff at Disney and ESPN consumed 3.1 billion Claude tokens and 13.3 billion Cursor tokens in nine business days, according to a screenshot of the dashboard.
Val Bercovici, chief AI officer at AI memory storage company WEKA, said after being briefed on the numbers that Disney’s token usage is “in the middle of the bell curve” and in the “sweet spot” for non-pure technology companies. He added that Claude’s numbers were “very low” compared to Cursor’s numbers.
Based on dashboard data, the estimated cost for one Disney technology employee was approximately $1 for every 16,700 Claude tokens used and $1 for every 21,200 Cursor tokens used. Bercovitch said this is a reasonable fee.
If all dashboard users were charged about the same rate as one technical employee, Disney would estimate costs for Claude and Cursor of approximately $185,000 and $627,000, respectively.
Still, it’s difficult to know exactly how much Disney employees’ use of AI is costing the company. Will Sommer, a quantitative modeling analyst at research firm Gartner who studies AI usage, said tokens are an “imperfect measure” of real-world costs.
Token usage and price can vary widely depending on factors such as the nature of the request and the model used, Sommer added. But analysts Business Insider spoke to said Disney’s tech staff likely won’t be paid much, based on information from the dashboard.
According to the website, the cost of 1 million Claude tokens ranges from $0.25 to $15.
Power users run swarms of agents
According to a screenshot of the dashboard, one prolific Cursor user spent 287.1 million tokens in approximately 2,800 requests over a period of nine business days.
“In a technology company, a Mag7 company, this is never a big deal,” Bercovici says. “But in a Fortune 500 company, it’s definitely up there.”
There is a simple explanation for the height of this number. It is a so-called “swarm” of AI agents, automated bots that create and delegate tasks to other automated bots.
“A larger number can only be agentic,” Bercovici said.
“These are actually normal numbers for someone who called in a large swarm of agents,” he added.
Advanced software developers using Claude can process around 10 million tokens a day, Bercovici said.
Sommer also concluded that Disney’s AI power users are working agents.
“It makes a lot of sense that a few users consume and request astronomically more than others,” Sommer says.
Software engineers are evolving with AI, moving from hand-coding to managing bots to complete tasks.
“You’re much more productive when you have agents doing the work for you,” Sommer says. “Being a manager for a set of agents allows you to create more content.”