Disney Seeking “Director of AI Enablement” After Warning of Layoffs Amid Companywide AI Push

Disney is bracing for another round of layoffs, this time to its legal and global affairs department, as part of a corporate-wide workforce redesign in the adoption of artificial intelligence and other technologies.

On Sept. 18, Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and global affairs officer, told employees that the company is undergoing a “transformation process” that will require “hard choices,” reported Deadline. He pointed to “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies,” moving to self-service models, engaging alternative legal providers and outsourcing.

The legal and global affairs department “will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process,” Gutierrez wrote.

While the memo doesn’t explicitly mention AI, Disney is increasing treating the technology as a restructuring tool in a way that will change how corporate functions are staffed and organized. It offers the clearest window into how the company’s AI push will change the entertainment giant beyond the movie screen: Disney isn’t just giving employees ChatGPT or Claude; It’s deploying AI to change the ways in which employees perform their jobs amid an operational shift that is leading to layoffs.

On Thursday, a week after the memo was shared, Disney posted a job opening for a director of AI enablement and legal engineering. The supervisor will redesign legal workflows using AI systems and implement other technology-related solutions for contract review, legal research and regulatory analysis. The position specifically calls for the evaluation of whether Disney should build AI systems internally or buy them from outside vendors, measure the return on investment for AI and help lawyers adopt new workflows.

The effort is believed to be part of a broader push under CEO Josh D’Amaro to improve operational efficiency by leveraging AI.

“We’re using technology to fundamentally change how work gets done,” said CFO Hugh Johnston during a May earnings call, a month after the company laid off roughly 1,000 workers across studio and TV units, among others. “We have been and will continue to look for these types of opportunities to redeploy capital, both financial and human, to areas we see driving the highest returns for shareholders.”

Disney in August reiterated that it remains “highly focused on reducing costs across the enterprise,” according to an earnings letter. Its stock is down 5 percent so far this year and nearly 40 percent since 2021.

In last week’s memo, Gutierrez stressed technology is reshaping “how work gets done and that it requires “taking a dispassionate look at every aspect of how we do our work, so we can do it in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.”

“Obviously, this will require hard choices about where and how we deploy our resources and investments, including our staffing investments and how we work will look different in the months and years ahead,” he wrote.

So far, the adoption of AI in production workflows have been stalled due to legal constraints around ownership, among other things involving messy copyright questions. The memo and remarks from company leadership indicate that the company considers lawyers, regulatory specialists and other corporate personnel expendable while simultaneously creating a position devoted specifically to automating and redesigning legal work.

“Josh’s vision is of a Disney that succeeds in a changing market by breaking internal walls and embracing technology to amplify what makes it great, not by clinging to the way things always have been done,” Gutierrez wrote.